University Fund Management
Designed a platform to streamline university fund management, ensuring transparency, efficient decision-making, fair distribution, and fund analysis
Role
Interaction Designer
Project Duration
2 Days
Problem Statement
001
Design a platform for streamlining fund management within a university, fostering transparency, efficient decision-making, fair distribution, and comprehensive analysis of fund utilisation. The platform should offer the following capabilities:
Empower stakeholders to seamlessly request funds for a diverse range of activities and events.
Implement a meticulous review process, characterised by due diligence, to ensure optimal allocation of funds.
Provide real-time statistics and leverage historical analysis to offer a deep understanding of fund usage across various activities.
Enable detailed analysis of fund allocation and utilisation within each specific activity or event, facilitating valuable insights.
Research
002
Literature Review
I read several IIT Bombay internal handbooks to learn more about how the university operates. From these handbooks, I gained insights into the different roles of administrative staff in building and distributing funds to labs, professors, and departments.
Primary & Secondary Stakeholders
By reviewing the literature and considering the problem at hand, I found out who the most important and less important people or groups affected by the situation are. I also thought about how these individuals or groups are connected to the process and came up with potential ways they might benefit from it.
Contextual Inquiry
Focus:
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How are funds allocated to projects and what is the criteria? Who are involved in fund allocation
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What are the typical activities or tasks you perform related to fund allocation and management
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What information or documentation is required when making a fund request
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Are there any tools or systems currently in place that provide real-time statistics on fund utilisation
Factors governing fund requests
Key Performance Indices (in context to fund requests & allocations)
After doing more research, I collected the key performance indicators (KPIs) that other universities and colleges use. I then compared these KPIs with the data points already available at IIT Bombay, as well as potential new KPIs that could help us gather important information and make better decisions.
Work Models
Interaction between IIT Bombay, Govt, Industry, Students and Faculty
Key Insights
003
Each department and lab gets a set amount of basic funding. If a professor or Head of Department (HoD) needs more funds, they can request it, but the dean of research and development needs to approve the request before they get the additional funding.
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They use SAP system to allocate funds and request funds which only allows simple one way requests and allocation of funds.
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For negotiations and relaying informations they use email which is inefficient primitive and limiting when dealing with such large data sets and multiple parties and stakeholders in parallel.
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They manually maintain excel format documents to manage, analyse and record all transaction pertaining to all
and any transactions, requests and allocation of funds. For example: Salaries, Quotations from vendors, budget planning, expenses.
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The lack of visualisation of the above said data leads to problems and inefficiencies when gauging and comparing
the scales, trends, growth of the funds of different stakeholders and their own historical data sets.
Design Opportunities
004
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An intuitive user interface focused on usability, accessibility and ease of usage for all user proficiency levels
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A whole new system which would now allow them to request, allocate, negotiate, modify fund requests and display that data in an easily understandable visual form.
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A central place/archive with all the requests (new, pending, in progress, approved, rejected) which can be filtered out and sorted according to the user requirements.
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Graphs and data visualisation in real time that represent all the data sets related to funds relevant to the logging in user making it easier to understand analyse and compare their scales, trends, growth of all stakeholders and their own historical data sets.
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Built in negotiation portal with all messages and conversations from the stakeholders pertaining to their requests and needs.
Information Architecture
005
Visual Identity
006
Final Screens
007
