The Activity Recommendation App supports employees in individual and collaborative reflection by capturing discussions and solutions for problems that need to be solved. The app enables employees to record personal experiences with the solutions. Based on these experiences the usefulness of a recommendation can be re-evaluated in order to approve, update, or discard the recommendation. The application was successfully evaluated in coaching employees in learning time management techniques.
Reflection on work experiences can lead to new insights and ideas how to handle
work situations better in the future. But the capturing of experiences during work and
the reflection on this data is only half the way for a successful improvement. The
other half is the creation of a viable reflection outcome and the validation of this
outcome when it is applied in practice (see [
Whilst a lot of applications support users to capture data during work in order to
provide it in a subsequent reflection session, the second half of the reflection cycle is
often left unsupported. To also cover this part, the Activity Recommendation App
(ARA) was created in the MIRROR project [
The recommendation is created in an individual or a collaborative reflection session. Major elements of this session are the identification of the concrete issue and a viable solution for this issue. Texts, files, or data from other MIRROR applications can be attached to be used as evidence to back the comprehensibility of a recommendation. The events during the discussion are listed as a kind of minutes. Measurement criteria can be selected to evaluate the usefulness of the recommendation. Before publishing the recommendation, a target person/group is selected and invited to try the new solution.
A concrete scenario could look like this (cf. [
To evaluate a recommendation, the app allows users to view all experiences with an aggregation of the ratings, efforts and benefits captured. All this can then be used to get an overview how well the solution works in practice to be taken as a basis for the decision if the solution should be kept, updated or discarded. 78 In the continuation of the exemplary scenario, the team discusses the recommendation’s weak points (due to the captured experiences) during the regular team meeting and agrees on adapting it in respect to the selected period in time. It is then reevaluated, re-discussed, and finally marked as solved when team agrees about a wellfunctioning final solution. 3
A summative evaluation of the ARA took place at our company IMC over a period of six weeks. Ten staff members took part in a time management coaching. The approach combined the usage of a computer activity tracking tool and the ARA with a weekly coaching session. In the weekly coaching sessions the coach and the coachee reviewed the individual progress, adjusted the time management rules if not appropriate anymore, or, when the particular goal has been achieved and the new behaviour has been adopted, decided that no further practice regarding that goal is needed. The Activity Recommendation App served well as a support for learning time management by providing a data basis for the coaching sessions. It was used by coach and coachee to set time management goals and to document and monitor the progress in learning new time management techniques. Both benefited from the better preparation for the coaching sessions available with the notes in ARA. Furthermore, the app helped the coachees to focus their goals. Two things were missed concerning ARA: It lacks an interface optimized for smartphones and currently no reminder function is available which motivates the user to capture experiences. These shortcomings can be addressed in future development.
The coach and several coachees also suggested forming peer groups to train time
management techniques. They could then benefit from sharing experience data to
compare own progress with that of others and learn from each other’s experiences.
IMC has started a free online course for time management that includes usage of the
ARA [