Lesson 6 - Storytelling

Identify a story in your organization that helps explain issues that need to be addressed.

（posted by Steffani）

For my organization, teachers used name-lists to take attendance of the students. After a term, the principal found that teachers had taken two attendances wrongly among thousands of attendances. He was not satisfied and asked the IT teachers to think of some methods to digitize the roll call system. After a month, 'e-class system' was introduced. Other than roll call system, there were also some functions such as online exercise, online quiz, etc. Therefore, the principal asked all the teachers to fully utilize the system. The teachers were trained for only one hour and they needed to use the system in the next week. As required, teachers needed to upload online exercises, manage the online resources and make online quizzes frequently as well. The pace of 'reform' was quick and some teachers were unhappy with this. This increases their workload. The students disliked the system as well since they have extra homework and quizzes. Therefore, I believe that the principal should slow down the pace of reform. I think the school should digitize the roll call system first. After that, online exercises should be uploaded once a month. After being more familiar with the system, teachers can then create online quizzes. This can comfort the staff and they can adapt to the change step by step.

(posted by Leo)

In my organization, student need to change the classroom all the time and have different timetable during their study, so we have provided the locker for them to store their personal belongings. If they want to use the locker, they need to go to the student counter for registration at the beginning of each semester. Our college will mark down the information on the name list sheet and give the locker key to student. Each time when starting the registration, there is a long queue waiting outside the counter.  The process is very slow and students need to wait for a long time.  Sometime it may assign the locker wrongly and they will blame on the staff. Also our colleagues blame on this ineffective process.

In order to enhance the process and make sure all students can have the collect locker, an e-locker system is developed and launched for few years. Students can register online, so they don't need to wait outside the counter and the lockers will be assigned by the system. Once student receive the successful notice of locker registration, they can come to the counter at office hour to collect the key. Our colleagues can follow the list to give corresponding key to them. The process is now more effective and avoids the artificial mistake. However, as there are a large amount of students  log in to the system for registration at the beginning, some students claim that they can't log in at first and need to try several times. So there are still rooms for improvements.

(posted by Marisa)

When i took my intern in the Media group last summer, it really reminds me of the important training is needed. There is a specific machine room in the office, the machines includes image pickup device， computing machines , title machines and so on .We new intern didn't know how to use it correctly, if we failed to work on it,it would make a crash or disposal of important files. So the professional training course or online teaching system is essential for media group to set up. Student may access to it and follow the online teaching steps and instructions to use it virtually or it may set up a training test for new intern and tell them how important to know the notice to use the devices.

(Posted by Angus)
My organization used traditional time clock to take the attendance in the past, however, management found that many staffs helping each other to take the attendance. They want to avoid this situation and reduce time for HR to input attendance record from paper to system, they introduce a finger print time clock.

The organization avoid the problem and improve HR's efficiency after the installation. However, after few year of installation, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Personal Data issue a guideline for collecting personal information, collecting finger print for taking attendance is not appropriated and some staffs complain about this finger print system. Finally, the organization need to stop the finger print system to avoid breaking the law and introduce a e-card system instead.

(Posted by Cyrus)
There's an annual convention for my organization. It is such a big event that held in a total of 7 halls in AsiaWorld-Expo with over 8,000 participants from all over the world. To organize such a large-scaled event, we have to prepare a lots of materials like website content, event guide book (over 45pages) for listing program timetable & content and directional signage (over 300 documents) for showing directions to different program venues. The most difficult part of materials preparation is that we need to include 5 languages - English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai. We have to start the preparation work 6 months earlier before the event. First, we have to confirm the English and Chinese versions by gathering the information from the previous events and make amendments. Second, it comes to coordinate English-Japanese, English-Korean and English-Thai translation from overseas offices respectively. Problems pop up during the coordination work. Since several colleagues were responsible for different languages last year, the files for reference were kept individually and even lost. This year, I was the only colleague to coordinate all languages and find it difficult to retrive the previous files which saved separatedly. At last, the translation speed of other languages was very slow because the colleagues from overseas offices need to start from the begining with no reference work from the past. And that it's talking about over 500 documents transfer, with 5 different languages. Back and Forth communication led to further messy transfer like different file names with different updated versions. This made the further production totally lag behind schedule.

From the story above, I have come up with two sources of problems. 1. There's a lack of a well developed intra-and inter-department file retrieval system. 2. There's a lack of matrix to record or organize the huge coordination work. My suggestion for next convention would be holding an overview meeting before starting the preparation. Instead of treating all these works as ad hoc tasks, we can develop the file retrieval system and matrix system beforehand.