Using The Concept System to Assess and Improve Service
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CSI clients and affiliates use The Concept System as a tool for assessments and evaluation efforts of all kinds. Angie Parkes, Program Evaluator at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, chose to use it to better understand what services students and staff wanted from the Library.
Founded in 1916, SAIT (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology) is North America's first publicly-funded technical institute. Currently, there are over 66,000 registrations (10,000 full-load equivalent students) in over 2,000 course offerings including certificate, diploma, and applied degree programs. SAIT employs about 2,000 faculty and staff including contract and casual employees. The Library serves the entire SAIT campus and the larger community.
The Library Manager and her staff were interested in knowing how they could improve Library services to the two major stakeholder groups, students and faculty. To gather this information, Ms. Parkes asked faculty to participate in a two-hour live brainstorming session. During the session, stakeholders responded to the following focus statement: “One specific service that the SAIT Library should offer is...”
Once the ideas were gathered, the stakeholders did a conceptual sort of the ideas.
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Both faculty and Library staff also rated each of the ideas according to the following scales:
- How important is this service to SAIT faculty?
- How important is this service to students?
- How frequently would this service be used?
- To what extent will this service be used?
- What additional resource investment would be required to implement this service?
The Library management team looked at the results of the analysis and was able to decide upon a list of services that could be implemented almost immediately because these additional services required relatively few additional resources. The project also provided a list of recommended additional services, some of them resource intensive, in order of priority to help with budget planning.
In regard to the benefit of using The Concept System Ms. Parkes writes,”[The] software provided not just a list of brainstormed ideas (which any competent facilitator could solicit) but also strong data from stakeholders about the priorities for implementation. Generally a facilitator would apply his or her subjective interpretation to the results. With CSI software the stakeholders themselves provide their own interpretation. Furthermore, providing the Library management with recommendations sorted by priority and feasibility made their planning tasks much easier.”
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Project Officer of the Future
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Since Summer 2002, Concept Systems has been working with the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Chronic Disease Directors (CDD) in the initiation of a systematic process of strengthening the skills of its work force of project officers, program consultants, and others in order to meet more effectively the technical assistance and support needs of partner organizations (state and local health and education agencies, national and international voluntary and professional organizations, Prevention Research Centers, and others) now, and into the future.
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We asked CDC employees and partners to provide us with information about what a project officer should know or do to be able to successfully create and deliver programs. The information and insights acquired from both groups of stakeholders provided the foundation on which we are developing and institutionalizing a competency- and experienced-based system of staff training, development, organization, and deployment.
CSI Consultants, Mary Kane and Jill Helmle, have worked with the project’s steering committee to ensure the success of this worthwhile and important effort and look forward to working with the team throughout the next phases of the project.
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Concept Systems continues to improve CS Global
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Concept Systems has just released a new version of their internet
data collection component of the Concept Systems suite of tools.
With CS Global, corporations and researchers have a cost effective
tool to gather brainstorm ideas, sorting and rating information from
key stakeholders and project participants.
In an ongoing effort to provide the richest and easiest experience
to the end-user, Concept Systems has made user interface improvements
to CS Global.
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In the brainstorm area, users are encouraged to enter
focused, single thought sentences. In sorting the user is walked through
the creation of the first five categories, and then informed about
continued category creation.
Please let us know if you have ideas about how this tool can be made
to work better for you and your projects.
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