Shine the light, cast out the demons! REFORGING FACULTY DIRECTORIES INTO A MIGHTY TOOL OF POWER
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Montana State University recently overhauled our faulty directory and faculty profile pages for over 1000 faculty members.
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Shine the light, cast out the demons! REFORGING FACULTY DIRECTORIES INTO A MIGHTY TOOL OF POWER
- 1. #AUD11 #heweb19 Shine the light, cast out the demons! REFORGING FACULTY DIRECTORIES INTO A MIGHTY TOOL OF POWER
- 2. #AUD11 #heweb19 I’m Justin Assistant Director of Web & Digital Communications at Montana State University, Bozeman. @justinwayneshow
- 3. Who are you, and why are you here? #AUD11 #heweb19
- 4. Why are you here? #AUD11 #heweb19
- 6. #AUD11 #heweb19 Faculty directories and profiles are all over the place
- 7. We did it. We fixed our Faculty Directories and Faculty Profiles. We’ll tell you how we did it, what worked well, what we would do differently next time, and about our secret weapon… #AUD11 #heweb19
- 8. Hoggle Ian. If you’re going to do this, find your guide.
- 9. Spoiler Alert! Presentation Takeaway Cheat sheet #AUD11 #heweb19 • Set a deadline. • Keep pushing the communication. • Use existing data. • Use existing systems the faculty already use. • Find your champion. • Adoption by snowball: get enough and all will follow (FOMO works!) • Build-in easy access to your CMS. • Write good documentation. • Will quell some of the “outside of brand” issues.
- 10. Montana State University, Bozeman Montana #AUD11 #heweb19
- 13. Number of Faculty Members 1,038 #AUD11 #heweb19
- 14. Some of our demons… #AUD11 #heweb19 Some of our demons…
- 15. #AUD11 #heweb19
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- 17. #AUD11 #heweb19
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- 19. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 20. #AUD11 #heweb19
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- 28. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 31. OK! Let’s distribute a template! Whoops! Bad idea. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 32. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 33. We got a call from the Office of Planning and Analysis It was Ian (our future “Hoggle”.) “Could you use the data we collect annually from all of the faculty to create consistent web profiles?” #AUD11 #heweb19
- 34. No, thanks. That’s right, at first we said, “no.” #AUD11 #heweb19
- 35. In other words… turning a one-month template design project into a six-month (at least) application design project. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 36. And, we remembered that templates were a bad idea… twice before. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 38. However… we went back to our goals and we realized that our answer should be… #AUD11 #heweb19
- 40. Benefits of cooperation • the data already exists and is current-ish (Activity Insight), • since the data is higher quality, we can store and reuse, • faculty already know how to use this system, • we gain a champion in a higher office. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 41. Let’s get to it. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 42. Communication time! It’s time to start telling everyone what you’re about to do. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 43. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 44. Start talking to those faculty. Department heads, faculty members, key stakeholders #AUD11 #heweb19
- 45. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 46. Start talking to that API. API = application programming interface. Pull the data, store it and update it regularly (we do at 3am daily). #AUD11 #heweb19
- 47. Ask your service providers for things. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 48. Now display the data. Liaise with design colleagues, stakeholders… #AUD11 #heweb19
- 50. Once you have the data, you can use it in all the places! • Search • Sorting by expertise • Call the data in news/blog stories • Calendar posts #AUD11 #heweb19
- 52. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 53. [image of current directory search] #AUD11 #heweb19
- 54. [image of current directory]
- 55. [image of current directory]
- 57. What was the score in the end? #AUD11 #heweb19
- 58. What was the score in the end? • Nearly 2 years • 2000 development hours • 30 presentations to faculty • 10 big meetings with key stakeholders (Provost, VPs…) #AUD11 #heweb19
- 59. What was the score in the end? • 100+ consistent staff and faculty directory pages • 1000+ consistent faculty profile pages with up to date(ish) data • 1 happy Office of Planning and Analysis administrator. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 60. Hoggle Ian. Ian is very happy.
- 61. What would we have done differently? #AUD11 #heweb19
- 62. What would we have done differently? • Set a due date from the start. 3 months at the most. • Used the existing faculty user interface from the start (we tried to build our own.) • Leveraged other departments and included other administrators’ priorities earlier, instead of going it on our own for so long. #AUD11 #heweb19
- 64. Takeaways from the Faculty Directory forge. • Set a deadline. • Keep pushing the communication. • Use existing data. • Use existing systems the faculty already use. • Find your champion. • Adoption by snowball: get enough and all will follow (FOMO works!) • Build-in easy access to your CMS. • Write good documentation. • Will quell some of the “outside of brand” issues #AUD11 #heweb19
- 65. ROCK AND STONE!
- 66. #AUD11 #heweb19 I’m Justin Assistant Director of Web & Digital Communications at Montana State University, Bozeman. @justinwayneshow
Editor's Notes
- Warning! This presentation contains movie references to Constantine, Labyrinth, Army of Darkness and probably others… Will contain some bad jokes. May also contain some useful information!
- Show examples of bad ones! Get from bad to good. Show bad example and current directory!
- Faculty pages and faculty directories – the pages where faculty post their contact info, classes, office hours, publications and more. These are some of the most viewed pages on our website, and yours may be a mess. You may feel a bit like Toby, in Labyrinth.
- You remind me of the babe (what babe?) The babe with the power (what power?) The power of voodoo (who do?) You do (do what?) Remind me of the babe
- Lots of interested parties: Provost, Planning Office, Research Office, University Head, Web people… and we can’t forget the faculty themselves!
- No consistency. No theme, all done differently, using different formatting for publications, among other things, and hardly ever updated.
- And Ash’s secret weapon in Army of Darkness was not that he had a shotgun in the dark ages, nor that he had a chainsaw as an arm… But that he brought this disparate and desperate group of people together to fight, and drew upon his superior technological Knowledge and experience to garner the respect necessary to lead. However, in our case we also had a champion!
- Ian = works near the President of the University, former faculty member, in the Office of Planning and Analysis collecting data.
- I realize that the big event is mere hours away and if you would like to leave, here’s a quick sheet to take a photo and take with you!
- Let’s start with some context – a bit about MSU, who we’re serving and our resources.
- As of 2018.
- 6 full-time and 6 part-time, so 9ish. When we started we had 5 people.
- Most faculty members do not have access to their webpages and expect staff to assist in keeping updated.
- Would you like to see some of our demons?
- Just a list
- Table, listing
- Just a list
- Just a list
- Last. Next are profile pages
- Last one.
- There you are! What now?
- Whoops! Bad Idea [on click] We had templates and no one used them. (Well, a few did…) Justin, don’t tell the story about the meeting you had with a faculty member, it just reaffirmed that they all want different things…
- However, we had already “said the words.” We had been discussing this and the word had gotten out. People knew that we were looking at the redesign of the faculty directories and profiles.
- “Could you use the data we collect annually from all of the faculty to create consistent web profiles?”
- We knew this would turn a “designing a template” project into a full-fledged “design and implement a web application” project.
- We had templates and no one used them. Justin, don’t tell the story about the meeting you had with a faculty member, it just reaffirmed that they all want different things…
- Digital Measures product called Activity Insight. Faculty reporting application where the university collects data from faculty members (ours is annually.) And the data can probably be reused by you! Some of these systems have a canned solution or module (Digital Measures built their own during our process)
- Outline communication path!
- Meetings! We did over 30 presentations at department meetings and about 10 high-level meetings with folks like the Provost, Deans, VPs and the President.
- Start talking to that API!
- We were building our own sister user interface and realized we would then be asking faculty to login to two different places, learn a new system… bad idea. We asked Digital Measures/Activity Insight to add to the existing interface, and they did! Clunky interface, but better than making them learn a second! (Only after we had built out our own 80%...)
- This is the design portion (much of which we had already done when we were creating our “template!”
- We did it! We made friends with the demons, squashed others and made the remaining work with us. Here is what they look like now – nearly all.
- Answer questions!
- Answer questions!
- Answer questions!
- This can be the end. The next slide is just the contact info again.
- Deep Rock Galactic
- Show examples of bad ones! Get from bad to good. Show bad example and current directory!