The Organizational Design and Management (ODM) team project is the organizational optimization and design of Florida Institute of Technology processes, events and activities from the perspective of graduate students (i.e. the FIT Optimization and Redesign).
According to Dr. Guy Boy, an Active Design Document (ADD) is an integrated and shareable prototype of the artifact that is being designed. An ADD will be used by the team members to provide incremental progress evaluations during the project until a final product emerges (Boy 2005).
The ADD will provide overall traceability from the initial project design to the creation of the proposed redesign of optimized processes, events and activities at the Florida Institute of Technology. ADDs generally account for multiple contexts of use from early in the design process to project completion. In this specific case, the ADD will facilitate interaction and cooperation among team members in the requirements engineering and quality assurance as well as the experience feedback from research subjects and stakeholders.
ADDs generally use contextual links to connect interaction descriptions (IDs) to interface objects (IOs). In this team project, the anticipated interface objects will include the initial processes, events and activities as well as the range of deliverables (Gantt Chart, Design Objectives Documentation, Survey Instruments, Subjects List, Survey Results, Data Models, Improvements List, Revised Design, Report and Presentation).
The interactions in the task space will include the research procedure that encapsulates all of the tasks required to transform the initial IOs into the final report and presentation. One focus of the interactions in the evaluation space will be the discussion of the project to identify problems and issues that lead to the design objectives and development of survey and test instruments.
After identifying subjects and conducting interviews in the activity space, the data generated will be transcribed, processed and combined to derive data models to represent the status quo. The rationalization space will be used to select improvements of the processes, events and activities at the Florida Institute of Technology.
It is noteworthy that there are two major iterations of this team project: (1) initial survey instruments to be used in the preliminary research phase, and (2) final test instruments to be used to evaluate the proposed optimizations and redesign. It is across these major iterations that ADD will be most useful to ensure interactivity, rapid communication and fast feedback from the subjects to design team. Throughout the development of the final product, the ADD will enable streamlined modification and, ultimately, adequate traceability.
The outcomes of the ADD will be comprehensive and traceable documentation in the form of a written report and a graphic presentation. These final deliverables will illustrate the design decision history throughout the team project. Similar to the Gantt Chart, the final product of the ADD will clearly depict which team members were responsible for which components, which resources were used, and account for the timeline upon which the deliverables were produced.
References
Boy, G. (2005). Knowledge Management for Product Maturity. Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Capture. Banff, Canada.
Troy W.
Troy's research focuses on the human-centered design and development of cognitive augmentation technologies that enhance knowledge work. Barbados' national expert for mobile innovation under the World Summit Awards, Troy has been board-certified as an associate human factors professional.