Welcome to Belay On! My team, QUESTionable Decisions, and I were asked to help improve the belay certification process at the University of Maryland RecWell Adventure Program Climbing Wall. Over the past couple weeks, we worked alongside Ms. Meghan Loughry, our project champion to make getting belayed certified safer, quicker, and easier!

Based on the information we gathered from Meghan, our team saw opportunities to better the certification process right away, however, it wasn't guaranteed that these initial problems were the root causes of the issues that currently laid within the process. Therefore, we decided to conduct some research.

Our approach started with conducting interviews with belayers and supervisors about their experiences with getting belay certitified, the pros/cons of the process, and what they think could be improved. We discovered confusion between the staff members when it came to testing those who wish to be certified, along with the overwhelming weight of responsibility on supervisors, and the lack of advertisement/description of how to get belay certified. We were able to identify these root causes through a series of design thinking tools such as a fishbone diagram, a process flow diagram, a swimlane diagram, spaghetti analysis, and force field analysis. We were then able to measure out the advantages and disadvantages of each recommendation to see which ones were more effective and easily implemented.

The recommendations we proposed to our client were to combine all the google forms and sheets into one that would auto-generate a google sheet (connected to a google form), to input a query cell for easier access to visitor information and certification status, and to install a bulletin board holding information on the whole process itself to teach those interested in getting certified.

We are confident that our recommendations will hold great impact, and will guarantee a safer, easier, and time efficient process.