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Project Description:

The name of our project is ‘Fill the Shelves”, which is sponsored by David Solomon (PMP, Professor, School of Business) and Julia McCann (Manager, Algonquin Food Cupboard). It has been shown in a recent study by the CBC news that almost 40% of the students in Canada are facing the state of insufficient quantity of affordable and nutritious food since the food banks at the campus are not fulfilling the demands. This becomes the basis of the project “Fill the Shelves”.

The objective of our project is to help the food cupboard program at the Algonquin by bringing the different items collected by either donation or purchasing while maintaining the quantity as well as quality at the same time.

We are team ‘Life Saviors’’ consists of a total of six members – Jay Bhavsar (Project Manager), Olive Smith (Procurement Manager), Zaid Syed (Stakeholder Manager), Karandeep Singh (Quality Manager), Vanshika (Risk Manager), Harkamalpreet (Communication Manager).

We got a fund of $40.00 as a starter for our project from the School of Business and our target was to collect goods worth a minimum of $1000 over the given period. The delivery date of the goods at the Algonquin Food Cupboard was July 27, 2022. We are extremely happy to announce that we collected over $2246 worth of items in the form of funds and goods that were listed in the list provided by our sponsors. This indicates that we completed our project in a well-managed manner within the given time and budget with our team’s remarkable effort.

Let’s talk about the various phases of our project. Our project commenced with the planning phase (Phase 1) – we submitted our project plan to Professor David Solomon on June 17, 2022. This project plan includes – Project summary and goals, Scope management, Schedule and time management, Human resource management, Communication Management, Risk Management Plan, Procurement Plan, and Stakeholder Management plan. This project plan document helped us a lot during the entire duration of the project as we remained focused on the tasks and schedule without any doubts in our minds.

Next was Donation Collection Phase (Phase 2) – It started on June 17, 2022, and we started visiting small-scale businesses (Event 1) to ask the owners and the customers there to contribute towards our project and we collected $1696.00 from our event 1. Afterward, we focused on our planned next event – Online Fundraising (Event 2), for which we created a website Go fund me, where we tried to encourage people to get donations. However, as expected we successfully raised $50.00 from this online portal. Then came our Event 3 – Asking Friends and Family. We have collected $500.00 from this event spreading awareness about the Algonquin food cupboard and the activities they do for students.

During our project, we provided our project’s status reports and one upgraded status report to the sponsors of our project through the live presentations on the zoom sessions. During our project, we tracked all the processes as a part of an applied project such as cost, quality, procurement, risk, and other subject areas.

Finally, we delivered our goods to the Food cupboard on the plan at the Algonquin in the presence of our project sponsors – David Solomon and Julia McCann in the given timeline.

We are extremely grateful to Professor David Solomon for his continuous motivation and direction without which we couldn’t complete the project ‘Fill the Shelves’.

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Project Description:

Earlier this year, the Algonquin College School of Business recognized that difficulty navigating the Algonquin College Ottawa Campus was a serious issue for the Algonquin College community. The combination of the campus’s increasingly large size with the unintuitive layout for room numbering can cause difficulty for students, staff, and visitors in finding their destination.

Previously, a Room Finder Web Application existed, but it faced several challenges and was ultimately shut down. As such, our project team and one other project team were each assigned to analyze the issues that led to the failure of the original AC Room Finder and create a project proposal document outlining our suggestions for the creation of a new wayfinding application.

As part of our research, we contacted and conducted several interviews with key subject matter experts and the original AC Room Finder application creator. Through that research, we discovered the background and initial development process for the Room Finder. This was critical as it helped us determine the business case for a new Wayfinder application and helped us develop timeframes for the development of an application.

Learning more background information about the challenges and pitfalls that the Room Finder had not been able to overcome proved even more helpful in developing our proposal. This information helped us identify which threats to the project existed and would need to be addressed, as well as which obstacles existed exclusively due to the circumstances of the original project.

Using the information acquired through research and stakeholder interviews, we created project planning documents and our project proposal for submission to our Project Sponsor. The documents we prepared include high-level plans for Scope Management, Quality Management, Communications Management, and the Project Schedule.

The Project Proposal included summaries of the above components, information for Resource Management, Risk Management, and a cost summary for the development and maintenance of the application. We hope that this proposal and the documents that we prepared will help jump-start the creation of the Algonquin College Wayfinder Application.

We wish to thank our Project Sponsors and the Algonquin College School of Business for their support, and we look forward to presenting our proposal to the Executive Committee.

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Project Description:

The Synthera Health App collects relevant health data via user input, app integrations and blood tests and generates a customizable treatment plan for Iron Deficiency or Iron Deficiency Anemia. Users can visualize their data, view their treatment plan, track their supplement dosage, and communicate with their Synthera Health team. The apps responsive design allows users to access their accounts from either a web browser or mobile phone. The data collected by the Synthera Health team will be used to improve their treatment algorithm.

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Project Description:

The 2SLGBTQ+ is a collective term that refers to two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. As this movement gains momentum and more resources are becoming available for 2SLGBTQ+ members and ideas change. There becomes a need not only for resources but also for ways to connect people in need with these resources. In addition, over the past few decades, various 2SLGBTQ+ organizations in the world have been founded in order to provide guidance and informative resources.

Similarly, There have been several organizations in the Ottawa area which are helping the community but unfortunately not many are aware of it, or they are run at a small scale. These organizations are operated independently and do not have a uniform platform to advertise their services and events. Due to several reasons such as some organizations do not have enough funds and technical expertise to support advertising their services on websites, applications, newspapers, and advertisements on the radio. The challenges are humongous and to overcome these challenges. Our client, Charlie Dazé from the TenOaks project organization, wants to create an online platform to help the 2SLGBTQ+ community. We as a team come up with a solution for hosting the website 2SLGBTQ+. The website requirements from the client are:

● Be able to store, and display information and services of different organizations in the Ottawa area.
● Be able to provide a secure website to promote 2SLGBTQ+ content.
● Be able to use the website publicly without any cost.
● Be able to provide contact information of the organizations.
● Be able to provide an interface for changing data later after the site is deployed.

Once implemented, the 2SLGBTQ+ Website will provide everyone, especially those in the 2SLGBTQ+ community, with easy and quick access to 2SLGBTQ+ resources and the contact information of 2SLGBTQ+ organizations based in Ottawa. As a result, more people will receive the appropriate and necessary help they need. Although this project is focused on the Ottawa region only, anyone on the Internet can view the website and read the resources uploaded. This will contribute to a more open and diverse world between communities. The scope of this project is the design, research, information gathering from different organizations, product creation, database build-up and connection, front-end coding, database creation, version control system, testing, admin control page coding, documentation of all parts, list of all test cases, and admin operation guide.

While researching, planning, and working for the website we learned a lot about the community. We learned terminology, organization, resources, and events happening around the Ottawa area.

On a professional level, we learned the importance of time, teamwork, communication, and commitment required to work in a real-world working environment. We also learned backend programming mainly database, password hashing, website security, and UI fundamentals of making websites.

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Project Description:

As per a recent study “Rising tuition driving more students to campus food banks” by CBC News, 40% of Canadian students are facing food insecurity, and campus food banks cannot keep up with demands. The project “Fill the Shelves” aimed to provide assistance to the Algonquin College Food Cupboard Program which provides for the students who require services with food and other basic necessities. The support was extended in the form of donated and purchased items from the most pressing needs of the Food Cupboard in the last twelve months, meeting both quality and quantity goals.

The execution of the project started on the 4th of July, 2022. The team ran a fundraiser seeking donations as well as an online yard sale by procuring used or old items from free or cheap garage sales, Facebook marketplace, Kijiji, etc. and reselling the same obtaining profit to be used to fulfill the project’s goal. Some of the team members channeled their creative side towards the initiative and managed to sell their paintings, making some profit. The corporate chains though did not run the donation campaign on their retail floor as per the team’s original plan, yet agreed to give a percentage discount for the items bought from their stores, helping a lot in the project’s success.

AC Food Cupboard has been helping students for quite some time now and during the campaign, the team met a few ex-students who have benefitted from the program in the past and were willing to extend their helping hands to the cause now. For the online yard sale, the members kept the online market in check throughout, procuring items such as cycle, sofa, lamps, table, etc. for a very cheap price and reselling them for a good margin.

Overall, the project aimed at achieving an ROI of at least 25:1 on the initial starter fund of $40.00 provided by the School of Business, Algonquin College, Ottawa and was able to meet the goal by procuring items worth $1,007.81 from the amount of money collected and planning on smart buying techniques. The procured items were delivered successfully to the AC Food Cupboard on 29th July 2022, i.e., in less than a month’s time of execution.

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Project Description:

The webform tracker is a ticket number solution developed for Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) with the goal of decreasing the number of calls the Client Support Centre (CSC) receives. This solution provides clients with the ability to track the webforms with they have submitted with the ticket system in their IRCC application portal.

The project was developed by a team of four students from the Interdisciplinary Studies in Human-Centred Design program. The team selected a line of business to focus their research on, which is the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). After meeting with IRCC, as well as clients and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) of the TFWP, they identified their needs and pain points and developed a solution that would help provide clients with the reassurance they need.

After conducting secondary research analysis, questionnaires, and interviews with SMEs and TFW’s, the team decided on the following problem statement: How might we improve the IRCC call center operations for temporary foreign workers?
While developing personas, and journey maps, and analyzing the collected data, the team concluded that one major factor in why clients call the CSC is for reassurance regarding the webform. Currently, when clients submit a webform to IRCC, they have no way of tracking how many webforms they have submitted or the status of the webform. Clients are not sure what happens to their webform after it is submitted and don’t know whether IRCC received their information or enquiry. This can lead to clients calling the CSC in a panic.

The Webform Tracker System would provide clients with a ticket number when they submit the webform, and users would be able to view previously submitted webforms in their account, as well as their status. This solution requires some user interface alterations to the account portals, as well as some system changes to adjust for the ticket system.

The team faced some challenges in this process, such as struggling to find targeted participants to interview in the time frame they were provided. But with determination and perseverance, they collected the data they needed to validate the concerns they discovered. They learned that tools such as Miro and Slack are valuable to communicate and organize research data, insights, and ideas. They also discovered that by identifying the strengths of each teammate and utilizing their skills accordingly, they could overcome any challenges they faced.

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Project Description:

This Excel application contains the contact information, training, certification, and various other information of UCSR stakeholders. By utilizing Visual Basic for Applications and other Excel features, we are able to dynamically generate and export accurate reports for the users. This application is low maintenance, user-friendly, and able to be shared on cloud storage services such as Microsoft OneDrive.

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Project Description:

Over the years, the number of people aspiring to migrate to Canada has steadily increased. The pandemic has caused longer than usual application timelines. This increase has led to a drastic overload of IRCC’s Client Support Centre, resulting in long wait times on calls and a sharp increase in client dissatisfaction.
This project investigates the systems to address the issue. Our team focuses on curating satisfactory call-center experiences for applicants applying through the Family Class immigration pathway. We take the Human-centred Design methods to redesign the client service experiences to boost caller satisfaction and relieve the overload on the current client service departments of IRCC.
The research team began by developing a multi-method approach to collect data on the current situation within the IRCC. To do so, a survey was designed in order to produce a high-level understanding of the most prevalent points of frustration amongst a diverse participant sample. This survey also functioned as a method of recruiting participants for a qualitative analysis of the problem space.
The recruited participants underwent comprehensive interviews in a semi-structured format, based on a line of questions informed by our data from the survey. In this portion of the research, the team delved deeper into the causes and mental models that resulted in the patterns of repeated calls to IRCC.

Information from these sources, along with an exhaustive literature review helped us derive a few key-insights. This phase of the research was interesting because it validated a few of our initial assumptions while discarding others. For instance, the team started off with the assumption that the immigration application process was complex thereby causing people to call the IRCC client support. However, we learned that a majority of the applicants found the application procedure to be fairly straightforward.
Through the key insights, we confirmed that most of the calls to IRCC happen after the application is submitted. These calls are mostly to gain updates on the status of their application. It was also discovered that due to the lack of communication between the application process steps, clients felt like their application was lost or forgotten about. The team realized that the long silences between updates and the opaque nature of the current application process give rise to a lot of anxiety that quickly translated into an increased number of avoidable calls to the IRCC.

This anxiety, the study found, manifests in applicants forming groups on social media to compare timelines and share information with each other. Unfortunately, it turns out that, even though the applicants form these groups to relieve anxiety and stress, they are instead subjected to misinformation. Moreover, the act of comparing timelines also elevated stress and panic, directly resulting in calls to the customer support line.

The team recognized this to be our area of intervention.
The researchers decided to revisit the application portal and see how the issue of transparency could be tackled. We learned that by merely breaking down the application process into smaller milestones, the clients feel a sense of movement in their application. This reduces anxiety and will combat the feeling of applications being lost or stagnant. Moreover, showing more of the application process will also increase transparency in the IRCC process and dissuade panicking applicants from comparing timelines by showing that every timeline is unique.
Additionally, having more information online about the application process will also help fight unhelpful and untrue rumours about the IRCC that causes additional distress… Thereby, freeing up space for IRCC to tackle more urgent issues.

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Project Description:

The OMS Food Ordering System is a cross platform online food ordering application designed to integrate with existing Tech Track Canada POS (point of sale) systems in restaurants. Users can look for restaurants in their area and order food for pickup, which is seamlessly integrated into that restaurant’s order system, with real time order tracking.
Our clients Afaq Bukhari & Kareem Yussuf wanted an application that could replicate the features of existing food delivery applications (I.e., UberEats, Door Dash, etc.) but for restaurants who cannot afford the large fees of other platforms. Competitors also lack integration and flexibility for restaurants to efficiently use their services. The OMS Food Ordering System will allow restaurants to limit the number of orders coming in, the distance customers can order from, and update menu item availability in real-time synced with a restaurant inventory tracking system (POS system needed). Competitors often place restaurants into situations where the number of in-person and online orders becomes overwhelming and do not account for on-hand inventory leading to unsatisfactory customer service and backlogged order queues.
During development, the largest issue faced was deciding which framework would allow full inclusion of key features, while being lightweight and deployable on multiple platforms with minimal retooling testing. React was chosen and used to develop the OMS Food Ordering System with OAuth being used for login, and the database managed by Tech Track Canada.

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Project Description:

We are students in the Project Management Graduate Certificate program who collected $2,170.50 worth of non-perishables for the AC food cupboard as part of our Applied Project Management course. AC food cupboard provides students who require food and other basic necessities. For the 2022 AC Food Cupboard project, there were two sponsors, i.e., Prof. David Solomon and Julia McCann. Two of the main requirements of the Project Sponsors were, too;

1. Raise goods to be donated for the Algonquin College’s food cupboard with a sponsored amount of $40 and achieve the funds ROI of 25:1 with an approximate amount of over $1000.00.

2. Goods must be delivered to AC Food cupboard on 27th July and, at least 70% of the items must be the items which are in high demand.

To raise the required funds, we speculated an amount. Then, each of us contacted cooperate companies and also the communities and informed them about the project. To advertise the project, we created posters and shared them through our social media accounts. Additionally, we created a “Go fund me” charity event, emphasizing the project and advertised that via social media. To collect these funds, we set up an account with our communications manager, Vishnu Bhan.

From 20th June 2022 to 23rd July 2022, we collected the funds through cooperative companies and communities and managed to raise $1,836.76. To procure the items, we conducted a market analysis and reached retailers such as Costco, Sysco, and Walmart. Out of these three companies, we shortlisted Costco and Walmart and our Communication Manager got in touch with the store management to procure the items. Then based on the percent allocation we created at the planning stage of the project, we purchased items from Costco and Walmart. Through special discounts, we managed to save $283.44. The total MRP of the items purchased through the retailers was $2,120.20. Additionally, we received $50.36 worth of items as a donation through one of our community channels. This sums the total MRP of $2,170.50 items toward the AC food cupboard.

In the early stages of the project, the funds accumulated slowly. We kept on reaching the cooperating companies and conducted a marketing campaign. We learnt that this target can be ascertained only through effective communication. Unknown risk struck on 23rd June as our contact in Sysco reported that she contracted Covid, and we knew we wouldn’t be able to purchase items through Sysco. Another Unknown risk occurred as one of our transport’s (Project Manager’s SUV) had an engine failure on the day of procuring. However, our contingency plans helped us to raise $2,170.50 worth of items for the students in need.

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