Centennial Playbook
Organizational Excellence
Challenge
Although Centennial Staff successfully leverage various methods and techniques to manage projects, workflows are not consistently shared or readily available across the organization.
Methods
Outcomes
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Interviews
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Staff
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Analysis
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Thematic analysis
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Prioritization matrix
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Repository audit
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User flow
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Insights around how Staff manage projects
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Version 1 of the Centennial Playbook
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Process to iterate and maintain the Playbook moving forward
The Process
Goal 1: Complete user interviews to receive insights on tools and current
documentation resources used by colleagues
Understand and identify infrastructure-critical workflows
The research questions below were the project team’s north stars during interviews. Due to the semi-structured interview format, coupled with the diversity of projects articulated by interviewees, interviewers were able to conduct organic conversations, and use the research questions to refocus the conversations if appropriate. The semi-structured format gave flexibility during interviews to learn more about unexpected insights that may not have surfaced in a more prescribed format.
Guiding Research Questions -
- What tools and techniques do Staff use to complete their projects?
- How does Staff update existing tools?
- What types of tools and techniques might Staff use if they were
readily available?
- Where might resources be stored for city-wide use?
Note: The research questions above were not asked verbatim during interviews to interviewees. Interviewers were coached to stay away from leading question, strive to ask open-ended questions and to not explicitly ask what an ideal solution would be.
Goal 2: Analyze feedback and synthesize insights by preparing a
research summary to document learnings.
The project team organized insights captured during the interviews into four broad sections: Notes, Documents, Techniques and Challenges.
Insights were reorganized into groups with some semblance of commonalities. Themes quickly surfaced as the project team refined the organization of the insights.
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Similar to categorizing the insights, the project team organized themes into buckets based on similarities.
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By crossing referencing the themed buckets with Staff insights, the project team identified resources currently being used by the organization and potential resources that may be able to remedy different challenges faced by Staff.
Potential resources were then mapped on an Idea Prioritization Matrix. Resources captured in the top right rung were initially presented to Staff.
Goal 3: Identify a repository to house the Playbook
The project team identified four potential repositories to examine to house the future Playbook Resources. These repositories included: W, X, Y and Z . Below, is a snapshot of the Repository Examination form used to evaluate each repository.
W repository surfaced as the place house the Playbook resources. Factors that influenced this decision, include:
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Organization effectiveness
- Centennial U is maintained by the Communications Department with high
input from other departments.
o This allows for better version control practices, as opposed to other potential
repositories, namely the X respository.
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Accessibility/Findability
- The Playbook will leverage Centennial U’s organized format, as opposed to being
included in more legacy repositories with hire barriers for information findability.
o Ex: X, Y and Z at times can be overwhelming to find resources because of
unknown information architecture and institutional knowledge of resource
placement and system usability.
Goal 4: Develop a user flow
A user flow was developed based on the commonalities of resources, coupled with the capabilities of the content editor presented by the website provider.
