Simple Solutions

Dear Readers,

Today was the final presentation of “Management Personality Development (MPD)," a course I took in my second term. As a part of the course, we had to do something that impacted the lives around us. Since the course is officially over, I would like to share with you all the journey of “Simple Solutions.”

If the challenge exists, so must the solution. - Rona Mlnarik

Ever since I arrived on campus, I started noticing certain hygiene problems that everyone complained about and no one tried to resolve. I started discussing it with my close friends, and with the announcement of the MPD project, team “Simple Solutions” was born.

We were a group of six people who worked together to find problems and come up with solutions that were easy to put into action.

Now, the problems I am about to list might seem very menial to you, and as a matter of fact, they are, but that’s what made them so crucial because they hindered our day-to-day activities. Just like these, there might be some problems around you that you may want to provide Simple Solutions to.

Need for an efficient workspace

As you all know, I am currently on a journey to make things in my life more efficient, and for that, I am trying to harness the power of technology. Coming from a completely non-tech background, my zeal to learn about these tools is even stronger.

For our workspace management, we started using Asana. I will be writing more about this in my upcoming newsletters, but for now, I can say that it’s a project management tool that helps in organizing, tracking, and managing work.

This is what our workspace looked like. Eventually, we started learning more about Asana and transformed it based on our requirements. We planned on onboarding students, clubs, and committees on this so we could help them make their workflow more efficient. We were able to get one club on board—Prodman and were also able to get into the Asana ambassador program.

Auto Guy Unawareness

As part of studying on a temporary campus, we often have to travel to our respective hostels at odd hours. In such cases, either we relied on someone with a vehicle or waited for someone to call for an e-rickshaw that they were in contact with. We wanted to empower people to be self-reliant, so we compiled a list of e-rickshaw drivers and sent it across.

The problem with this was that people would not open the excel sheets every time we circulated the contact details in such a manner that if someone typed “Auto,” all the numbers came up in one go.

Silence Please

Another major problem that we faced as students inside the class was that, by mistake, if someone forgot to put their phone on silent, everyone got disturbed. I started thinking that this error cannot be completely removed if we rely on our ability to remember. Hence, technology again came to the rescue! I have been using an app called If This Then That (IFTTT), which makes my phone go on silent as soon as I enter the campus premises.

We created a step-by-step tutorial and shared it with the batch.

Fantastic Faculty and Where to Find them

Since we are on a temporary campus where recruitment of new faculty is constantly going on, there was no system in place for someone to know which faculty sits where. So we made a simple Excel sheet and shared it in the same place where students go to see their schedules. Honestly, if you ask me, the name itself was the motivation behind us finishing this on time.

We solved many such small problems, but while solving them, we started realizing that there were bigger problems that came once we solved them, and one of them was “How to get my peers to use these resources?”

During the course of this project, I grew as a professional, mostly in terms of my mindset, and I would like to thank Dr. Rihanna for this development.

I intend to continue this project over the course of my remaining time at this institution and my affinity towards the name “Simple Solutions” is growing more and more. Maybe one day you'll see this brand.

We all have problems around us and just being a little proactive can make a lot of difference.

This edition was mostly me documenting something that I really want to look back on maybe five or ten years from now. I promise that I will bring you interesting ideas, tools, and all sorts of stuff in my next letter.

I hope that I am able to add value to anyone who is reading this.

Namaste, and best wishes for the coming week!