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1. Problem Statement

Housing managers and desk workers need to efficiently manage resident information, building access, and billing transactions.

This is difficult because the systems responsible for these functions are on different, isolated platforms, thus unnecessarily duplicating work. In addition, significant amount of student information has yet to be digitized.

2. User Classes

  1. House Managers
    1. JD is the house manager in charge of the four dorms on the MIT campus. He has been working as a house manager for almost 20 years and has training dealing with operations of buildings. On a daily basis, he maintains the upkeep of the building (both in terms of the structural aspects as well as the human resource aspect), the organization of the desk workers, the budgeting of the building, etc. He currently has too many systems to deal with in terms of entering in information. During the beginning of the school year, he has to manually enter in the information for each student into the database. 
  2. Desk Workers
  3. House Masters
    1. Individuals who need to keep track of the number of students in their dorm 

3. Goals

  1. House Managers
    1. Easily charge residents fees and monitor transactions
    2. Eliminate work related redundancy
  2. Desk Worker
    1. Access summer forwarding addresses quickly
  3. Shared
    1. Learn and manage resident data efficiently
    2. Easily allow building access to students

4. Notes from interviews

We interviewed several individuals with various positions in the MIT housing and facilities system. As we developed our problem and user goals, we realized that some of the individuals we interviewed are not in the user class of our problem. We have included notes from all of our interviews here, including interviews with individuals who are not in our user class.

J. - house manager for an undergraduate student dorm

  • Apparently it is a pain to give card access to students at the beginning of the school year so he has to enter every individual into the billing, access and housing systems.
  • Facilities and housing don't really communicate so if power goes out in the rest of campus or steam is having issues, the house manager doesn't necessarily find out till later or after hte work order is filled out.
  • Communication between different dorms is different so he has to gear his emails to different audiences. This doesn't seem like something that we can easily solve.
  • The way that fixit works is that once someone files an order, an email gets sent to him and the mechanic. The mechanic has to then deal with each one of the orders and then close it himself.
  • As House Manager, he is in charge of having to deal with students (e.g. desk workers), mechanics, plumbers/electricians, upper management (who apparently is new). He has to think about budgeting, when something is broken or needs to be maintained, making sure that people are happy at their jobs, etc. It seems like a lot and he says that it takes time to build these relationships.... he said his boss is new and is trying to figure out the system but don't know how to do it.

B. - house manager for an undergraduate student dorm

  • “Work is distributed  first by evaluating the task and determining if a licensed craftsman is needed or if the task can be completed within the Housing staff. Once established contact is made to the Housing Construction and Renovation Team or MIT Facilities team to schedule the work. Then communicate to all necessary parties when  the work will begin in order to flow and complete in a timely manner.”
  • “Notification is given to me many different ways.  Most often by the sap building repair worker orders submitted online, students report when they see me,  housekeepers/mechanic also when in they in conversation with residents in there area.”
  • “Life safety and Security tasks get first priority. The next tasks would be emergency plumbing, heating and electrical. Then Tasks in the third tier most times  are completed when craftsman are available to respond.”

T. - house manager for a graduate student dorm

  • "She says they use Excel spreadsheets for keeping track of tasks, but I don't know the details."
  • "She also said she prioritizes tasks in her head,"

K. - student deskworker in an undergraduate dorm

  • “No one really knows how it works and it's tough to learn. When new people moved into the dorm and we needed to add people to the software, no one knew how. And no one could figure out how.”
  • “No undo functionality. Errors have to be manually inverted”

E. - custodian for an undergraduate student dorm

B. - undergraduate housing office

  • “...I keep track of via a regular to-do list, written out and crossed off every day.  Not high-tech, but gets the job done.”
  • “I’d say the biggest frustration is just the fact that MIT is so segmented as an institution, and for every thing that has to get done, there are multiple steps involved and multiple people involved.”E. - Zeisger Athletic Center desk worker
  • "a big issue is that people who get a new id card no longer has access to the z-center. I have to send them back to the card services people to resolve the issue. There is this constant back and forth between us and the card services people." 
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