After our recent follow-up meeting with CreativeWorks (CW) team at Joe’s Movement Emporium (JME), I think our team has a better appreciation for the current status of their files and organizational systems and we are starting to identify some of the needs we may be able to help them address. They would probably benefit from standardized file naming and hierarchy rules as well as working from a single server with regular backups. Their hardware and software setups are sufficient for student needs in the moment, but lack software updates, security features, and regular IT maintenance/support. And as my teammates have mentioned, each project, student, and staff member seem to implement their own systems, with varying degrees of clarity and success. And so, working with their teams to flush out the details of these systems, in addition to preparing their students and staff to move forward with them, is certainly easier said than done.

Broadly speaking, our conversations serve to both document these challenges and to allow the staff to interact and discuss them in a different setting. While Andy and Zach were detailing their findings from the computers, I found myself returning to the Weiss and Holtzenblatt techniques to further interview staff. Sierra reviewed the challenges of running the Digital Media Lab, including inventorying equipment, signing in and signing out resources, and providing appropriate guidance and training without creating barriers between students and their projects. Asking for more details about Patrick’s comments regarding a former staff member helped identify that some previous work had been done to retrieve student files before a contract with provider of computer gear ended, the details of which we should try to leverage. Finally, we also learned that there is a “Joe’s Metadata Template” actively used in AdobeBridge.

As the requirements grow more complicated, I think it will help us to keep in mind that it is a service to document these discussions, even if they have to do with “pain points” that our project and future projects may not be able to fix. To my mind, as we recommend improved intake and filing processes to track their assets, these may lend themselves naturally to helping CW make process improvements in other areas. Furthermore, since the files themselves go through an identifiable and relatively predictable life cycle, we can point out specific resulting deliverables (final projects, resumes, reports, etc.) that may help motivate both students and staff to participate in some new organizational processes.