Solving Problems/Improving Leadership

Team Collaboration to Improve Project Efficiency at VAHJI

The first week of working on a project that is new to both the interns and the project managers was certain to have its problems. At the Virginia Holistic Justice Initiative, it is my team’s job this summer to collect detailed information on a variety of Richmond resources and nonprofits to create a database of program solutions that may be used as alternatives to incarceration for non-violent people. To gather this information, we must contact and interview the appropriate staffers at various organizations. This project is new to all involved, which means it will require collaboration and team work to discover the strengths and weaknesses of our approach.

This past week, to get myself and fellow interns adjusted to the process of interviewing, our team managers assigned us to contact staffers at REAL Life, a nonprofit that VAHJI already has close working relations with. What we quickly learned, however, was that by assigning each intern a program at REAL Life, individual staffers were receiving up to 8 emails from different interns to set up a time to meet and talk. Not only was this probably overwhelming and inconvenient for them, but it also created difficulties for us. In order to respect the time of the REAL Life staffers, we combined our meetings so that multiple interns could interview one staffer at the same time about their respective program. Although this was perhaps more efficient for the staffer, it was ineffective and inefficient for the sake of our research.  Each of us are looking to for the same information about different programs which led to a lot of repetition in our questions. This clearly upset some of the staffers we interviewed as it came across as though we were not paying attention, when we were just trying to be thorough and correct.

Myself and fellow interns came together to discuss how we could avoid this sort of inefficiency and also respect the time of the people we will be in contact with for interviews going forward. We also brought up the problem with our project managers so we could work together to identify what could be improved. We identified the biggest problem as being the way in which we were assigned our research: one intern per programming solution. This was the problem because each staffer oversaw a variety of programs and therefore was in communication with multiple interns. The lesson we have learned for the future, therefore, is that each intern ought to be assigned to a staffer, rather than individual programs. This way, each one of us will talk directly with a staffer and conduct interviews on all of the programs they manage. This could mean a process of meeting with the same person several times over a week or more, but lessens the amount of people each staffer at an organization will have to communicate with. We think that going forward this will be a more efficient means of collect the information we need.

The adaptability of our team, both interns and project managers, is a part of what makes this project so special. We are continuing to improve our methods of research to discover what works best. It is a collaborative effort that requires us as interns to identify what is or isn’t working and then work alongside our managers to find the solution. It is this communication and teamwork that will ultimately lead to our project’s success.