Affordable Housing Consulting.

Background Research.

After we had our initial stakeholder meeting with the client, I performed background research on the affordable housing industry and its emerging technologies in order to better understand our client and the constraints of a nonprofit business.

These questions were the focus of my research:

1. What is known about the nonprofit affordable housing industry?

2. What are the primary issues that the nonprofit affordable housing industry is facing and are they trying to solve them?

3. What emerging technologies are affecting the nonprofit affordable housing industry?

Contextual Inquiry & Interviews.

In order to conduct contextual inquiry and client/user interviews, we created an interview protocol that encompassed our research questions. Two of us attended each hour long interview in-person to ask questions (and follow-up questions) or take notes. There were six members of the organization that we interviewed, including:

• Head of finance

• Human resources and administrative assistant

• The IT supplier

• The IT vendor

• An employee end-user

• An employee end-user and admin

Our main takeaway from the interviews was that employees have a disconnect between their behavioral process and the actual protocol for ordering items. Employees also do not follow given communication standards due to perceived closeness with other employees in a casual environment. The result of this is a lengthened ordering process for the employee who is responsible, and a general disorganization and lack of transparency with what supplies are available.

Affinity Wall & Interview Interpretation.

After each interview, we held interpretation sessions in order to extract our findings. During these sessions, we made note of important quotes and facts, as well as synthesized our insights. These snippets became our affinity notes.

From there, we imported our 700 affinity notes into Miro, and over 12 collective hours, we organized notes into groups of similar concepts, and deleting notes that were irrelevant or repetitive thoughts, reducing the number to 300 notes. We then iterated through each group to provide insightful summaries of each concept, and proceeded to group these thoughts into higher-level affinity notes and visual hierarchy.

In this process, we were able to discover the underlying problems of our client (which were different than our stakeholder originally believed). These findings were ultimately the foundation for our recommendation process.

The highest level findings included:

• The client has teams that are very good at managing employees' experiences in a positive manner.

• The client uses different channels to place orders depending upon the item and has a primitive method of placing requests for orders with no standardized process for ordering.

• Bottlenecks in the process includes undefined workflow, lack of awareness regarding the process, lack of structure and transparency, multiple storage locations, and the possibility of human errors to occur in current process.

• The IT Vendor provides IT and hardware support and initial set up which is something that the client’s in-house IT team is unable to do.

• Many employees at this company believe they have no official inventory system, and ORG is mostly experimenting on platforms like Google Sheets and Sortly that seem to lack the features they require to function properly.

• A centralized and automated system that is accessible to all employees at this company regardless of technical proficiency would save time and money for those involved in the ordering process.

Creating Solutions.

In our solution-finding process, we heavily used our high-level findings from the affinity wall to ensure that the problems we were solving were real issues for the company. Next, we moved to our in-depth findings on the affinity wall to discover root-cause problems. These included:

1. No standard inventory management process.

   a. Lack of documentation of the information workflow within the company.

   b. Unstandardized requesting and ordering process.

   c. Finding/creating a centralized repository for all the documents related to ordering.

   d. Defining the level of transparency among employees for documents

   in the repository.

2. Sortly and Google Sheets do not have the features that the company requires.

   a. The company would like to have customizable fields.

   b. There is a lack of Information about where items go and who is using them.

   c. The system cannot be updated in a timely manner.

We needed to find a solution that was scalable for a rapidly growing organization, was affordable for a nonprofit, and was easy to use for non-tech savvy employees. In order to do this, we created a weighted rubric to use in our brainstorm sessions so that our chosen solution would target the most important priorities for the company.

We also took into account whether a free trial was offered (so our client would be able to see if it fit the company’s needs before purchasing), pricing per user, key features and constraints, scalability limits, and number of users. Additionally, we created user flows and workflows to better view the company’s process. In the end, we decided on a multi-solution deliverable that provided options for organization size and budget.

Final Recommendations.

Short-Term Recommendations

Airtable - for inventory management

To replace Google Sheets plus Sortly, we recommended Airtable. Though the original request was to find a solution for the tracking of technology items, we believed that all of these steps are innately related, and fusing them together will reduce confusion, increase efficiency, and ultimately save time. Airtable a wide variety of custom developers that could connect and automate the system to Amazon through APIs like webhooks.

Google Drive - for documentation

Google Drive’s ability to connect to other Google Suite applications makes it a valuable tool for this company’s documentation needs. Documentation can help in streamline knowledge sharing in organized workspaces so that teams can collaborate company wide. We heard from employees that it was very difficult to find the necessary files in the Google Drive. We recommended a high-level restructuring and reorganization of the company’s Google Drive that compartmentalizes certain documents into certain folders for ease-of-use. We believe that including a wealth of well-organized documents would ease the burden of the onboarding process for new employee trainers.

Restructuring Responsibilities

We believe that two things can be improved about the ordering process. The first is that the employee whose responsibility it is to order items must be better informed about budgetary restrictions and guidelines. With a lack of guidance about the expected item quality and budget constraints, employees are unsure if they are correctly ordering items. Secondly, we think that ordering responsibilities could be delegated to their individual departments, as they are more familiar with the specific needs of employees.

Mid-Term Recommendations

Confluence - for documentation 

Confluence is a highly customizable software for collaboration on a remote-friendly team workspace. There is an existing way to connect Confluence with Airtable, and Confluence would greatly assist this company in addressing the problem of a lack of transparency on procedure regarding item requests, budget guidelines to follow, and more. We recommend Confluence as a solution for when this company requires a more concrete and professional approach to sharing information between employees and departments.

Benefits for the Company

1. It saves time: Employees do not need to check multiple channels for information, and it therefore reduces employee workload through documentation of a step-by-step ordering process so the ordering employee only needs to check one place being notified.

2. All in one place: It combines the spreadsheet for order requests, documentation, and current inventory tracking all into one place, and therefore the procedure for order requests is easy to find.

3. It’s easy to use: It reduces complexity through Airtable’s modern and user-friendly interface that still allows for complex information.

4. It solves communication issues by allowing employees to assign tasks. It also creates transparency in how the process works because employees can see the system.

5. Low relative price, cloud storage, automation, professional, industry standards, connectivity, scalability, and customization in all systems.

This project culminated in a final presentation to our class of over 100 students, as well as sending the final deliverable to our client and all interviewees, on which we received a 100% grade.