Success Story: MIAD
MIAD is more organized & connected with Zenkit’s help, easily tracking individual & group progress
The Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) is a private non-profit art and design college based in the United States of America. MIAD offers a four-year Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in five majors, including: Communication Design, Illustration, Interior Architecture and Design, Product Design and New Studio Practice: Fine Arts.
Crystal Lemmer, the instructional technologist at MIAD, started to use Zenkit with more than 30 team members 2 years ago. In this article, Crystal is going to share with us how Zenkit has helped her team collaborate more efficiently.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Around 135 faculty and 100 staff
2 years
Project management, staff onboarding, tech training knowledge base and online learning switch during the pandemic
“Zenkit ensures efficient organization of day to day processes & enabled digital transformation during the pandemic.”
Crystal and her team members carry out important IT projects at MIAD. As you can imagine, each IT project involves various important processes. Things such as staff and faculty onboarding, lease returns, tech training, and many other essential matters require effective organization & collaboration among the team. Due to Zenkit’s flexible collection structures and collaborative features, Crystal and her team are able to visualize their workflow & keep track of the progress of each project.
In addition, the Covid-19 pandemic has deeply affected people’s lives since early 2020. Many organizations and businesses around the world are aware of the importance of adapting to the new normal; yet as the saying goes, it is easier said than done. Fortunately, instead of facing the difficulties in digital transformation many colleges had, Crystal told us that due to their usage of Zenkit, MIAD was able to switch easily and swiftly to virtual work during the pandemic. As a result, Zenkit not only improved their efficiency in organizing day to day processes, but also provided the agility MIAD needed to make their usual workflows virtual in a short time frame.
As an example, Crystal told us they established a collection in Zenkit Base for organizing a variety of trainings. They created items for each training and added corresponding labels to differentiate the type of specific training. Therefore, they also prefer to use the “Kanban” view, which automatically groups items with the same label and presents a comprehensive overview of tasks.
Having an overview is great, but details are also important. Under each training item, they add additional links as information & references to bring more context to anyone who’s viewing the collection. They also created a progress label, “Done”, which can be used whenever the specific training has been completed. With this example, Crystal clearly showed us that the Zenkit collection serves as a crucial centralized place to store, organize, and share knowledge, and to track each of their unique trainings.
“Zenkit provides a centralized space to handle various training materials in a smart & organized way.”
“Zenkit allows us to track individual & group progress easily, making us more organized & connected.”
It’s no secret that great team collaboration can contribute to better team performance and project results. Among many of the elements that can influence how team members collaborate, such as delegating tasks and responsibilities effectively, prioritizing properly, managing expectations and more, many organizations report that tracking progress can sometimes be neglected or difficult to measure according to many organizations. Of course, the story is different at MIAD.
With the implementation of Zenkit, Crystal told us that they can now track their own individual progress within any project with ease, such as using a Kanban to visually showcase what tasks have been finished. This has been helpful because each team member can execute their own task lists with ease instead of being lost in all the to-dos. Additionally, they can view which tasks are assigned to each member to gain an understanding of what others are working on. This is extremely important for everyone, but especially the project manager, because it enables them to plan projects and assign tasks more efficiently.
In the end, we asked whether they had something to add to other teams who might be considering using Zenkit. Crystal told us: “Zenkit is a great investment! Not only because it has many unique features that make it a powerful project management tool, but also because it gives us the ability to customize any project and workflow as we go. Being able to create a simple to do list while also having the ability to build out a more complex project is amazing to MIAD. Besides, it’s great no matter whether users work closely together or miles apart.”
Some of their favorite features include labels, view switching, the drag and drop ability, custom fields, and the filter setting. With Zenkit’s rich features, Crystal believes every team can accomplish their goals in a timely manner.