OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Identify an organization and situation you want to study over the remainder of the course.
2. Describe the organization and situation.

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Describe your organization.

The organization I will be using to study over the remainder of this course is a
company I currently work for, called DevStride. DevStride is a project management
software company that supports teams of all sizes using the Agile framework to manage
and track projects. For context, Agile is a project management methodology that uses
short iterations throughout the life cycle of a project, making it a very adaptable approach
when managing your project. The software contains elements that allows you to plan and
track your workflow with meaningful features such as Workstreams, Kanban Boards and
Analytical Reports. Even though DevStride is quite established, we are contantly adding
to the software to enhance the features as well as increase the effectiveness of the
platform. Our goal as a company is to allow users to enhance their project management
processes through the use of the Agile Framework. Since DevStride is a startup company,
the team size is fairly small compared to other big corportations. However, our smaller
team size enhances our productivity and effectiveness through optimal communication.
One benefit to our small team size is shorter daily meetings, which allows us to direct our
focus on tasks within our current cycle. Each team member part of this organization is
fully committed to creating a platform that motivates teams and organizations to manage
their projects more efficiently.

Describe how Describe your role in the organization (it can be internal or external).

Within this organization, I play a role as a part-time, documentation contractor

focused on helping the documentation team. The documentation team is comprised of
two people, me and my fellow coworker. Even though we are a very small team who
works on the documentation needed for the website, we do get help from the engineering
team when needed. For context, my coworker and I write articles for the user guide that is
uploaded to our platform. This user guide acts as a “guide” that helps users navigate the

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 software by unpacking the purposes of different features as well as how to use them
effectively. This user guide is accessible for all users, at all times which is extremely
helpful for when there is confusion about the usability of a certain function. Every feature
and function on the platform must be documented in order to complete the user guide so
it is our job to draft articles in a manner that is easily understood by the user while
explaining the technicality of each feature in relation to Agile project management.

2) Describe the situation. (see the Canvas instructions for details, especially about how
your situation will be analyzed from five different perspectives over the next five
modules)

As I have already mentioned, my main role within the company is contributing to

the final user guide that will be available on the DevStride platform. This project has
continued for several months and is finally nearing its completion. However, during the
process of generating the user guide, a major delay arose while migrating our
documentation. A few months into the project, we decided that we would migrate our
documentation knowledge base to another platform. My role in this situation was to
attend a demo for a documentation platform we had collectively decided on, which I will
not name for confidentiality reasons. With that being said, the demo that I attended went
very poorly as their sales representative’s behavior made us question whether the
platform was the right fit for our organizational values. Due to this situation we were
faced with a dilemma; whether to stay with the current platform, select the platform we
had collectively chosen together or research other adequate softwares.
If we had stayed with the docuementation platform we were currently using, there
would have been no delays in the project, but our platform would not have been elevated
in the way we desired. If we decided to select the software with the poor demo, we would
have saved time and elevated our user guide but with major timeline delays. If we
decided to research other options, our timeline would inevitably pushed back, but we
would be able to explore new avenues for making our documentation site more appealing
to users. In the end, we chose option C which was to explore new options
which…backfired. After spending several hours conducting various research, we found
that the platform with the misbehaved sales representive was the best site on the market.
Even though we could have selected this platform right off the bat, I am glad we explored
other options to ensure we had selected the best one for our user guide.
For the next few assignments I will be analyzing how this situation was affected
by structural issues such as the organizational structure and team size. I will also mention
how HR issues, especially the group proccesses, were highly prevalent in this situation.
Also, I will reflect on the different political issues within this situation which will include
a deeper dive into the dilemma mentioned above. Lastly, I will look at the symbolic and
ethical issues, specifically the culture of the organization I work for as well as the one’s
we encountered within this dilemma.