James+Opportunity+for+Change

Opportunity for Change at the SBCC music department.


 * Need**

Organization in the department has been paper based, and uses a system that made sense to the previous occupant of my position, but as I take on bigger and farther reaching roles in the department, I find that the entire system takes too much time and effort to navigate, and electronic records keeping and universal access for all faculty members will have a large impact on reducing my day to day workload. It will also help us with loss prevention.


 * Specific Ideas**

Establish a system / solid database for equipment and library inventory, and make that system accessible online for all of our faculty. Included will be notes of who has checked out what for how long, and locations of all equipment should it be moved temporarily or permanently.

This will require a lot of student worker gruntwork, and some innovation and creative ideas when it comes to data gathering and implementation. I hope to be able to take a step back and let the student workers have more responsibilities when it comes to setting goals and schedules.


 * Additional resources, potential obstacles**

Additional resources = approval to pay student workers for work outside of the normal semester, which I just received today. So one potential obstacle removed. All the other software/technical equipment is already existent, so the total list of additional resources is limited to student worker hours and **my freedom** to spend time on this project.

As is always the case, free time for me is usually viewed as “ohh, good, he can do stuff for me now” rather than time for me to work on improving processes in the office. Having a project somewhat fleshed out will help mitigate this, but it remains to be seen if this will actually go forward.

In addition, finishing the OMET program will also be a time conflict that can potentially interfere with the project.