Guiding peers using Mind Mapping!

Challenge:

  I being the member of Bachpan NGO  (Australian Multiple Birth Association) whose job is to help out the students pursuing the chattered accountancy  (CA) course. As the students after passing his 2nd level has to undergo an internship  under a qualified CA or under a CA firm. Generally, we found out that the students are  not happy with what their internship journey. And mostly you will receive an  unsatisfying and dull response from an intern on asking about their internship  experience.

  Hence, we at the association level identified the persisting problems face by budding  CA’s and decided to solve the problem. We quickly communicated with students from  various firms and levels and probably made use of ethnographic Interview to identify  the core problems faced by the students. This was the application of What if analysis to  find the prevailing problems.

Selection:

  On communicating with various students across the city we had a huge amount of data  which may or may not be similar, some quite elaborative, some were solo words!

  Mind mapping tool successfully helped us out of this problem giving us a clear vision  and direction to think and generate ideas to solve the underlined problem.

  Mind map is the tool that provides a bridge from “what is” to “what if”. Mind maps is the  tool that help to organise large amount of data in a systematic manner providing an  opportunity to thinkers to generate idea relevant to the problem. It sets the  organisation to a common understanding. And this was the exact reason why mind  maps were our selection.

Application:

  Due to the large amount of data gattered by volunteers and the variation in the data it  became difficult for us to identify the core problem and think for a solution. We decided  to use the mind map technique. We asked for the help of the volunteers in the mind  mapping process. We all gathered in the meeting room and divided the volunteers in  the group of three including us. We along with the volunteers were in all 5 teams with a  set of three people. Each of the team was allotted a particular amount of raw data and  each of the team was asked to segregated the problems into a group relating to a  similar theme or a problem. For example, the problem of inadequate exposure or a  problem of unwillingness to learn a particular work maybe audit, both can be grouped  into a single theme as “Problem with exposure”.

  On performing such grouping, we finally arrived at a certain number of themes listed  on the white board. Even some similar themes were to be merged to make the data  more accurate and concise. Finally, we were left with a small set of problems from the  large amount of data. We had finally identified the specific set of problems on which we  can concentrate upon to generate the idea to solve the problems.

  Finally the problems of unsatisfactory internship experience was due to students  mistake in selection of the proper field of interest, some student even though were  sound of their area of interest were not able to crack the interview of the required  firms and some students were facing issues with maintaining the right equilibrium  between their studies and work. These problems were tackled along with the support  of the qualified and experience CA by providing one on one counselling, conducting  mock interview sessions & organising events for students to solve their problems.

Insight:

  The mind mapping tool provided us an efficient tool to categorize the problems from  numerous pages to a set of fixed problems. It provided us a directional thinking and  prevent us from deviating form the core problems to solve. We could have spent days  to identify answer to each and every problem which could have led to have a pretty  huge list of problems and answers to it. Mind mapping helped to efficiently draw  conclusion and save time in problem identification.

Approach:

  Since we have discovered the real potential of mind mapping tool and its real efficiency,  we would primarily try to gather information in such a way that it would supplement in  the efficiency of the mind mappings process. Such as collecting data in standardised  format, this would help us in applying mind mapping technique at the primary data  collection level itself.

