1. Build awareness of project
How do we let the community know that we are looking for input/suggestions? How do we explain our process, goals, and inform people of their various opportunities for commenting, providing input, suggestions, etc.?
2. Draft a focus group protocol and methodology
What questions should we ask? Who will lead the focus group? Who will take notes? How do we recruit participants? When do we schedule them? How do we analyze the results?
3. Draft a survey
What questions should we ask? Who do we send it to? How do we analyze the results?
4. Organize open sessions for faculty, staff, and students
When? Where? Who to facilitate conversation? What questions do we ask? (How is this different than the focus group?) How to advertise?
5. Position statements from stakeholders
Develop a format/set of questions and invite stakeholders (academic departments, faculty, students, administrative offices) to develop position statements that allow them to articulate their goals for the web, and to sketch out scenarios for how various communities might interact with their office, and each other, through the website.
6. Statistics and inventory of existing environment
What do we know about present usage patterns? What key tools, services, utilities need to be converted to whatever we move towards?
7. What else should we be doing to gather feedback and ideas from the Middlebury community?
Questions we might ask (for use in our surveys, focus groups, open sessions, one-on-one conversations, etc.)
(These are the questions proposed by the Internet Strategy Taskforce; what other questions ought we ask? How might we re-write these questions? What questions might we exclude?)
- What impact does our web presence have on you and your role at Middlebury?
- What would you change if you were given free reign over our web presence?
- What would be the impact of keeping with the status quo for our web presence?
- What three opportunities might the web help you take advantage of that you are not currently utilizing?
- What three problems do you hear most often about our web presence?
- What emerging trends (technology related or not) will have the most impact on your work moving forward?
- What do you feel we must do in order to stay relevant/fresh as an institution?
- What web sites do you visit/use most often and why? Are there aspects of those sites that you think could be incorporated into Middlebury’s presence?
Groups that we will need to consult
Academic Departments (All)
Admissions
Athletics
Bread Loaf School of English (including remote sites)
Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
Center for the Arts/Museum
College Advancement (APP)
Communications
CSO
Environmental Council
Faculty Council
Human Resources
LIS
Middlebury College Alumni Association
Middlebury Language Schools
Monterey Institute for International Studies
President’s Staff
Project on Innovation, Creativity and Leadership
Schools Abroad
SGA / Student organizations
Spring Student Research Symposium
Staff Council
Strategic Communications Committee of the Board
Who else?
I will be traveling during the upcoming meeting, but here are some thoughts on how I think the requirements gathering process at MIIS might mirror, but differ slightly from what you might decide to do at Middlebury.
1. Build awareness of project
This is actually a two-step process on our campus, since we are about to enter phase two of what will be a 3-phase makeover. This is something I will be communicating to our community during the next couple of weeks, via the MIIS@work blog. If you decide on language to use in describing the overall project at Midd, I could adapt it to our situation.
2. Draft a focus group protocol and methodology
I have a staff member who is terrific at running focus groups, and would like to adapt the same questions and methodology you decide on for MIIS purposes
3. Draft a survey
I am less inclined to use a survey here, at least for broad-based planning, because our campus tends to be over-surveyed. It might be more useful later for specific, targeted issues.
4. Organize open sessions for faculty, staff, and students
Probably not the best tactic for MIIS, under the circumstances. (Lots of reorganization planning going on simultaneously – but web project issues might get folded into some of these events.)
5. Position statements from stakeholders
I think what might work best at MIIS is for me to convene a small task force of major stakeholders to help me shape our input into the process.
The Financial Aid Office should probably be added to this group. Other organizations are adding campus-wide document-imaging systems, and Financial Aid is one of the biggest users of paper records — transcripts, tax records, loan applications, etc.