Week 5: The Playbook Meeting

This week we had the Playbook Meeting with our project partner Vincit in Demola. We discussed about the issues in the Playbook including the values, challenges and goals. It was very beneficial to us to get valuable feedback from project partner and from facilitator about the things that we had thought with the team. We also got some new information about the project's future. 

Next week we are going to visit the Vincity in Hervanta - looking forward to that!

Week 4: ...Continues with the Traffic Wardens Interviews

We were interviewing the traffic wardens of the city of Tampere. It was so great to hear that they and also other cities are really enthusiastic to this project. They are willing to co-operate with us as much as we need to, and they are really waiting for this project to go further. The new system is now needed to replace the old-fashioned system, and our project with the brand new technology is considered very exciting.

 

 

Traffic wardens working in the Tampere area

We got also very important information about the typical working day of traffic wardens. With that we can understand and develop the process - and continue working with the project.

 

This car is using Easypark

 

With this handheld "computer" the parking fee tickets are written now manually.

Thanks for the interviews! Co-operation continues...

Week 4: Time = Money

In the fourth week of our project we were waiting for algorithm and the Google Glasses to arrive. Meantime we were considering the values and needs of our product. For that we needed valuable experience and knowledge from the traffic wardens. We had many thoughts and questions in our minds, and we decided to arrange a interview with traffic wardens to get some answers and feedback about our design this far. Based on those interviews we could design our product further. 

One of the most important things was to to find out the process of their normal working day duties. How long it does take to check a) one car's b) for example 100 cars' parking tickets manually? Our expectation is that with Google Glass the process is much simplier, and takes much less time. And in this work especially - time is money.

Of course the time and the money aren't the only values we are delivering to the customer. A hands-free system is not only effective but also ergonomic and reduce the workload and unnecessary work tasks. And this could maybe give a focus on something new - like taking photos of graffitis etc. and reporting of those - and so on. By that the city and its citizens benefit too. Being also the first one to use this technology makes traffic wardens the pioners in their area of expertice.

In Demola's No-Slide Pitching event we were supposed to bring all that value together and present them only in a one minute - without any slides, videos or similar. We got feedback about defining the target group, and after some changes to the pitch - it sounded pretty good! Thanks to Philipp presenting our ideas in front of audience!

Week 3: Creating Value & Jamming at Demola

Value Creation Workshop 

This week the whole group participated in the value creation workshop. The first part of the workshop gave use a theoretical overview about value propositions and how those should be communicated to different stakeholders. The second part required us to create a one minute pitch to communicate our values. This workshop helped us a lot. It was not only the fact that we learned about the basics of pitching and the NABC model. It was also useful to understand everybody's individual ideas and to combine all of them into one project vision.

Demola JAM 

Last Saturday we went to the Demola JAM. In this whole day workshop we managed to get some interesting insides about our project. We thought we would only have one group of users which we would bring value for. Everything seemed to be so easy but in fact it is not! The workshops made us think more about our stakeholders (primary and secondary) and about their wishes and needs. We developed a very simple prototype of Google Glasses and tried out different user interface designs for our application. All in all it was a great experience. Not only because we where able to get further with our project idea. It was also a great team building experience.

Other activities 

During the week we finalised our playbook and started to think about our development process and tools. We had a look on the Android development environment and created repositories for the Google Glass application and licence plate integration.

We are ready and eager to start our first Demola innovation cycle next week!

Week 2: The Initial Meeting with Vincit

First Team Meeting

This Thursday we had the first team meeting. We mainly talked about our individual project visions, deadlines and what we have to do first to get the project started. We talked about our meeting on Friday and came up with 7 points which needed to be clarified.

1. What is Vincits vision of the project?
2. Has Vincit been working on this project before?
3. What resources will Vincit provide? (contact persons, libraries, licenses, hardware etc.)
4. To what extend we could share details of the project with our own contacts? (how confidential the project is)
5. How much will Vincit actively participate?
6. Is the license plate library compatible with Google Glass? Or is it just used through an android app? 
7. (What are the success criterias?)

Meeting with Vincit

On Friday we had our first meeting with Vincit and it was an eye-opener for us. We got the impression that our customer is really interested in the project, which was very motivating for the whole team. We decided on the playbook deadline and the playbook review meeting. Also, we discussed about our main need: "Google Glasses".

All in all, the meeting gave us a great idea about Vincit's goals and success criterias. The first contact was very promising and we are looking forward to get started with the requirements gathering process and the playbook.