Activity 7 - Alec

Develop ideas of where you could incorporate the use of scenario planning in your organization

Organization uses scenario planning to develop flexible long-term plans. This method can assist organization to generate strategy options for decision making or policy. Moreover, it setup a planning process that enables change anticipation, preparedness, evaluatin and risk assessment.

There are many version of scenarios planning. Here is one that I will apply to my organization.  Dawon (2012) summarized it in the following figure.

                                                
Scenario planning is a comprehensive strategy for an organization, it is not easy to describe it fully in this blog. In the following section, I will simply apply scenario planning in my organization for the implementing of ICT.

Step 1: Define
At this stage, our team member need to decide the problem and get down to create the scenario. In my organization, because we have not establish any database or filing system to manage our activities materials, all physical materials and printed paper just keep in file box and sort by year. Also, instructors and staff should use more time to find out papers from different boxes and students can not check their previous work easily. Thus, the implement of ICT should be a direction to solve this problem.

Step 2: Explore
Information gathering is a critical step at this stage. We all know that most academic departments have use different kinds of ICT to assist staff and students' work. To optimize our scenario plan, we had ask some friendly departments about the use of ICT and IT team had checked the cost and relevant information about ICT.
At this stage, we also find many uncertainties.
1) How many course are suitable to use ICT
2) How many instructor are willing to use
3) Who can be the in-charge person of ICT
4) No student use ICT
5) Instructor are not interest to use ICT
6) Staff don't know how to use it

Step 3: Create
We have identified two highly important uncertain drivers.
1) The low usage of instructor and,
2) The low usage of students.
I created a four-quadrant plot to describe four scenario directions.

 










Wonderful World: There are high ICT usage of both instructor and students, instructor uses it to observe and evaluate students' work. On the other hands, students can create their e-portfolio  and search their working history. Moreover, they can have a communicate platform to express their views and share various resources they need.

Unidirectional teaching: Without the participation of students, we can only see the teaching materials provided by instructor. Although some students will reply instructor's questions and upload their work, lack of students' post will not establish a healthy platform to both parties.

Entertain network: It seems to be an out of control situation. If students are fully participating on the platform, then share various lovely ideas, linkage and video, but instructor has not post anything on the ICT and does not care about students' interaction. The ICT will be only a friendship network between students.

Tragic World: Both instructor and students do not want to use ICT, then it will be deserted. Therefore, organization will waste money and manpower for setting the platform and the training time for staff.

For different situation, organziation could provide training course or technical support to instructor and studenst. Some instructor may also evaluate students' ICT usage and work quality to adjust the final result of teh student. For the preparation stage, staff and instructor may take a short training class to know more about the ICT.

Step 4: Communicate
At this stage, most of the scenario materials will be created and ready to action. Normally, we should have meetings to discuss, finalize particular documents and prepare necessary information for introduction to students.  

Step 5&6: ACT & EMBET
These two stage are ongoing surveillance, staff have form different teams to monitor the use of ICT in different activities. Senior officer can adjust or update scenario or strategy to maintain and establish sustainable strategy for organization.

Reference:
Dawson. R (2012)
http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2012/03/scenario-planning-in-action-what-why-success-factors-and-process.html