#11 Gratifying — SHE team is LIVE with our solution!
The final week here at SHE Investments in Cambodia — The second half has been the busiest weeks.
To recap, 3 of us — Hazel, Tobi and myself were tasked review SHE’s M&E tool (excel sheet with formulas) used to report their KPI’s. As, the reports had data discrepancies and was not reliable to be used in reports.
But, after going thru’ the customer journey map we made key discoveries, pain points and identified the areas of opportunities. In the current process, the M&E tool is directly updated of survey data with $ranges, some need manual calculation and thinking. This was repeated 5 times for every program graduates over a period of 24 months. The primary challenge was data compilation, redundancy and inconsistency. Adopting 4D — Discover, Design, Develop and Deliver that can reiterate in loops, we discovered 2 key manually intense processes that could save 90% of the resource timing.
- process to consolidate the list of applicants, who apply for the program, score and finalize the applicants.
- The selected participants need to take a survey 5 times over a period of 2.5years, and accumulating the survey responses, scoring and tabulating manually was indeed time-consuming. And the only back up was the hard copy of the survey.
Thinking end to end, just by automating the above two steps could save the SHE team a lot of time. Last week we demonstrated the prototype of the solution using available tools with zero dollar expense to the client (minimum $ if scalable). And we accomplished it !
How ? After lots of brainstorming we were able to design a prototype using available apps — google sheets, google forms, google drive, Gmail, square space, appsheet and tie these apps via Zapier.
Our proposed solution was to directly write online applications data to google sheet, and archive the received email submission, add an user interface to read the data from google sheet for applicant review and scoring.
For the surveys, we proposed google forms writing to google sheets. In the end, the final scores from all these sections, can be computed in google sheet and tabulated in a pivot tables, it would only need the final data set for individual metrics to be entered to the M&E tool once each period. The tool had required formulas to generate the KPI report which now had reliable data.
The solution we defined is :-
feasible — making minimal changes and get instant results with no cost just using googlesheet, gmail and google forms
viable — Start with zero $ package and connect the applications that SHE team uses for their daily activities and automate the processes or notifications using Zapier and appsheet.
desirable — this section contains a recommendation to implement more features like a chatbot interface, survey feedback and much more.This would need few applications to be upgraded to minimum $package (if required)
Today after our deep dive presentation of the prototype with Celia & team, they announced the action plan to start implementing the solution from this week. This decision by SHE team was indeed a gratifying moment!! It really feels awesome !! As, our effort is being used by the client ! To top it off, one of the program manager at SHE who had missed the survey scoring demo sat down with me to understand the process. At the end of it she laughed and I cried as the simple tricks and tips of google sheet that I shared with her was a delight for her and joyful moment for me. This last week we handheld the SHE team to implement the prototype to solution !!
Wishing SHE team the very best and sincere thanks to all the support, time, dedication !
