I am currently leading a team at my workplace that's evaluating our use of the project management software Quickbase. Quickbase is essentially an online database that manages data points such as (in our case) people, courses, programs and tasks. The tool was originally intended to facilitate collaboration and project management, enabling the use of templates to generate task lists and notifications for courses running on a repeat basis. It was also intended as a platform for designers to manage the development of new courses; pulling all their team members and resources together on one timeline. Managers have a stake too; using Quickbase they are able to easily assess at any time the status of courses or programs.
Our Quickbase use has fizzled a bit (or a lot).
One reason for this is likely due to the interface: It's very database-y:
Our workplace consists of instructional designers and assistants who may not be accustomed to a database interface, and honestly are not expected to be power database users as part of their skill set.
My charge, along with the team joining me in this journey, is to find what might actually work to achieve our ends. We know that the software is very good at managing data, tables and relationships. We also know that our users are drawing a blank when attempting to use it. So the question is: how do we build an interface that our users instinctively know how to use and serves the purpose of keeping team members honest and on track? There is yet another layer of complication here. The team interacts on a nearly daily basis with various data housing systems outside of Quickbase - systems that store more detailed course information, manage time tracking, store course multimedia, etc. Here in fact is a snapshot of the whiteboard from our last meeting where we were discussing all these systems:
You can see how tangled this problem is. Many of the systems are out of our control and will probably still have to be interfaced with manually, but for the in-house solutions, there is great potential for integration, saving time and duplication of effort for everyone who uses them.
Luckily, we have Jeanette Condo on our team, a programmer with database and API experience. (yay for us!) With her help, we may come up with a win-win solution that puts Quickbase in the background while fully taking advantage of its powerful database capabilities.
Our next team meeting is next Monday. We are still in the discussion and exploration stage and have not begun any nitty-gritty development or testing yet, so the question I think I want to ask is, if we were to design a system for managing our work from the ground up, without consideration for existing systems, what would it look like?
