Day 1
Goals and questions
While working at Boeing I had the opportunity to work on various projects involving Design Ops, consulting, mentoring and product design. The Digital Transformation Environment (DTE) was created to change the way Boeing delivered software, with the main goal being to help teams sharpen and accelerate their software delivery practices to meet enterprise-wide goals.
Focusing on Lean UX principles while working in balanced teams ensured multiple perspectives were accounted for and that the right questions were being asked. The balanced teams created the trifecta of successfull product deployment combining desirability (UCD), feasibility (Agile/XP) and viability (Lean PM).
Onward!The following project was an opportunity to bring many teams togther and break down ancient silos. The sprint was to be run on site at the Boeing composite wing factory in Everett. Working with a few key stakeholders, the scale/scope of the project was established and I was able to determined that it would be a good candidate for running a quick design sprint to align teams, design a solution, and test it, all within a week. Although we roughly followed the Google sprint format, I adjusted a few things on the fly and beforehand to adapt to our needs.
By making sure we'd have some time for a site walkthrough and a few contextual interviews during the first day of the sprint, I was confident we could achieve alignment on the users painpoints and stakeholders would be able to refine their intial scope requirements and priorities if need be.
Crane operators in the factory had many parts moves to make during their shift but were often blocked by AGV operators and other factory traffic below. The communication system and scheduled moves were only available in one location in the giant factory, far from where the work was actually being done.
There was a clear need for an in-hand traffic coordinating application where lead operators could live update move statuses, blockers and view their next moves, in order to improve communication on their team, with others and increase efficiency.
By reducing the amount of individuals involved in managing the crane and AVG traffic, the factory floor had less people walking around and less equipment blockages creating problems for others.
The traffic management system already existed, however it was far removed from those who needed it most. The mobile app condensed the needed info and got into the hands of operators on the floor.
The results of the sprint brought together many teams who'd never experienced design thinking before. Moving forward the DTE was recognized as successfull and methodolgie adopted by those teams.