Name

Needs Analysis/Action Plan

Outcome

Each student will be expected to participate in the development of a needs analysis/action plan for a school site or other entity.

Description
   

Needs Analysis

Everyone has needs. Individual people have needs, pets have needs, and organizations have needs. How do we know what we need, compared to what we want, or what we think we need? In most day to day decisions, we can just take a guess. But, when larger numbers of people are affected by our decisions, or when we're trying to help another group of people, we need to come up with a strategy for answering these questions. One way to try and answer these question is through a needs analysis. Needs analyses gather information in order to determine the needs of a particular situation or to answer a question. Sample needs analyses might include:

-What kinds of computers are needed for a classroom? A School?

-What does a club need to do to get more members?

-What does Indiana need to do to attract more people to its football games?

Often times, people will conduct a needs analysis, and start to find that they were asking the wrong question! For example, a classroom might find that it doesn't need computers after all. This is important. A central goal of needs analysis is to determine the actual problem.

In this project, you'll be doing a needs analysis for a particular school, department, classroom, or other entity in order to ascertain what their particular technology needs are. You can use a variety of methods to perform your analysis, such as interviewing teachers, interviewing students, researching other successful programs, or researching other unsuccessful programs. The result of your analysis will be a list of needs and evidence for justifying the stated needs. Your examination should be clear enough that the reader really gets a sense of why you're making your suggestions.

    Issues:

1. Who are the stake holders?
2.     What technology/software do they have access to?
3.     What are they currently doing with this technology/software?
4.     What would they like to do with technology/software?  Where?

An action plan is basically a description of a problem, a plan for solving the problem, and then detailing how you'll know if the problem is adequately resolved. A typical action plan might have a problem statement, goals, a list of action items, or a timetable of actions to be taken, and a means of evaluating the success of the program. At first glance, this might seem pretty simple -- but a good action plan actually embodies a lot more than simple a strategy for dealing with a problem. For example, it uses methodologies to arrive at its conclusions, such as interviewing or analysis techniques. It also embodies an effort to involve all stakeholders in the process. So, a good action plan will reflect the a broad set of concerns, and also be the first step in getting people to buy into your plan. After all, the ultimate test of how well an action plan works isn't how good it looks on paper; it's how well it enables people to accomplish real world tasks.