091111 Managing It Volunteers NEW With Notes!
ā¢Download as PPT, PDFā¢
0 likesā¢300 views
I run a one-day session for people who want to recruit IT volunteers. This presentations has notes explaining how it can be used in a workshop. Please feel free to use/adapt as required. Please contact me for similar workshops, as well as a 90 minute version of the same thing that is ideal for teams from Volunteer Centres and so on. **Big thanks to Anne at IT4Communities for all her help.
![Managing IT Volunteers ,[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to 091111 Managing It Volunteers NEW With Notes!
Similar to 091111 Managing It Volunteers NEW With Notes! (20)
More from Mark Walker
More from Mark Walker (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
091111 Managing It Volunteers NEW With Notes!
- 1. Managing IT Volunteers Mark Walker, SCIP ICT Champion for the South East
- 15. LUNCH
- 35. www.it4c.org.uk
- 36. Ā
Editor's Notes
- There are lots of people with IT skills looking for charities who could use those skills. And there are lots of charities looking for help with IT projects who donāt know where to look for volunteers, or donāt know what skills they need from a volunteer. This workshop looks at what you can do to solve that problem. It is practical and will focus on your needs.
- A challenge: why is this so hard? The voluntary sceor is good at recruiting managing and supporting volunteers, so why does it struggle with IT? Does it see it as different? Is it different? What is different?
- I will write up your questions and we will review tem at the end of the session
- This is a good chance to reflect on what you already know about IT projects in general, as well as those which involve volunteers. It could be that you are not confident working with IT projects, or have only limited experience eg built websites but never developed a database. This exercise should also show what broad range of projects and activities need IT, and the different skills it needs, including people skills
- Think about risks, and weigh up potential benefits
- Back to the challenge: in what way is this different to your needs when looking for voluntary help with human resources or legal issues or accountancy? Use this time to talk about how you view these different specialist functions and work out is different about IT ā to what extent is it about the people and they way they behave - a common complaint about IT people?
- So why do it? Save money, build knowledge and skills of your team, involve people in your communityā¦.
- Does it make any difference if you pay? What difference does it make? Are you any better at managing the risks if you pay?
- This is a suggested list ā can you think of any other criteria?
- This part of the session helps you to review how successful projects work, and looks at the key steps involved in a successful IT project. When reviewing this slide we will be talking about what you understand by these terms and I will be asking you about your own experience and training in project management. Lots of people have these skills but may need reminding of how important they are. They may also want to discuss how this links to the way their organisation makes decisions especially in terms of getting ābuy-inā from board members and other staff.
- How familiar are these steps? We will talk about the brief being the critical first step for you as the client ā are you starting by identifying the problem and your goals? Or are you spending your time working out the solutions? Your needs should be focused on issues such as income generation, better services, achieving efficiencies or making your work more effective. Before you leap to the design process be sure that you brief says what you think will be different once this project is complete eg our service users will be able to access information 24 hours a day. This will drive the project forward and give you targets againts which you can review progress.
- A catch up ā a reminder that your are running a project and looking for a volunteer to help you with it. So use sound project management processes from the start, or look for a volunteer with project management skills and lots of project experience, rather than specific IT skills.
- Hereās an example that is fairly common ā a website brief. IT4C says that the most common projects are websites. So here is a brief for a website, not necessarily everything you need, and may not be in this specific order, but about right. I will ask you what questions you have and we will talk through each heading to see what we each think of it
- I will click back to the previous slide to give them the suggested headings This exercise helps us review what we think we know about projects, and get you talking about real projects and may give you stuff to take away and use straight away
- Here is a source of further help about preparing a brief for a website
- A reminder
- Questions and answers based on feedback from IT4Communities.org.uk
- Red/amber: timescale too short, not enough focus, more work needed on the brief, could be a linger term project involving the young people, look for someone to help prepare a brief before deciding how to build the site
- Red: too little structure and too easy for this situation to run away from you ā you need it to be managed carefully so that it definitely works otherwise you risk losing all the good work to date. Also, a new person coming in would probably have their own ideas and may end up undoing something done y a volunteer
- Green ā ideally look for someone with a combination of procurement skills and technical knowledge
- Green/Amber, the only caution is because this is a critical and large scale project which may be supported by a volunteer but may also become more complicated the more people who get involved. Another observation would be that you donāt choose a web designer who canāt speak you language - Ā£30k is a lot of money so you should have plenty of choice.
- Green, but you may not specifically need a techie as much as you need a good analyst or communications person who can link IT decisions to your overall gaols
- Amber ā sounds plausible but my be very difficult to manage
- This slide can be used to discuss current issues that people are facing and discuss ways of resolving them ā especially helpful to show how they are not IT issues, but may be about confidentiality, or security or internal management issuesā¦
- A reminder
- Discuss experience of the group to localise this information ā esp things like who to talk to at a local college or university of local businesses that are known to be sympathetic
- The only specialist organisation ā really good project briefing process
- The website gives some good examples of projects that volunteers have delivered, including databases, websites, installations, etc
- You can also add a widget to your site showing requests for volunteers as they come in
- This underlines that it is about knowing how to run successful projects, not just choosing the right person