When I first arrived in Ghana, we had developed new metrics for evaluating potential clients, new surveys for villagers, and a whole host of new procedures. As Cole, Karin, and I set out to begin spreading the word of our program and knocking on gates to deliver surveys, we ended up with a lot of data and long list of people wanting to sign up for loans.
So, as those survey clients began to come to our office and asked about joining our microfinance program, we weren’t sure who to accept and how to group everyone. How did we make sure everyone completed our education classes? How did we build in enough checks and balances that we could remain objective and protect ourselves? Our “do-it-first-codify-it-later” approach worked for our first class of 30 clients. But by the second class, we had well over 300 people showing up and enough teachers to run a class of at least 80. This required a much more sophisticated design for managing the information in an efficient way and getting people through the application process as easily as possible. So, I leaned on my Information Systems 460 class from the UW Foster Business School and created a process flow diagram.
The first thing I mapped was a basic outline of the process a client went through from the time they met with us to the time they completed a loan cycle. I then identified the places that could make a person ineligible for our program (the circles) so we could create ways of helping them fix what they needed to and get back in. I also needed to pinpoint all the decisions (diamonds) along that our Ghanaian Field Officers might encounter so we could provide adequate employee training.
I broke it out into 3 phases, one for the application process, one for the education process, and one for the loan cycle process. This provided a clear idea of how our clients “flowed” through our program, the strengths and weaknesses along the way, and became the foundation for points on our self-designed credit rating system.
So, as those survey clients began to come to our office and asked about joining our microfinance program, we weren’t sure who to accept and how to group everyone. How did we make sure everyone completed our education classes? How did we build in enough checks and balances that we could remain objective and protect ourselves? Our “do-it-first-codify-it-later” approach worked for our first class of 30 clients. But by the second class, we had well over 300 people showing up and enough teachers to run a class of at least 80. This required a much more sophisticated design for managing the information in an efficient way and getting people through the application process as easily as possible. So, I leaned on my Information Systems 460 class from the UW Foster Business School and created a process flow diagram.
The first thing I mapped was a basic outline of the process a client went through from the time they met with us to the time they completed a loan cycle. I then identified the places that could make a person ineligible for our program (the circles) so we could create ways of helping them fix what they needed to and get back in. I also needed to pinpoint all the decisions (diamonds) along that our Ghanaian Field Officers might encounter so we could provide adequate employee training.
I broke it out into 3 phases, one for the application process, one for the education process, and one for the loan cycle process. This provided a clear idea of how our clients “flowed” through our program, the strengths and weaknesses along the way, and became the foundation for points on our self-designed credit rating system.
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