#5: Stakeholder Presentation & Engagement
I’ve had a very busy week presenting my findings to my coworkers and reaching out to SMEs.
My presentation went very smoothly, and it was well-received. I presented to my supervisor as well as two coworkers whose work is relevant to the project I am working on.
As a refresher, I have been reading webform feedback comments from various One Stop webpages, and I am now recommending that the commencement dates for all of the university’s colleges and schools be added to the Academic Calendar. The Academic Calendar is the most viewed page by far on the One Stop website, with an average of 233k views per month. The feedback regarding the lack of commencement dates on this page is significant—over 1/3 of all webform comments mention this issue.
So, when giving my presentation, I first and foremost advocated for the user. Both students and parents are affected by this issue; students are eager to walk across the graduation stage, and parents are even more eager to watch their students do this. I included personas in my slides to further center the user and make this issue feel more real.
After setting up the situation, I gave my recommendations (and created prototypes to showcase what they would look like):
Add graduation/commencement dates to the Academic Calendar.
Users navigate to the calendar for all important dates—payment, no classes, term start and end dates—so the commencement dates should be included, too.
Furthermore, users already expect the dates to be here. One user commented “I filtered for graduation and did not even get the graduation date! Lol.”
This also brings up an interesting issue; users have an overwhelming preference for the word graduation instead of commencement despite the two having different definitions. Some users mentioned both terms, but almost 80% of the comments used the word graduation.
Create a centralized “Commencement dates” page.
Users navigate to several other pages related to graduation in search of commencement dates. These pages could link to a centralized page that includes all commencement dates. The dates could also be separated by undergraduate vs. graduate and professional commencements, and each college and school would have their information in an accordion dropdown.
If a centralized page is not created, the pages users navigate to could also just link to the Academic Calendar filtered by “Graduation” (or “Commencement,” if that tag is created).
Overall, this issue affects a large population of users, and they would benefit greatly from the commencement dates being added to the Academic Calendar.
I am super proud of myself for how well that presentation went! After speaking with my coworkers and answering some questions, I then went on to find the best contact for each college and school’s commencements. If commencement dates are to be added to the Academic Calendar, having a list of contacts for each college and school would make the transition much smoother each year. So, I created a list of SMEs or other helpful contacts for each college. I then drafted an email to send; it gives them some background information about the project I am working on, asks them to confirm if this is a good email to reach out to annually, and asks what time of year the dates are typically finalized. This helps ASR get a good idea of when to reach out to the colleges. It also helps ASR to know when these dates can be imported to the Academic Calendar.
Now that I’ve sent out the email, I’m just (eagerly) awaiting responses. So far, I’ve gotten three responses, and everyone seems excited about this opportunity.
Key words: presentation, recommendations, stakeholder, outreach, email