Organisation Transition and ICT a case study from Chen Li

Chen Li, undertook his professional year internship at Connecting Up (CU) and was instrumental in progressing to “go live” a digital transformation project in CU’s recruitment, induction, operation, tracking and reporting process of volunteers based on the Better Impact System alongside professional year intern Renu Bala and volunteer Stathis. 
 

The system was used to structure new and existing content, records and training materials currently held in various formats. These formats included Excel, Word, and PDF alongside e-learning modules in Microsoft Forms and MP4 videos, which were stored across sites including SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and on YouTube. 
 

Projects such as these are critical to streamlining, succession planning and conservation of resources, by reducing aspects of the initial direct supervision time commitment required for volunteer training. Automating much of the standard volunteer induction allows for a more cost-neutral process, allowing each volunteer to uniformly learn about and add to the host organisation. Importantly, they can begin to improve the service rather than impede their host’s ability to conduct their activities, which can prevent not-for-profit organisations from being open to taking on transitional volunteers. From a volunteer coordinator's perspective - it's a must! Find out more below:

Photo: Daniela Atanasova, Laura Monje Gomez, Chen Li

Organisation Transition and ICT a case study – Chen Li

We are living in an increasingly ICT dependent world and can reduce our paperwork and workload in a much more efficient way by implementing new technologies instead of handling every task manually. The Volunteer Management Platform Project tells us there is still a lot of space for us to improve volunteer management efficiency and back office administration. The implementation of this platform is more like a whole of department transition, the volunteer management process will be handled by the platform without constant supervision, management and processing. Using the Better Impact system is the first step but also the biggest step in a volunteer department transition.

 

Saving time in back-office operations and administration assists the Community Information Team to allocate their time to deal with relevant community-based tasks. By using the volunteer management platform, we built our own knowledge centre and information system by combining volunteers' information, training sessions, activities, qualifications, working hours, and previous paperwork. This allows us to establish an interoperable and integral information system using a platform which is quite flexible and expandable, therefore, the department can integrate more functions, routine tasks and paperwork in the system in the future.

 

Back office or organisational transition is never an easy task, people afraid of change or not willing to study new things can be the biggest issue, different cases require different solutions, if we want to be successful we have to be agile. The outcome aims to relieve unnecessary administrative burdens from inside to outside the department, however engaging stakeholders and ensuring people can work collaboratively can also be a hard task. To me, it is all about people, without being transparent with stakeholders on scale and standardization, there is a high risk of failure. Tech issues can never be the hardest thing to handle, as at least we can hire some experts or outsource them.
 

 

My coordinator Catherine McIntyre trusted me and believed that I could handle the project without ever treating me like an outsider. Establishing trust with your employees or colleagues makes a difference to supporting successful projects and change management aligned with following an organisations policies and standards, and detailed governance structure. A defined accountability and responsibility structure assists in improving the performance in the workplace, allowing supervisors or managers to give employees (and interns) leeway to be creative if they can prove they are able to follow these structures when undertaking tasks, if they have trust the results may impress. If an organisation has an intensive micro-management environment and an old-fashioned culture, it is likely that these benefits will never be realised, and an intern will not have the opportunity to gain this experience.

 

I had no understanding of non-profit organisations before with my previous working experience being in profit-driven companies. My experience here makes me realise that it is also a great choice to work with non-profit organisations or join a non-profit organisation. Connecting Up, is a real place to demonstrate your skills and knowledge, if you have it. 

 

These last few months I have tried to implement my knowledge and skills in my workplace, now I am able to utilise a variety of analytical techniques as well. Connecting Up provided me with an opportunity to apply a comprehensive and logical approach to tasks within the project, balancing what I needed to consider and pay attention to whilst considering the procedural framework, process model and risk management strategy. It also allowed me an opportunity to utilise my tertiary education in ICT, marketing, finance, accounting and business management.   

 

These are the learnings from my three-month-long internship at Connecting Up and I sincerely appreciate the opportunities that I was given and that everyone is so nice to me as well. I have compared my other classmates’ situations and I am probably the only one or two people who received such a great experience from our internship.