Golden Mittens
A group of student consultants to help solve a client’s problem.
Improving communication between Volunteer Services (VS) and its Volunteer Supervisors.
SI 501: Contextual Inquiry and Consulting Foundations
Role: Student Consultant, Graphic Designer, Photographer, Client Contact
Duration: September ~ December 2019, 3 months
Team: Dolapo Raji, Fernando Herranz, Jason Chou, Katherine Garrison, Shinyoung Chung
Course Staff: Kentaro Toyama, Liz Marquis
Skills: Client Engagement, Teamwork, Project Management, Background Research, Semi-Structured Interviews, Qualitative Data Analysis, Affinity Walls, Critical Thinking, Brainstorming Solutions, Sensitivity to Organizational Dynamics, Rating / Organizing Solutions, Presenting, Report Writing
Background
The mission of our client seeks to provide an avenue whereby patients are listened to and feel empowered to be involved in the delivery of their healthcare. Volunteer Services (VS) coordinates all volunteers and volunteering activities. Volunteer services have only 5 staff members to manage about 200 staff members that volunteer as supervisors to oversee and coordinate all volunteers (nearly 2,700).
Main Challenges
Due to the size of the organization, it has been difficult to develop an efficient communication channel with the volunteer supervisors. In view of this challenge, our team gathered and analyzed qualitative data using Contextual Inquiry to improve the communication, relationship, and workflow between volunteer supervisors and the management of volunteer services.
To improve communication with its volunteer supervisors across all Michigan Medicine departments.
To increase responses to communications and participation at VS events by these supervisors.
To better understand the supervisors’ needs and be able to address them better.
Methodology
Our team’s methodology was to interview, observe, collect necessary artifacts, and analyze collected data to make informed recommendations.
Conduct Interviews with VS related staff, supervisors, and volunteers.
We reached out to participants affiliated with the Volunteer Services via emails and managed to interviewed seven participants. Four volunteers’ supervisors, two volunteer services’ managers, and one volunteer.
Collect data from interviews and conduct group interpretations of all interviews.
Following each interview, team members conducted debriefing sessions and shared electronically transcribed interview notes with other team members via Google drive.
Collect the interpretation data (400+ “affinity” notes) and begin the process of organizing and clustering the affinity notes onto an affinity “wall” to see what patterns emerge from the data. Base problem analysis and recommendations on these clusters, while also looking for new observations.
After we completed our interviews and interpretation sessions with about 420 affinity notes, we came together as a team to create data clusters, identify similar patterns that were grouped into themes, and analyze our data using an affinity wall. Affinity wall diagram is a qualitative data analysis tool that systematically finds themes and summaries from a large amount of data pool. We grouped notes with similar patterns; under each group, we had about three to seven affinity notes. As we continued to reiterate this process to form high-level clusters, we started to see the reasons that caused the problem. In the end, we created an affinity wall that had a total of four levels of themes. By using the affinity wall, we were able to develop two high-level groups of data summaries, which gave us ideas to brainstorm potential solutions that could help solve our client’s challenges.
Improvements
According to our interviews, the main areas for improvement were:
More feedback tools/resources for supervisors
More supervisor leadership development
Improve attendance at supervisor luncheon
Volunteer Services is understaffed
More recognition for supervisors
Recommendations
Get Volunteers For VS
Mentorship Program for Supervisors
Incentives for Supervisors
Our recommendations include…
The Volunteer who can:
Input data from the forms to Excel
Perform Data Analysis
Set up the recordings for annual luncheons
Manage the website, update Supervisor Handbook
Help VS coordinators!
Mentorship Program Among Supervisors
No Training? No Experience? No problem.
Another Point of Contact to Share Best Practices and Concerns