Written by: Janae Savoy
I found myself quite excited on the morning of October 28th. I walked briskly to Van Munching Hall in anticipation of class. It was the big day: the day that the scoping team was going to present the scopes for our process improvement projects. I was thrilled at the idea of working with an actual client on an actual consulting project.
My fellow classmates and I sat through nine presentations with each potential project presenting its own unique problem. After talking over the different options for projects, my team, JABBS, ultimately decided on and were selected to work on our favorite: the material transport project with the Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
“I liked this project because it suited our strengths. While the other projects were biased towards one area, this one was pretty balanced. I thought we could work well together on this project” says Sarah Scott (Q23), member of JABBS.
When QUEST alumnus (Q19) and AIE Innovation Specialist, Meenu Singh, was asked about what the Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship does, she responded “We try to engage all 37000 students in innovation and entrepreneurship, specifically through teaching and being part of the core curriculums.”
A major role of the Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is going to different classes and giving students hands-on experience with the design thinking process, brainstorming, and prototyping. In order to do this, the instructors have to carry supplies from their offices in Symons Hall to the building they will be teaching at, whether it be the Cambridge Community Center or Van Munching Hall.
The instructors do not like the current process because the containers are too bulky and the dolly they use is troublesome. It was our job to recommend several different solutions that would optimize this process. I found myself excited to potentially have an impact on the process of an on-campus office that has the potential to change the world.
To brainstorm, we actually met in one of several AIE’s spaces that can be reserved for group work and did our own version of an IDEO deep dive. We broke the process down into five major categories and independently developed potential ways to enhance each of the aspects of the process that we identified. According to Austin Kendall (Q23), “I really liked it. It helped us to generate a lot of ideas. Everyone took their own route and it led to a lot of good solutions to solve the problem.”
I asked Singh about how she felt about the solutions that our team came up with. She said “We think there’s a broad range of options and we are eager to test them.”
I find that working on this process improvement project has been my favorite part of QUEST. Learning about tools you can use to optimize a process has been very interesting and being able to apply it to a real consulting project was great! I’m really looking forward to consulting projects in the future.