Impact

As a result of this study, Enovio mentioned the following impacts our research had:

• Brought more awareness and interest in the Knowledge Management Center, thereby already increasing use of it like they had wanted

• Planned to hire an employee specifically for Knowledge Management to implement our recommendations

EMPATHIZE

BACKGROUND RESEARCH

Each member of the team wrote a 2000-word report about a different aspect of the client and/or problem that would allow us to be more knowledgeable for our interviews. More specifically, our team researched the following categories: general background about the problem our client presented to us, general background about the client, competitor analysis and a short literature review.

INTERVIEW PROTOCOLS

Next, with the information from our background research reports and background we received on the stakeholders, we generated three interview protocols tailored toward the three positions that we planned to interview. We chose our questions from gaps we found in the background research report, as well as with the goal of finding pain points in SharePoint. For each protocol we generated, we set an overarching question summarizing the purpose of the interview. Following the overarching question, 10 questions with followup and sub questions were prepared for the interviews. 

INTERVIEWS

We conducted 4 onsite interviews, one phone interview and one email survey. At least two people from our team were present for each interview conducted; one member acted as interviewer, while the other acted as notetaker. I partook in one interview as the lead interviewer and one as the notetaker. Each interview lasted about an hour, and looked at each employee’s relationship with SharePoint. During the interview process, we took notes about the observation of how employees used and interacted with SharePoint.

After conducting my interview, I listened to my interview again and annotated the notes from my notetaker to find preliminary trends or important notes as well as point out things that I did well as a interviewer and things I could improve on.

ANALYSIS

INTERVIEW INTERPRETATIONS

After each interview we held a debriefing session where our annotated notes were combined on a shared Google document. Replaying each interview minute by minute, we wrote down important insights or quotes along the way. In total, we ended up with about 300 notes from all the interviews.

AFFINITY DIAGRAMS

Once we finished conducting interviews, we synthesized our information with an Affinity wall. To create our affinity wall, the notes we created on the Google document were written out on individual notes label by participant number.

Next, the notes were sorted and grouped by a high-level theme. Grouping the notes from our interviews by theme allowed us to have a visual representation of how the answers from one interview related to other interviews. We then took the broadly grouped notes and clustered them until we could not combine the information further. The affinity wall’s concepts helped us to generate our final recommendations.

EVALUATION

FINAL REPORT

For our deliverable, we created a final report for our client. This consisted of an executive summary, background information on the company and the problem, our findings, and recommendations. Due to NDA, the report is not shown here, but feel free to contact me for more details.

REFLECTION

Through the contextual inquiry process, I learned a few things about myself as an interviewer.

• I thought I did relatively well was adapting to the interviewee’s current situation with our set of questions after I was a bit thrown off by the response to the first question; since we are looking to find insights into how our client’s employees use their Knowledge Asset Management System, I was initially very shocked when he responded he didn’t have access to the system. I changed some of the questions to talk about SharePoint sites he did have access to, as well as changing some questions to hypotheticals.

• I thought this was quick adapting on my part, but in retrospect I probably should’ve changed the questions to focus more on other concrete examples rather than so many hypotheticals, so I could ask him to walk us through a different process since we discussed in class that we want to ask for specific instances, not generalities.

• I also noticed sometimes I would ask two questions in one sentence, which I just have to follow the script better since we had double-checked for those in our protocol.

• Lastly, I know there’s another person taking interview notes but I wish I could’ve had a pen to keep track of the questions and write down short names; I found at one point in the interview I was trying to think of the company he was with before [our client] and couldn’t exactly remember the name, but if I had jotted down the name I could’ve referenced it later