ProgDB is Live and Ready to Help
I’m incredibly excited to announce that we are ready to add additional universities to the ProgDB. Today is the first day of availability.
This is the software that I wanted when I supervised a programming staff at Humboldt State University. Just within my department, I knew that we could do better work by sharing the details of our individual projects. I saw that my staff was disconnected from what their peers were doing. And I also found myself wanting to collaborate with my amazing colleagues in other departments.
We struggled with a few things.
1) How difficult it was to get everyone who worked on programs (even within our small department) into the same physical space.
Since many of us work with students on our staff, it was important to help them balance their academic and work schedule. Which means being flexible in finding a meeting time that works for everyone. In teams of 5-10 it was not as much of a problem. Finding time for larger team meetings quickly became a problem.
2) Eating up that precious meeting time talking about the details of a program and not using that time to talk about our goals.
Perhaps this is familiar: getting into a larger team meeting and quickly going around the room with brief statements about the projects everyone was working on. I loved this section of the meeting, but it was easy to use a quarter of your meeting with just these updates. And it was important, but it wasn’t directly improving our practice and inevitably details were missed, and people forgot to announce their projects in that moment. So, now that everyone was in the same physical space – was it the right space to be conducting this business?
3) Stuff was lost, mistakes were made.
Even after we completed events, it was difficult to get a good picture of what we had accomplished. We initially had paper forms, and a small database of our events, but allowing everyone in our department to use that data was complicated. If we wanted to re-create a program in the next year, the files for that event were inevitably on someone’s personal computer – perhaps they still worked for us, but it was just as likely that they did not. I can’t tell you how many times we re-created the same documents year after year.
4) The meeting-problem prevented us from working with other departments.
Instead of everyone hearing updates about the projects happening in other departments, we would send representatives from our department who would come back to our meeting and report back about what other groups were doing. But inevitably, there were holes in those reports, and dates and times were missed, and opportunities for working together were lost.
None of these situations helped us serve our students – and all of these problems had solutions. Whether we call it maximizing the social capital within our organization or improving the organizational intelligence, it seemed important to apply a tool which would help us become better educators. The ProgDB was specifically designed to help us do this and we are incredibly happy to announce it’s availability.
Please take a moment to see the tour. If you are interested in checking it out, you can put a small team on it for free for 30 days. We recommend starting small – don’t overload yourself by thinking about getting everyone on at once. Consider using the summer to try it out with a small group of people and seeing if it works for you. By the end of the summer you will have mentors who can help others in your department.
And we’d love to continue this conversation about how we can use tools like this to improve our practice as university educators and serve our students. That is our goal in producing a tool like this for your organization.