Tiffany Vincent
Academic Web Services

Get the .mp3 of the presentation

Spreadsheet mentioned in the .mp3

- Six sigma
- Kaizen
- TPM
- Lean
- TQM

All are various ways to improve the way an industry works. I first learned of Six Sigma from a friend who worked as an engineer for GE. Six Sigma is, at its simplest, a way to eliminate defects in a process. As a Web developer this had immense appeal. As I began researching Six Sigma, I found its sister methodology, Kaizen. Kaizen in Japanese literally means “improvement,” but the first definition I read of defined it as “continuous improvement.” In this presentation I will discuss ways to use Kaizen with Web traffic metrics to continuously improve a site.

The Excel spreadsheet
The metrics spreadsheet was designed so that you can input your monthly traffic statistics on the page labeled “Data.” (Use the IND DATA column to populate the sheets with the IND prefix.) YTD and YTD CHARTS are automatically generated charts showing your traffic changes over time.

Pertinent links:

Wikipedia Kaizen entry

Six Sigma, Kaizen and Lean

Comparison of Six Sigma and Kaizen

Web Analytics Demystified By Eric T. Peterson

Alexa (useful for doing research into other site’s statistics)
Eduweb

Holly Peterson, Director of Alumni Affairs, World Learning
Tristan Roberts, Staff Writer for Alumni Communication, World Learning

“If I want to find my college or study abroad classmates, what do I do? I don’t call them or write them letters. I log into my email, type their names (not their email addresses – the technology does that for me) into the address line of a black email message and send it off. Usually it’s less than four lines, and often it includes a smiley  somewhere in the message. Does this mean I have less meaningful, in-depth conversation with my friends than if I wrote them a letter or called them? Maybe. But it means that I keep in touch with friends I would have long lost were it not for the ease of communication. And I’m not even a member of the millennium generation.” Holly Peterson, March 2006

Several years ago, World Learning, including The Experiment in International Living, the School for International Training (SIT) and SIT Study Abroad, found itself in an interesting position. Our organization has thousands of alumni engaged in international, intercultural and social justice work in nearly every country in the world. However, we had little contact with this great pool of alumni. We needed to find a way to connect with them, and to connect them with each other.

The goal of our project was two-fold: to better serve our alumni base by allowing them to network with each other, and to enlist alumni as advocates for and supporters of World Learning. When we realized that our alumni base is largely young, mobile, and globally dispersed, we knew that we would need to engage them in non-traditional ways, including primarily through new communications technology.

With that in mind, we set out to find a set of tools that would allow us to make these connections. These tools had to be web-based and have strong email and directory components, as well as listserv, blog, and content management capability. They also had to be affordable. Over the course of one year, we research software, met with vendors and implemented our new online community for alumni: OurWorld (ourworld.worldlearning.org).

The PowerPoint, Word document and podcast outline our process, achievements and new goals for this project. We hope it will help others going through a similar process, and will also spark debate about “where we go from here” in using technology to reach students and alumni in an increasingly complex and borderless world.

Get the audio interview with Holly Peterson and Tristan Roberts, conducted by Robert French in March, 2006 (15:39; mp3).