Leading with Vision: Blueprint Today
On redefining vision, mastering new strategies, and challenging project success. Meet our Fall 2018 President Ken Chen!
Ken is currently a senior at UC Berkeley majoring in Computer Science. Ever since joining Blueprint, Ken has been playing an active role in fulfilling our mission and values.
We all wonder what is behind the powerful philosophy and mission of each organization. But, when it comes to the point where there are more solutions than what we can feasibly implement given our restricted timeline, more opportunities than hours in a day, prioritization is the best approach to envision the club’s future.
The key to Ken’s powerful philosophy of Blueprint is based on mutual benefit and empowerment:
“Ultimately, because we’re an organization that creates pro-bono software, outwardly, our success should be measured based off of how much each project is able to impact the communities for which our nonprofit clients serve.
However, the prerequisite for that success is a motivated group of individuals that are willing to carry out and sustain that mission. This model wouldn’t work unless at each level of the organization, we reciprocate with meaningful experiences that these individuals can continually grow from.”
On Redefining Vision
Joining Blueprint as a sophomore, Ken realized that one of its main challenges lies in the shifts of leadership every semester, bringing in new perspectives and overshadowing old visions. Seeing how these changes can prevent long-term goals from ever being fully reached, Ken sought to mitigate this effect by creating more sustainable processes.
Blueprint is in a stage where we already have technical maturity and can reliably develop projects to completion. This opens up the possibility for us to focus on other things, such as the distribution of our projects to our nonprofits own clients and having a play into the success of that.
Furthermore, we’ve attained some national recognition and international outreach in the form of our BP Waterloo Chapter, so we can start having conversations about the possibility of further expansion and the rise of an international nonprofit organization to manage operations across all chapters.
“The convergence of all of these new higher-level opportunities requires establishing a framework for sustaining our vision for the long-term, so that plans set in motion can keep their momentum through one or even multiple transitions of leadership.”
Understanding the big picture of an organization is fundamental, so we drew the mind map of the whole structure of Blueprint. In this way, we could fully embrace the limitations and find ways to foster the Blueprint community.
Ultimately, Ken’s biggest goal is to create a more sustainable framework of the club’s structure for current members and subsequent generations to embrace a lifelong vision of Blueprint.
And this semester we’ve already seen elements of this framework come to life, through the improvement of communication with non-profit organizations, the creation of committees to connect Internal and External teams, and the connection of our alumni network with the Executive Team.
On Succession Planning
What makes Blueprint unique is that it serves the non-profit sector, which requires quite a different approach for delivering service unlike other traditional tech clubs, which are dealing with businesses and direct clients. In our case, succession planning and learning are essential.
Is the success of a project only limited by the quality of the software, or are there other variables to consider? It’s very important for us to challenge what a “successful project” really entails.
Simply delivering a beautiful product to nonprofits is not our end goal. What we should strive for is the full adoption of our software by the nonprofit, and maximal impact on the communities that they serve.
“We’re aiming to get people a lot more engaged with their nonprofits to close the gap between our members, the nonprofits, and their clients.”
These are just a few of the explicit measures that we’re taking to achieve this:
- Scoping projects with nonprofits in the summer prior to taking them on as clients
- Engaging developers in the project scoping process rather than just the project leaders
- Defining the checkpoints of our development timeline more explicitly by formalizing our contract of work (at the beginning) and delivering the software in-person at the eventual handoff (end)
- Increasing the number of in-person meetings with NPOs whenever possible
These improvements serve to support the meta-processes surrounding the actual project development itself — we’re strengthening what happens at the beginning (scoping), at the end (handoff, testing, and distribution), and fortifying all communications in between.
On Mastering Strategies
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead
Compared to other clubs at UC Berkeley, Blueprint is a relatively a small club, consisting of just under forty active members. As a result, being passionate, driven and tight-knit have all become inherent features for Blueprint, vital to the success and quality of our projects.
But how can we share our mission and make it more accessible to people around us? The solution lies in creating other Blueprint chapters within the communities of other colleges and universities to foster a stronger network all around the world.
Following that, our next goal is to unify current Blueprint chapters by establishing an International Blueprint organization, which would be strongly supported by our network of alumni.
“You can think of it as a board of representatives from each chapter that can deliberate on the logistics for supporting each of its chapters both in terms of resources and finances, and even creating Blueprint’s own products and open source resources.”
