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Project Description:

We began working on our project with Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), when they reached out to us and explained the crisis that their Client Service Centre (CSC) are going through. They are facing a huge backlog at every channel of communication which hinders their normal operations and creates a bad experience for their clients. They wanted to understand why people feel the need to call and how they might reduce the backlog. Our team was responsible for the Study Permit line of business, which felt familiar as most of us made that journey only last year.
In the year 2021, Canada welcomed 450,000 new international students. They set a new record for the education industry in Canada and these numbers looked positive from afar. However, many international students have had their own struggles and a long journey to get here.
In the first phase, we set out to understand these journeys and collect as much information through secondary research. Applying a human-centred approach, we created and circulated questionnaires to gather key insights about their pain points and invited these participants for a semi-structured interview where they can share their personal stories and experiences. We also reached out to several Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to understand the challenges they tackle with their student clientele and what may make this easier for them.
In every part of our journey, we discovered that a major pain point for our applicants was the waiting time and lack of updates throughout their process. They wanted some sense of reassurance and wanted to feel the sense of human touch. We included various multimedia items to our solution to solve this problem. Videos, personalized tools, descriptive text material could not only help in assuring them but coming from a legitimate source will also help in tackling the problem of false information and the subsequent false alarms.
After gathering the qualitative and quantitative data, we analyzed it to present our research findings. Next, we used user experience strategies to form experience principles to guide our design intervention. We concluded that the solution should be user-friendly, support proactive communication, and provide relevant information to the applicants before they feel the need to call. This will empower the applicants and at the same time help in reducing the call loads on IRCC call centers.
Our design intervention includes a tool in the main IRCC site to provide the applicants (or potential applicants) a personalized set of resources of information in different formats, according to their specific situation: location, nationality, stage of the process, waiting time (if waiting), particular concerns or needs, etc. Student applicants tend to use the internet and search engines as a major source of information. This tool can enhance their research at each stage of their application process.
Furthermore, we use personalized emails and text messages to deliver follow-up information to our targeted users. This will give them reassurance throughout their waiting period and will further help in reducing their anxiety and uncertainty.
Our solution will help study permit applicants to get the information they need and wherever they need it. It will also empower applicants and at the same time help in reducing the call load from IRCC call centers.

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Project Description:

The name of our project is Fill the Shelves, as part of our program – Project Management. David Solomon, PMP, Professor at Algonquin College, and Julia McCann, Manager, Algonquin Food Cupboard, were the project clients. Our client requested assistance with meeting the food demands of Algonquin College students requesting help from the food cupboard. As per statistics of Canada, more than 40% of Canadian students are facing food insecurity, and hence, there is a greater need than ever before. The goal of our project was to procure $1000 worth of food (based on the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price, or MSRP) through donations with initial funding of $40 from our project sponsors.

To kick off the project and collect donations from the public and friends, we organized three different events, i.e., placing the donation box at an Indian restaurant in Ottawa, selling the theme-based cookies on Canada Day, and selling artwork on Facebook Marketplace. We elected to procure our groceries before the planned project date and took a risk of $60-80 to take advantage of a summer sale day at Walmart. We raised $513 collectively from all the events and were able to procure groceries worth $1028 as on 27th July 2022.

Our final milestone was to complete the inventory and quality control checks of the products we purchased for the food cupboard to ensure they meet the quality benchmarks per the Canadian safety standards. To complete the task, our team created a document detailing the quantity, quality, and expiry dates of the relevant products with the bills attached along with it for any changes and replacements. Finally, we delivered our groceries to Food Cupboard on 27th July 2022 in the presence of our project sponsors.

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Project Description:

The Ducklings Social App is a mobile application tailor-made for our client, a group known as the ‘Ducklings.’ Founded by well-known clinical sex and relationship therapist Sue McGarvie, the Ducklings are a local membership-based social club for adventurous adults, whose mission is to build a community of people who are sexy, sassy, flirty and fun. Ducklings also has a strong emphasis on member safety – only allowing real, local people who pass a thorough vetting process to be admitted as a member, as well as enforcing a code of conduct for all members. This approach ensures an unparalleled level of safety and comfort that allows Ducklings members to truly be themselves and feel comfortable within a like-minded community. Ducklings also puts a strong emphasis on education opportunities for members, with regular learning sessions ran by McGarvie and others, not to mention group outings to various points of interest in the local area.

The Ducklings group originally had a dating-only mobile application for their members, however it had several issues that limited its use, and as well it did not fully encapsulate everything that Ducklings has to offer, so our client requested a new direction for their mobile application. To meet this need, the Ducklings Social App was created to allow members a simple, convenient way to access all the key features of Ducklings membership – from accessing the events calendar and RSVPing, to updating member’s personal profile, to finding and chatting with other members, to linking to the Ducklings merchandise store. This was done by building an application that would leverage all the existing Ducklings online ecosystem, such as the Ducklings member website which runs on a Modern Lifestyle platform, as well as the Ducklings merchandise store website. Built with Flutter and programmed in Dart, Ducklings Social uses a WebView class to create a custom, integrated user experience that brings the existing Ducklings websites to a mobile-first format, allowing members to quickly access and easily jump between the different Ducklings features. This approach keeps the application light, fast, and intuitive for users and means any updates to the websites will automatically be shown in the application, saving on maintenance overhead. The application is also cross-platform and built to run on both Android and Apple iOS, allowing Ducklings members to use the mobile device of their choice.

At present, the Ducklings Social App features a homepage landing screen, and once logged in the user can quickly navigate between the events calendar, their member profile, member chat, and the Ducklings merchandise store. The application is designed to be modular and allow for easy addition or removal of features in the future as required. Some features were planned but not yet implemented and should be included in future updates. This includes a member proximity system called ‘Duckling Radar,’ that when enabled, will allow Ducklings Social App users to see other members nearby them superimposed on a map, enabling easy informal meetups and connections.

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Project Description:

This is a project that researched how to create an indoor navigation app for the Algonquin College Ottawa campus and the different ways in which the app will be useful. The project required extensive research on the various indoor navigation systems that currently exist in various settings, the technology and expertise required to create an app from scratch and also the various development companies that can create such an app.
The app will be useful to help students, professors and staff alike easily find their way across the complex maze of rooms and floors across the camps. One of the most beneficial features is that in case of an emergency when evacuation is required, the user can easily find the nearest exit.
The project proposes a plan complete with scope, time and cost to be built and deployed in the near future to help all visiting the college campus.

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Project Description:

PM Connect Event is a networking opportunity that gives project management students the ability to interact with project management experts in a casual, social setting. The goal of the “PM Connect Event,” a virtual event, was to aid project management students by giving them an evening of knowledge centered on the area of project management in Canada.
The PM Connect Event gave Algonquin Level 1 and 2 students a road map, focusing on how to interact and form connections for employment opportunities. It also gave them the chance to hear from guest speakers about their experiences and highlight how important project managers are to a project. Enhancing student involvement by working together with the section 300 team, who oversaw the first half of the PM Connect event, for the July 28th event.
The event’s first phase began on June 7, 2022, during which point we gathered requirements, met with David once a week to address questions and talked about how the project was going. As the team began to look for suitable guest speakers and prepare the event’s marketing, we were successful in locating one speaker, Yvan Bastien ( Digital Learning at Algonquin College), while we submitted our project plan’s initial draught.
The second phase included putting the marketing plans outlined in the first phase into action. It also included the preparation of the material for the poster, PowerPoint, Eventbrite registration form, and survey link using an online survey tool. To ensure that all the criteria for the event were prepared, we convened a checklist meeting with the section 300 team. At this stage, Penny Mayo, a team lead for the Canadian government, was also finalized as our second guest speaker. Students who registered for this event on Eventbrite were sent an email with a zoom link to access the event as Algonquin College’s ITS department provided the zoom connection.
Phase 3 was the major event day on July 28 (event time: 12 pm to 2 pm) all 4 guest speakers (including 2 from the 300 group) discussed their perspectives as project managers. The host succeeded in introducing the speakers in this instance. After that, all the guest speakers participated in Q&A sessions to provide the students with a chance to ask questions and get answers.
Later, at the last stage of the event, the team sent the students a link to the survey. Where any two students who took part in exchanging survey responses will receive a gift incentive (a $25 Walmart gift card).
The project’s overall goal was received: 49 students participated & 22 students filled the survey.

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Project Description:

Our Digital Signage Management System app provides Network Operations Center (NOC) operators all of the tools required to efficiently manage their customer’s digital signage. The digital signage market is experiencing rapid growth and is projected to be worth $27.8 billion by 2026, all while providing a more sustainable and greener means of displaying information in comparison to its traditional counterparts.

While there are many standalone apps that provide a single one of these functionalities:
– Device status monitoring (CPU Usage %, Temperature, I/O)
– Content management for displays (Scheduling, Library management, Display Authorization)
– Manage remote device workflows (Real-time triggers, Remote Procedure Calls)

None of the current apps on the market satisfies all of these requirements at once. That’s where our app comes in. Not only does our app centralize all of these functionalities to a single hub, but we’ve also planned from the very beginning of our research to ensure our app is platform and device agnostic (accomplished via PWA architecture), and scalable to handle thousands of signage endpoints (accomplished via Microservice-based architecture).

This project consisted of 10 developers split into two teams following an Agile framework. Each team, front-end and back-end, had elected scrum masters who closely worked with each other to ensure the tickets of each team were in line with sprint goals.

Members of the front-end team learned and applied many new technologies and best practices in order to achieve sprint goals and maintain development velocity despite dependency blockers:
– Git best practices were strictly enforced with a fast-forward merging method being used, requiring developers to stay on top of rebasing and ensuring proper integration with their teammates
– Figma mock-ups were created and approved before any major feature implementation
– All pure React functions required unit testing via Jest in order to be approved during code review
– Each major feature required Acceptance/E2E testing via Cypress
– Mirage.js, a developer mock server solution, was used as a means of continuing development on features whose back-end dependencies were still in development – preventing blockers and maintaining development velocity
– Tailwind was utilized to ensure that the UI was scalable for all devices: desktop, smartphone, etc.
– Dotenv was utilized to ensure that dynamic variables and client secrets were not tracked in our repository. This enables automated builds to use environment variables rather than constants
Tech stack: React, Tailwind, d3.js, Jest, Cypress, Figma, GitLab

Members of the back-end team learned and applied many new technologies and practices in order to implement a scalable and maintainable microservice-based back-end. These include:
– Automated unit testing of Django microservices views
– Automated API acceptance testing via postman
– Firewall rule-sets via iptables
– OpenVPN server deployment
– EasyRSA Certificate Authority deployment
– Virtual Private Cloud provisioning and SSH authorization
Tech stack: Django, NGINX, Python Unittest, Postman, OpenVPN, EasyRSA, ThingsBoard, Zabbix, Xibo, DigitalOcean, GitLab

Our entire team is grateful to have had this opportunity to research and develop this app. We can’t wait to see what comes of it in the future.

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Project Description:

PublishersLink is an online platform to simplify an outdated process that has become indispensable to the entire publishing industry. The main goal with PublishersLink is to use modern technology to help the submission process for the literary community; saving time, energy, and money for publishers and literary agents while also helping to get writers published. We will create a centralized, searchable, online submissions database, that is easily accessible by both writers and agents/publishers as well as an option for agents to connect with publishers via chat.

The current procedure an author must go through to have their work published is very time consuming, tedious, and yields little success for most authors. If we compared PublishersLink to the real estate market, writers would be the house sellers that pay a fee to use the service, literary agents are the real estate brokers, and publishers are buyers. PublishersLink is the MLS® system that connects them all. PublishersLink does not prevent writers from submitting their work to individual publishers and agents just as house sellers can still choose a “for sale by owner” option; however, the platform will provide a more efficient way to improve the chances of authors selling their work and getting published. To incentivize writers and agents to use the service, agents will be able to access their own submissions that writers will submit to them directly at no cost, agents will be provided with a free basic submissions platform to effectively manage their workload. Writers will also have the option of submitting their work to the wider pool of agents at a cost.

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Project Description:

This study was conducted on behalf of the Yazidi Legal Network (YLN), an organization dedicated to ensuring recognition, accountability and justice for Yazidis related to crimes committed against them by the Islamic State. Currently the YLN uses Google Sheets to maintain a bibliography of sources on Yazidis. The existing format is inadequate and the YLN would like to transition from Google Sheets to a secure, online site that is accessible and useful to users.

The purpose of this study was to examine the benefit of online access to the YLN bibliography to users. The study also explored how users prefer to access information, how they organize information and what they use it for. A mid-fidelity prototype was created as a minimum viable product for use as proof-of-concept for an accessible, online bibliography. This proof-of-concept will be used by the YLN as evidence to justify and apply for funding to further develop and implement the prototype.

A literature review yielded insights on information retrieval. Prime among these is that, in order to be useful, information must be findable. Findability requires the efforts of multiple disciplines, including expertise in usability, graphic design, information architecture, user interfaces, interactive design and user experience research.

User experience research was conducted with representatives of different user groups who were recruited by the client from their contacts and included legal professionals, academics and humanitarians. The research team also recruited subject matter experts. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten users and five subject matter experts.

Following analysis and synthesis of findings, the research team learned that users need: easy, rapid access to information; co-creation opportunities; to share information across disciplines / languages; data protection; and the ability to provide feedback on source evaluations. These insights informed the creation of a journey map, personas, user scenarios and experience principles which collectively guided the development of wireframes.

The prototype meets the need for easy, rapid access to information with a standard search engine that has the option for simple or faceted searching to meet the needs of both beginner and advanced users. Also included is navigation via category browsing and by clickable maps. Furthermore, employing Nielsen’s heuristic design principles for user interfaces that support universal design ensured the interface is broadly accessible and easy-to-use.

The need for data protection is met with access controls enabling pre-screening and approval of users. Data protection is also supported by trigger warnings to caution people with vulnerabilities from the potentially trauma-inducing content.

Future prototype iterations may address other needs identified in this study. For example, co-creation could be realized by creating a space for Yazidis to contribute content, describing their traditions, stories or experiences and / or by creating a ‘wiki’-like space in which users could offer translations of source information.

The mid-fidelity prototype meets the needs of the client by addressing all the themes identified via research, either in the current prototype iteration or in recommendations for future iterations. These future iterations would require the support of multiple disciplines as outlined above.

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Project Description:

A fully working and functional website for Taslaine Industries based on the site map.

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Project Description:

The Virtual PM Connection Event was a free event to join. The main purpose of this project was to conduct a PM Connect event in which four guest speakers discussed project management integration in Canadian contexts. They attempted to solve the critical issue of finding a job in the Canadian marketplace for aspiring project managers and project management students. In addition to this, it was a great chance for students to:

a. Make a connection between PM professionals and future PMs.
b. Gain insights on PM professional experiences by attending the event.
c. Create a network by organizing or attending the event.
d. Increase their work field awareness through the event.

The virtual event was held on July 28, 2022, at noon. All students were welcomed to attend.

The guest speakers were:
• Pete Grieve, PMP: Program/project/product/people manager, senior business consultant.
• Hillman Chan PMP, CSM, CSPO: Senior project manager at Bell.
• Penny Mayo, PMP: project manager – Team leader at the government of Canada.
• Yvan Bastien, PMP: project manager – Digital learning at Algonquin corporate training.

In order to motivate and engage the audience, we offered gift cards as incentives. The event was launched through Zoom, and AC assisted with the link Zoom account at no cost.
Furthermore, participants were requested to fill out a feedback survey at the end of the event to record engagement metrics. Out of all the attendees who filled the survey, two random applicants were selected, and these two applicants were sent out gift cards worth $25 each.

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