Jamie Small Reflection
The presentation with Jamie Small was something that really resonated with me. I have always loved to cook and I have recently been becoming more and more passionate about what food is made of and here it comes from. I was really interested to see how such a large company makes small businesses and local food work for them and he explained it pretty clearly. It is obvious that local food and sustainability is important to them.
I used to work at the Pub in the Commons and I can confirm what he says about preparing food and cutting everything ourselves. Disregarding whether or not it was healthy, the food was almost always cooked with whole ingredients prepared either in our little kitchen or in bulk by the one upstairs. It was honestly shocking to me when I first started working there, but everyone seemed to appreciate it and like the food so no one was complaining!
Case Study Reflection
Honestly, I really didn’t know how to approach this problem other than our STARS category presented a pretty obvious route for Julia and I. It gave us a really interesting opportunity to think about an internal issue instead of something more typical in this genre like composting or recycling. We were able to look into other school ways that they incentivize professors to create classes that are sustainability focused.
We looked into the Colorado State University (CSU). Manly through their public STARS assessment report as well as through their website which had a paragraph or two about how professors can participate.
Project Management Reflection
Initially, we chose our tool over others because it seems like the most popular one, as well as the one our professor had the most experience with. This was a good idea for us so that if we ran into problems we would have a greater chance of solving the issue faster. It was also the one that seemed like it would be the easiest to use for the way we wanted to structure our project and the way we worked best.
Asana is designed to be a “one stop shop” for a project manager or the team itself to assign and complete tasks. There were many features included in even the free version of the program. These included sub-tasking, description boxes and the ability to attach documents. You have the ability to assign tasks to individual people, attach the information that they need, give them a deadline, and once you create the task it shows up nicely in their inbox with all of the information.
The program works very well for its intended purpose, and I think that there is enough organization present to be able to track teams through even extremely large tasks. The problems I see for this program are in the small details. For a project like STARS, I believe that it would have been a more effective use of the program to have each group on the same Asana project. With only groups of two or three it is more tedious to enter each step for each person than it is to gather the group for a quick meeting or use a group messaging system, but with a larger project where it is much harder to gather people, or contact everyone at once, this would be really useful.
The tool was fairly easy to use. There are a few things that take some experimenting, but once you get them down it’s very easy to remember. The use experience is pretty smooth and there’s a fun animation when you “complete” a task. This is definitely unique and evident of thoughtfulness that the creators put into it. For the free version of this program I think it does more than expected, the options are the basics that most people would use, and you have the option to purchase the whole program if your project required that. This adds many extras, but the biggest selling point in my opinion is the ability to assign a task to multiple people. I imagine that it is a marketing tool to get people to purchase the upgraded version.
For the STARS project I do not think this was the best option. Though I can see myself using this tool for larger projects I don’t think that Asana was the right option for STARS. I would rate this a 3 out of 5 for the STARS project, but I would likely use it again in a different setting. Below is what our final Asana dashboard looks like. As you can see, there is a lot more potential space that would be better used with a larger project.
