Course Materials Inventory - Contextual Analysis

As the Director of Digital Learning Services, I was asked to look into our university book ordering process. There were reports of frustration from all sectors - students, faculty, IT and the bookstore. In isolation, no singular process was faulty but holistically they bottle-necked where they converged and created problems for everyone. Each perspective seemed unwilling to budge, but this map showed that it was a problem for systems thinking to solve. This helped create the impetus for change - no one wanted the students to suffer.

Carlow University | Pittsburgh, PA | 2012

Multi-User Systems - Decision Making

Rarely do organizations get to design their ideal solutions from scratch, and too often purchased solutions are chosen for reasons that don’t include actual user needs. Over my career, I've been quite vocal about ensuring user voices are meaningfully included in decision making. To me, that includes co-establishing the key features to evaluate through observation, conversation and/or discussing primary tasks with users. The relative criticality of each feature is also necessary to understand, as buying or building solutions typically means compromise. This example shows the criteria elicited from faculty for a new video conferencing solution, and their aggregated and weighted perceptions how each product (in columns) stacked up.

Carlow University | Pittsburgh, PA | 2012

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Sallie Wormer