Operation Clean & Organize Printing Areas (COPA)
Challenges:
The 2nd floor printing area outside of the library and the 1st floor printing room are in constant states of chaos. The shortage of supplies, messy tables, broken stationary items are constant pain points. These issues not only affect students, but they also present a bad image for Owen to the recruiters, alumni, and visitors. We need to find ways to have all students share the responsibilities of maintaining these areas, and not just rely on OSGA and IT services.
Client:
Claudia Escobedo - Owen Student Government Association (OSGA) Secretary of Finance and Facilities. She is basically the “go-to” person for any complaints/changes regarding the Owen facilities and is the liaison between the Dean’s Office (Sybil), IT Department, Library, and Students.
Goal:
Develop an adaptive and sustainable process/design to keep the printer/stationary areas clean and organized. Objective is to reach common adoption within Owen community.
Concepts:
- Force change through physical environment – reconfigure areas so that students are forced to change habits, no verbal/written communications. Potential action items: Moving printer; taking away table; attach "stationary bucket" to the end of the printer; reconfigure 1st floor printing room, etc.
- Organize change through guidelines, process, procedures – provide mechanisms to encourage change in behavior. Potential action items: Post 5S (Sorting, Straightening, Systematic cleaning, Standardizing, Sustaining) on the wall; provide contact information for assistance; use tape to outline where stationary items below; adding trays for unclaimed pages; encourage printing PDFs to low-traffic printers, etc.
- Empowering change through incentives, creating meaning behind changing, why change, work with OSGA/admissions. Potential action items: cleaning contest, prizes for low usage students, OSGA keeping Owen clean campaign, etc.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Thanks,
Team KKT (Kelly Leo, Tom Hiramatsu, Jake Chang)
I am a particular fan of offering incentives for reduced usage of printing materials in general. There is a substantial (to say the least) amount of pointless waste that goes on in these areas, and I think offering some form of fun incentives for students finding alternatives to just blasting everything they need, often more than once, through the printer, would be great.
ReplyDeleteFocusing on that concept, I think some attention ought to be paid in turn to faculty as well. Devising similar incentives for accepting student submissions in digital format (or having faculty offer incentives to students submitting digitally). As it stands, we are required to turn in the vast majority of our homework, casework, etc., on paper. Because of printer problems and glitches, such submissions often need to be printed multiple times, leading to extraordinary amounts of waste. I think focusing solely on incentivizing students to print less may miss a major reason they are currently printing so much, if that makes sense.
The printing here is a mess and needs to be addressed. You never know if your stuff has printed and someone just kidnapped it on purpose or accidentally. At the law school, you print from the computer and then when you walk over to the printer you swipe your id so that your documents only print when you there to retrieve them. Cuts down on waste.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Ginseng on the idea to promote turning in assignments in digital format.
ReplyDeleteI also like the idea of using lean improvement concepts like 5S to clean up the stations.
Additionally, whenever I see these messy areas I wonder who considers themselves responsible. Is this the library staff's duty? Or a collective Owen student population duty? It seems that there is issue of diffusion of responsibility. Maybe that is one angle to take - assign a group or individual the responsibility of managing the area?
Evette's example from Law School is excellent. Who keeps taking my case reviews and resumes hostage? Everytime I print something I have to dig through an enormous pile and am usually unable to locate my work. If we had a swipe card that printed when we walked to the printer it would significantly cut down on waste. I think a best practice email/sign would help as well (similar to idea #2). We need to make some changes since students seem to not care at all when it comes to wasteful printing and printnapping of my work!
ReplyDeleteGreat ideas!!! I think this is definitely a key area for improvement in Owen.
ReplyDeleteAbout number 1, I would be very curious to see what would happen if the table was removed and replaced with a basket.
About number 2, would the students really care about the 5S initiative. I think that might be hard to monitor and maintain.
One thing to look out for is over printing at the printers. People print and forget to get their documents, or keep printing not realizing the printer is out of paper/out of order. A lot of that waste gets carried over to the table.
Evette's idea about the law school is great! See what can be done about that. Maybe something to consider as you implement your ideas.
My favorite is to create a game out of our crazy over-use of printing. First of all, students need the facts. Ask Net Impact for the updated printer-usage facts. We are already 32% higher than our usage at this point last year, and the trend is continuing upward! So, inform students of the facts. Then, make it a competition! Have contest for low usage, do a "war of the classes" competition, or girls vs. boys, etc. The prize could be funded by OGSA or possibly Net Impact. Great idea!
ReplyDeleteThis is a real mess . . .I agree. Printing is out of control (and I'm guilty of it). I like your suggestions above, though I'm not sure about really how to implement them.
ReplyDeleteAs much as I appreciate my free and unlimited printing, I also really like Evette's idea regarding scanning the id. I think measuring is the only way to minimize the mess.
I believe every student is responsible for those messy areas, but no one cares unfortunately...
ReplyDeleteThen creating physical constraints may be the most effective way in current situation. I like "stationary bucket" idea. In my company, we tied every stationary with bucket or table by strings around the printer area, and that worked.
I like Krystal's idea. Fun stuff works!
Incentives are always a good way for correcting behavior. What would the rewards be? How would you sustain a rewards program in the long term? Could you move towards a co-op system where different students sign on to maintain the print area for a given week. In exchange for their time maybe they could receive free color copying or something?
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of positive reinforcement, prizes for lowest consumption of resources. Keep building on it! People are much more willing to comply if there is something in it for them. Negative consequences might lead to inopportune behavior.
ReplyDeleteI like the incentive idea of awarding prizes to low-consumption students and to allocate printers for certain usages. I also love the swipe-card idea. Perhaps it could also keep track of how many pages you have printed each month. It might help students be more cognizant of their paper usage.
ReplyDeleteI think the positive reinforcemnt is a great idea if the incentives motivate the majority of the users. I also agree with the above comment about making sure faculty/ staff also take some ownership.
ReplyDeleteEvette has a great point as well. My unddergrad had a very similar system to the one used in the law school Swiping your student before the printer actually prints the documents makes it easier to know exaclty which documents are yours and prevents confusion.
My only concern is that the incentives need to be align with the goals of the individual participants. HOw can you get everyone in the entire school on board?
ReplyDeleteThis is a needed and noble goal. To be sure visitors see our mess and it does not highlight the best parts of Owen. I think that physical change is necessary if you will create habit changes.
ReplyDeleteRouting jobs to their appropriate printers is an excellent idea. Keeping the work load even across all the printers would reduce waste and mess.
Incentives are challenging, to be sure. If people work for the incentive they are unlikely to work at all when there is no incentive available. As Dave O says "Money is your most expensive asset, don't use it if you don't have to."
Good work and good luck.
There's a lot of talk about incentives, what about a cost placed on the users. If people paid for the printing they did, they might not print quite as much (or at least they'll bother to pick up what they print). That way, those who print will pay the price of the printing. If the total amount of printing is reduced, then the mess is likely to decrease, too.
ReplyDeleteI do like he way you are thinking about the various "wedges" you might use to control behavior (i.e., technical, social/moral, and then psychological (i.e., incentives). Question would then be, which wedge is most efficacious (or "efficient" to use an economics term)?
Talk to IT about the idea of print quotas for the school. It's been discussed before, but maybe now is the time.
I like all three ideas but my comment about the first idea is that the reality that it would only work if students are willing to make the effort. I may be cynical but my experiences with the stapler issue at Owen is that it is largely due to student clumsiness not lack of organization etc. How would you be able to create enough ownership to alleviate this problem? For instance, there are recycle bins next to the printers but yet most people leave their paper waste on the tables.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first came to Owen I was told there was an individual quota of something like 200 pages a month and it forced me to make tradeoffs about what I printed and what I read online. But when I found out it was free, even my earth-loving heart took advantage of unlimited printing. Like I mentioned in another post, the result is that Owen as a whole printed over 300,000 pages in the month of October 2011. It's tragedy of the commons. I am on board with moving to a cost-based approach.
ReplyDelete