Animal Restriction Database
Project Overview
A research Vivarium, currently managing all animal restrictions on paper and email, requested a database for managing animals' restrictions. A restriction can include water, fat, or caloric intake.
Business Value
The Animal Restriction Database provides institutional value by directly supporting scientific efforts at Janelia. It streamlines the restriction request process for both scientists (so that they can focus on research goals) and Vivarium staff (so that they can focus efforts on animal care). This reduces the risk of animals getting missed through the paper process.
My Role
Research: This project was the first of many for our vivarium team. It was worth putting extra time and resources into my researcher since the information gathered could carry over to other projects in the future. I had never visited the vivarium before, so I knew that I wanted to have many of our initial meetings in their everyday work environment. I began from the ground up, collecting data on that team's organization and walking through the vivarium with various veterinarians and their staff to learn about what each person does. Currently, this team does everything on paper, and since we are dealing with live animals, the risks are high. By speaking with the vivarium and collecting copies of their various forms, I began to understand their process and present the vivarium team to understand their current process during a whiteboard session and work collaboratively with them to fill in the gaps. This was one of my favorite whiteboard sessions that I have led because each person had a marker in their hand at some point. It was fun to see how each person touches the process differently as they add some details into my high-level understanding. I led several brainstorming sessions with our developers, and once we had a system plan, I moved on to the design stage.
Design: Based on my research and conversations with developers, I created various process flow charts, notification configuration charts, and mock-ups for this system. I was excited when the Director of Animal Services printed a large poster out of my mock-ups to present at an event for researchers.
Documentation
