Empowering Children and Adolescents Through Art and Play Interventions

Challenges:

• 1. While data is available in different locations, the leadership team is unable to use the data for strategizing and decision-making. This is because they have not created meaningful metrics and they do not provide dashboards.

  The leadership team captures and stores the data across multiple technologies and locations as below:

  • a. Wrike Project Management Tool (to manage all the projects)
  • b. Zoho Employee Management Tool (to manage the workforce)
  • c. Tally Financial Management Tool (to manage the finances)
  • d. Google Drive Document Management (for managing all the documents)
• 2. Difficulty in easy navigation of documents and locating relevant data in one place.
• 3. Data inconsistency across various technologies
• 4. Lack of an internal process to manage and track employees and their efforts.
• 5. They needed to streamline the finance module to enable visibility of funds available and create an alert in case they ran out of funds.

Solutions:

After conducting a thorough examination and engaging in a series of discussions, we devised and proposed a solution.

To build a collaborative environment that can integrate all the tools, collect, and locate all the relevant data in one place, automate tools for data capturing, create a document management system for easy navigation of documents, and eventually create dashboards in this newly created environment.

Three dashboards were created:

• 1. Project Management Dashboard: To track the status of the projects, count of tasks (completed, active. Cancelled, etc) for each project, schedule variance, and the effort variance for each project, etc.
• 2. Employee Utilization Dashboard: To track the performance and the effort of each employee, tasks assigned to each employee, etc.
• 3. Finance Dashboard: To check the funds allocated, funds utilized, and funds remaining for each project, the cumulative amount spent for the donors and the projects across quarters and months, etc.

Outcomes:

The free Microsoft 365 NGO license was leveraged to build a dynamic dashboard in Power BI which automatically collects updated data from Excel in SharePoint. Power BI would then build multiple reports in the dashboard. The dashboard displayed the current state of the projects, employees and finance, and trends over the years.

The team was able to get an overall view of various aspects of projects under different verticals, associated employees, the performance of those projects and employees, and various finance-related information.

The system worked effectively in capturing, converting, and visualizing the data.

Up Ahead:

There are several improvements that can be planned for NalandaWay:

• 1. Advanced automation tools for effective communication, and smooth data migration from various tools (Wrike, Zoho, Tally in this case) to BI tools (Power BI in this case).
• 2. A structured process could have been followed:
  • a. Get into a detailed discussion on the requirements
  • b. Take a sign-off on the requirements
  • c. Prepare the prototype
  • d. Take a sign-off on the prototype
  • e. Build the solution (dashboard in this case)
  • f. Perform UAT
  • g. Handover.

Here, the requirement gathering was very fluid. As a result, the NW team kept changing the requirements.

Conclusion:

The implementation of the technologies in the NalandaWay Foundation has helped improve the efficiency of its operations and streamline the workflows. It helped the management to track, analyze and report on various KPIs and metrics. The dashboards also helped them in monitoring and measuring the core areas of project and employee management.

Do you have similar challenges in your organization? Take your first definitive step towards creating a better and faster impact.