In an effort to complete a successful project for Summer Quarter Management 351, The Professionals were faced with many options. The group, comprised of Brett Bates, Mathon Culpepper, Mohammed Ali Hashim, Kiley Taylor, and Sanjay Kothari, needed to complete and implement a project within a six-week time frame. The Professionals came up with several ideas including improving inventory systems at a local store, adding business at a local food delivery restaurant, and improving the University of Georgia campus transit system. One of these options was clearly of more benefit to the entire student body, so The Professionals chose to improve campus transit.

The group began by interviewing a few people with the campus transit office. One of our group members is a bus driver for the University, so access to transit officials was relatively easy. As we began speaking with the officials, it became apparent that they had very few complaints from students about the way in which the transit system was operating. This seemed particularly unusual because each of our group members had at least one complaint concerning the campus bus system. The transit people kindly allowed us to look over their records. It was, in fact, true. There were very few complaints logged over the past school year. This left our group with a very perplexing problem. It would be very difficult for our group to solve the problems of campus transit if they did not have any.

The Professionals were certainly in a difficult situation. The group had to either find a new topic for our project, or invent some problems for campus transit. From the latter solution comes the basis for our project.

It was still quite difficult for our group to believe that there were so few complaints about the campus buses. It seemed as if at least once per week there was an article in the Red and Black about the horrors of riding the bus. The group decided that there must be a missing communication link between students and transit authorities. We believed that this missing link was the lack of an adequate feedback mechanism, and set out to prove that lack of communication was the reason for the low number of transit complaints.

The group began by distributing questionnaires about the campus transit system. The questions consisted of simple inquiries about a student's satisfaction when riding a University of Georgia bus. The group issued approximately two hundred questionnaires, the form of which was reviewed and revised by transit authorities, and received nearly one hundred responses. To our surprise, there were not nearly as many complaints as we had expected. About half of the people surveyed had little or no complaints about campus transit. Most of the people who did lodge complaints had seemingly minor ones. The basis for our project came from students' responses to a question about feedback. The question asks, "If you had a complaint, would you know how to address it?" Almost 70% of the students surveyed did not know how to complain if they wanted to do so. This was the reason that the transit officials had so few complaints, because no one knew how to complain.

The Professionals then compiled the information, and will deliver the presentation to Richard Steele, a campus transit official, per his request. Our group offered three simple solutions to help improve feedback for campus transit. The first of these was to link a way for students to communicate complaints via the Internet. The second was to post the number of the campus transit office on every bus that is traveling on campus. The final solution was to include comment cards, along with a drop box on each bus. These solutions will greatly improve feedback from students to the campus transit officials.

While at the time of the presentation, none of these suggestions will have been implemented, the mission of the project was achieved: to prove that the statistics supplied by the transit department were evidence of inadequate feedback channels. The statistics compiled from the questionnaire showed convincingly that most students lack the ability to provide feedback to the transit department, whose main interest is public service to University students. The Professionals did not have to provide suggestions to complete the mission objective, but we felt that in a project concerned with feedback, our feedback, especially as management students, would be appreciated by the authorities at the campus transit department. Although the final project took on a form that was not foreseen at its inception, it was a complete success. It will prove to be both a valuable exercise for the members of the Professionals and an important signal to the transit system that some slight improvements might make their already excellent service even better.

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