Workflow Assessment at Michigan State University's MATRIX
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The MATRIX team conducted interviews and analysis to identify areas for improvement in their intake, communication, and use of project management tools. They found that the intake process was inconsistent, communication broke down due to varying tool use, and their primary tool (Trac) was not always used effectively. Their recommendations included creating standard intake forms, requiring all staff to use the same tools, adding automatic reminders in Trac, and improving project folder descriptions and metadata.
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Workflow Assessment at Michigan State University's MATRIX
- 1. MATRIX The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online at Michigan State University THE ROADRUNNERS Emily Bowman | Shi Chen | Jeff Green | Brian Krenz
- 8. Finding 2 | Evidence
- 12. Finding 3 | Evidence
- 17. Models | Cultural Assessment
- 19. Models | Communication Flow
- 21. Models | Artifact 1
- 22. Models | Artifact 2
Editor's Notes
- BRIAN This semester we took a look at MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Science Online at Michigan State University. MATRIX serves as a digital humanities center. They work with public, private, and academic partners around the world to digitize, preserve, and display cultural works. **Explain what we will cover***
- BRIAN Our goal was to examine the overall digitization process at MATRIX. This process begins when materials - usually audio or video tapes - are brought in by an outside client, goes through the actual digitization process, and to the return of those materials to the client. Often, a website for showcasing the digitized files is requested, and MATRIX does that as well. So to do this, we interviewed 7 people at MATRIX. They came from all areas of the organization - the digital lab, the technical staff, project managers, and the director of MATRIX.
- BRIAN Much of what MATRIX does works very well. In fact, they are one of the leading centers for this type of work in the country. We propose that this is due to three key factors: The staff extremely knowledgeable very well-trained & experienced The culture informal & flexible encourages staff autonomy The technology Needs are always met If they don't have it, they can build it But there are a few areas for improvement...
- JEFF When Matrix receives materials, they do not have a consistent means of organizing them. Some materials are not clearly labeled. Some materials are even mislabeled.
- JEFF What's important here is the quote. We heard quite a bit about this intake form, but once we dug in, we learned that whatever form there once was, it clearly hasn't really been used.
- JEFF A very simple recommendation. Create a clean, simple form for recording information about newly received materials. MATRIX gets sort of two levels of projects - quick, small projects that they don't have to track long term (often from the MSU History Department) and larger ones from outside clients. Two separate forms might be helpful to split these types of projects.
- EMILY Another finding that was prominent in our data collection was that communication breakdowns among the staff were common and very frustrating for staff. Often, these breakdowns impacted the success of projects.
- EMILY While you can see from this diagram that communication breakdowns are occurring throughout the entire team, those that clearly needed addressing were lack of IM/Trac (project management system) access by Digital Lab staff. u06 and u07 - bottom right
- EMILY To address this issue, our recommendation was simple: set up accounts and access to Trac and IM services for all staff members, specifically the Digital Lab staff, regardless of the fact that they are student workers.
- EMILY To address this issue, our recommendation was simple: set up accounts and access to Trac and IM services for all staff members, specifically the Digital Lab staff, regardless of the fact that they are student workers.
- BRIAN Trac is a great ticket tracking tool that MATRIX developed. It's highly flexible and robust, but it isn't used as fully as it could be Some design aspects of the system make it a little harder to use than would be ideal. I'll highlight one of those changes today.
- BRIAN So here is an example of a conversation about a specific task on a Trac ticket. The key thing here is that there are big gaps between ticket updates. Here we have a change logged 5 months ago. Then the next one doesn't appear until 2 months ago. So there's a substantial 3 month gap. You can also see that the last two updates are asking about the status of the task. So project managers aren't really aware of what's going on because of a lack of updates.
- BRIAN So to encourage more frequent updates, we propose a simple email notification whenever an extended period - a couple weeks or so - passes without any updates. Trac uses email updates for all changes to a ticket, so this change will fit in well with the system.
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- BRIAN After careful analysis, our team has identified these three findings-improving the intake process, unifying the communication tools, and adding functionality to Trac-as being the most beneficial changes MATRIX could make to strengthen their organization.