Journal 4: Organizational Analysis

I will be selecting the structural framework about Bolman and Deal’s Four Frame Approach. The reason why I have selected a structural framework is because It emphasizes organizational goals, role, technology, coordination, and control. What it does is it concentrates on strategy. By strategy I mean setting measurable long-term goals, clarifying any tasks, and agreeing on the deadlines. This framework focuses on creating systems and procedures to achieve a certain goal.It emphasizes the need of clearly identifying individual roles that contribute significantly to the accomplishment of predetermined goals while utilizing cutting-edge technology to increase efficiency by automating repetitive tasks. This type of framework maintains the integrity of the entire system by ensuring checks and balances, preventing deviations from planned paths and ultimately leading to the effective execution of plans laid out in the earlier phase.

I’m volunteering with Zooniverse, which is a nonprofit online organization. Zooniverse is full of different projects of different topics for students, scientists, and anyone who is interested in participating. These projects vary from animals, to astronomical studies, to history, and more. When you click on a project, Zooniverse gives you a summary of what the goal of the project is. It is a predetermined goal which fits into the structural framework category. For example, one of the predetermined goals of a project I am working on is identifying and counting killer whales to determine if their predation is causing steller sea lion declines. The technology on Zooniverse is amazing, I have to look at pictures and search for killer whales, as well as count and identify how many and what kind of sea lions there are.The way they have you classify each of the sea lions and/or killer whales is very easy and efficient which also makes it part of the structural framework. The coordination on Zooniverse includes volunteers from all over the world. On the bottom of the project you will see how many classifications there are and how many they need and what is the progress of that project. Currently there are 16,451 volunteers participating in this project! As of right now this project has 532,457 classification and we are 70% done. It is motivating watching that number go up when I classify the animals. The researchers role in this project was to create the project, the deadline, and give information on what this project is about. Our job as volunteers is to dedicate our time and effort into identifying the killer whales and steller sea lions, and starting discussions with other volunteers about the topic for further research. Structural framework is like a tightly run ship, that sails smoothly even in the heaviest, nastiest storm. Zooniverse is exactly like that. It has a goal, it has the roles, it has the technology, it has the coordination, and it has a strategy.