17th week - Project closing

Last blogpost (From Traffic Management to Traffic Leadership)

As our semester is unfortunately over, we also have to close our work at Demola.

First of all, thanks for the opportunity I can say it was quite useful experience for all of us. Thanks for Ville’s facilitating, thanks for the support of Tero and Anni.

I think our job was quite hard, as the biggest problem was to find a good “touch” on the topic that is why it went very slowly.  We also have had missing team member due Sun’s trip. And of course we had university duty that made our schedule quite tight.

But let’s present the solution.

After the meeting with MobiSoft and Tampere Logistics, we had to realize, that the solution figured out already in the very beginning of the work could work…as there is a huge claim for it. And it could be very unique and supportive as there is no such an existing application. But what is this application? Basically nothing new…We have had travel planner applications, we have maps with real-time data…but…all the separately. Now we collect all of these, and built an application which contains all of them…in one hand. It is comfortable, isn’t it?

And what is the “added value”? In the beginning of the project, Ilkka ask his friend via facebook survey about their experiences linked to the public transport. It included all the necessary questions link to the price/travel time, comfort level, most annoying things…etc…you know…to increase the service level.

As we examined all the possibilities (even driver’s salary decreasing and working hours increasing), the technical background and information systems, it was clear, to “LEAN” it would be hard…and harmful.

But still the benefits of this application drive the companies to make their services smarter. How? Let’s see: the usage of the application will be recorded. So basically it is a survey about the passenger’s habits. Which lines are the most crowded and when, which are the less, which stop should be cancelled, or should be relocated based on the too much walking distances. It will drive the companies marginal service level increasing (due most comfortable and affordable transport). Increasing income->cost savings

What is the benefits for the “end-user”? The application (could be web and smart phone based) will be free or really cheap to download. It could be income for the developer. AAANNNDD: very comfortable for the user (everything via only one application), you can plan your trip accordingly (based on the requirements for: price, travel/walking time, walking distance, comfort level, privacy). You can bring it with you (with your smart phone) or check it before leaving (using your pc). Use the “follow me” option and check it during your journey if you are not sure about the direction.

Summarized we suppose, this solution could be very beneficial for both parties.

I attach some picture about the lay-out of this application produced by Ilkka. Sorry, we don’t have designer, so seems a little bit ugly…but it is a DEMO. J

You can find step-by-step instruction in our presentation slide.

Summarized the message of the project: we can’t give exact solution, which reduce the costs with 50%. We can give a supporting tool which will drive you more smart and effective services.

15th week - Application design meeting at TUT

During this meeting we figured out the layout and the working method of the application.
Some draft:

Eric and Ilkka found quite useful designing programs for this goal

The next blogpost will consist already details about the working application and some screenshot about the UI, plus a lot of details about the benefits (for user & for companies as well...)

14th week - Status meeting with Tero Ahtee from TUT

The goal of this meeting was to inform Eric's teacher about our progress.
The team presented the starting point, the problem need to be solved, our tasks and future plans.
We agreed that this "abstract" project cannot have only one good solution, we have to think really wide perspectives, and the presented solution could be very useful.
Tero Ahtee gave also gave us some useful advice should apply till the project closing.
Thank you for the participation!

13th week - Status meeting

Regular meeting @ TUT (3.5.2014)

During this meeting we went through all the possibilities should focus on by our application. All the public transport art were touched (bus, minibus,light tram & taxi, car-sharing), and we tried to find all the important points should implemented into the application.
The other important point of the meeting was to prepare ourselves to the status meeting with Tero Ahtee from TUT (Eric's teacher).

12th week - Team meeting, meeting with Tampere Logistics and Demola Jam#2

Team meeting @TUT (24.4.2014)
The main aim of the meeting is to prepare the materials for tomorrow’s meeting with Tampereen Logistiikka, together with Tero and Mobisoft representatives.
 Before the meeting, each of us are required to write down some points according to our agreed outline
of 4 parts, the basic introduction, the existing problems , the Mobisoft features and the benefits. This material also a good supporting document for the end-pitching.
 The basic idea we got from the draft introduction of our project is that, we would like to facilitate the
cooperation between TKL, Tampereen Logistiikka and Mobisoft. The aim of our project is to help the
municipality to cut the public transportation half.
For Tampereen Logistiikka, the cost for special transportation provided for the elderly and disables is on average higher than TKL and Mobisoft has their advanced programming skills but without fixed finance support. And via our researches from the end-uses, we find there are some possibility and benefits to integrate the 2 difference vehicles via Mobisoft’s techniques.
 And at the end , we have discussed some questions we would like to communicate with
different parties, especially with Tampereen Logistiikka.

Meeting with Tampereen Logistiikka (25.04.2014)
Supported by Tero, we had a great meeting with 'Tampereen Logistiikka' on 25.04. The representatives of Tampereen Logistiikka supplemented with Pekka Eloranta and .... from Mobisoft. Tero also supported the team in that meeting.
The most important message of the meeting was that the application we would like to develop is highly appreciated by the organisation.
During the meeting lot of existing solution were presented that we can use as "raw material". We got a lot of information about the operation of PALI small buses, the real time system used by the Finnish transport companies (even if they are still in demo version).
Our solution will support all the public buses (TKL buses), small buses (PALI) and additional to it but separated way the taxis.
We started to design the lay-out of the application which demo will be a web-based application (it is possible to use it later as a mobile application as well).
The feedback of the organization showed a high demand for this application which will increase the service level and also can reach cost reducing using this method (for example: perfect feedback for the company to schedule their routs "smarter", monitoring the public's habits, use their capacities accordingly and (re)organize their systems which results drastic cost decreasing).

Our next task it to figure out the physical lay-out of the application. Eric and Ilkka as the programmers in the team will develop the program, Sun and Gábor will support the processes.

Demola Jam#2 (26-04-2014)
The most important goal of this event was to complete the still backward tasks and to start to focus on the final pitching. During the event we had enough time to make our blog up-to-date and start to think about the content of the final pitch. For the result check our blogger site/demola project page and google drive folder. The event was well organized by Demola, excellent atmosphere and appropriate environment for effective work.

10th week: Midpitch

10th week: Midpitch

Based on the information we got from Mobisoft, we were sure that a web portal would be one of the most plausible things we could do. Ilkka had put down a some great notes regarding the event and though the preparation wasn't done until about 30 minutes before the actual event began, the pitching part went splendidly.

As far as the midpitching went, I think the biggest challenge was that all the rest of the crew were sick (Ilkka was in fever, Gábor had tonsilitis and Sun felt sick otherwise), so the pitching had to be done alone. That aside, the pitching went well and the only complaint I heard was that there wasn't much to demo, which is true.

The only thing I regret was that there wasn't anything to demo. 

Ilkka: cumulative: 40 h

Sun: cumulative: 35h

Gábor: cumulative: 40h

Eric: cumulative: 41h

11th week demola regular meeting

   At the beginning , we discussed something about the mid-pitch. Eric did a good job. and there is about one and a half month left for our project. we collected lots of information, still for the broad field, still there is a long way to go for the final demo. Ville introduced the other teams also faced the same problems and encourage us to continue to do something to put forward.

   the main part is about how to cooperate with the Tampere logistic. Tevo make it more clear to help us go further. it is showed as follows. for the missing cooperation part, we will discuss it for the next meeting with the rep. from tampere logistic, Mobisoft and so on.

  

 and in the end, we decided to have another preparation meeting before meeting with Tampere logistic. we outlined our project in 4 parts to make our own project clear: the basic introduction,, the problem, the futures and the benefits. with the separated tasks, we agreed on another meeting in TUT.

Ilkka:cumulative: 45

Sun:  cumulative: 45

Gábor: cumulative: 45

Eric:  cumulative: 45

9th week - Mobisoft meeting with Pekka Eloranta

First and foremost Thanks for the support Tero!

The meeting organised by Ilkka, as the easiest way for the communication is still to use Finnish.

Some of the company did not send and feedback for the requests, but Pekka Eloranta from Mobisoft was very helpful and we scheduled a meeting with him on 3.4.2014.

We have great discussion about the problem, Pekka give us a good brief about his opinion and the proposed solution. We suppose this meeting extremely useful and interesting as Pekka highlighted some new approach, which gave us some further idea. It was also very good to see, that our conception shows lot of parallelism with the solution proposed by Pekka.

We continue to focus on the application which will support the public transport, as we experienced, there is a huge demand for this kind of solution.

The idea is to collect the supporting processes of TKL, PALI & KELO, as these organizations working independently. Would be good to establish some kind of "supervisor" organization, that could collect all the data and make the processes "smarter" accordingly... We believe that this application could give appropriate IT background for this purpose, and additional to it the customer service level would increase a lot via this.

The Demo (layout) of this application is already taking shape in our heads, it will be able to be published really soon!

Some notice about this meeting can be found in the Google Drive Folder.

Ilkka: cumulative: 40 h

Sun: cumulative: 35h

Gábor: cumulative: 40h

Eric: cumulative: 38h

8th week - Set up meetings!

The main task of this week was to set up meetings with the responsible organizations based on Tero's advice.

As the task is easier to communicate in Finnish, Ilkka was quite active this time. Gábor supported to process with the template written in English.

Fortunately we got positive feedback and Mobisoft proposed a meeting on 3.4.2014.

We are still waiting for feedback, but at least we have already something.

Ilkka: cumulative: 38h

Sun: cumulative: 35h

Gábor: cumulative: 37h

Eric: cumulative: 35h

7th week demola regular meeting

we had this meeting aiming to communicate the progress of our project. For our part, we talked the results of the last demola jam and also gave some feedback from the survey on the consumers, for example, for the customers, they prefer to take the same bus with Children, and the elderly people or disabled people, when taking the bus together, there is no bid difference for most people. Also we survey on the speed, price and other factors ‘s comparison when choosing the public vehicles. the price, speed, walking distance , waiting time and privacy matters much. we would go further to get more information and brainstorming the solutions. and Also we confirm with the contact information and time with relative parties, Mobisoft, Tampere logistic and others.

Ilkka:  cumulative: 32

Sun:    cumulative: 30

Gábor:  cumulative: 35

Eric:   cumulative: 30

6th week - homework, blog writing, research, etc.

As we have "some" lag with the publishing of our project progress, this week we focused on the blog writing and to schedule the tasks. We decided to use the Google Blogger as our main platform for blogging. Our idea is to transfer our blog posts from Blogger to Demola's site as they are appropriate. Additional to it we have an official folder in Google Drive, all the materials are stored here. We have also a working hours register excel table, where all the meetings, homework and availability of the team members are in up-to-date form. Based on this it is easy to set up our meetings and follow up the progress, and communicate via our "official" channel, the FTM2TL group on facebook.

Ilkka: cumulative: 30h

Sun: cumulative: 28h

Gábor: cumulative: 33h

Eric: cumulative: 28h

4th week - Meeting with Anni to prepare the Jam & DemolaJam

For this week, we had 2 meetings, first, the prepare meeting with Anni finger out how we make full use of the demola jam to get some feedback from our end-customers to validate some ideas. and Secondly, the implement of the survey and the first demola program.

Firstly, in the prepare meeting, we tried to agree on what kind of ideas we would like to gather from our customers and in what kind of forms. Our aim is to help Anni to collect some data for her thesis, meanwhile to know the basic opinions from the customer, and learn how to validate our solutions as well. we came up with several questions to collect the end-users’ opinions on the public transport, for instance, the defect and also to check whether they would like the take the same bus with disabled , children and elderly people. the form, we thought, should be more interesting and involved them to join us, but it does not take a long time .

Secondly, during the section of the validation of the jam , we invited about 16 pubic transport users to contribute their idea. The questions include, describe the nightmare you went through in the public bus and if you have to choose one group people to take the bus, which do you prefer : elderly VS disabled, Elderly VS children, and Disabled VS Children. We should some funny photos of the 3 group people and also engage them to use tinfoil and markers to depict the experience .

lastly, we collected all the results, it showed several problems in the public transport we could base to find solution in our project. and we decided to make a survey to gather more people’s opinions. so later we designed a Finnish questionnaires.

Ilkka:  cumulative: 19

Sun:    cumulative: 18

Gábor:  cumulative:19

Eric:  cumulative: 17

5th week - Playbook review+No-slide pitching+Brainstorming

Long and productive week...let's see the events in order:

Playbook review (03.03.2014)
The team event facilitated by Antti, thanks for Ani and Tero for the participation.
Really-really useful meeting, very expedient method. There was still some dark point, but this
meeting helped to understand better the point. The final solution is already taking shape in our
hand, we will focusing on mobile application as improving step (which will provide real time data,
time tables, and a lot of contacted services.)

Table content after the meeting:

The most important post-it: full with useful contacts from Tero. Thanks!

After the meeting we met Mandar Gyan from Eday Solution who gave some great idea showing us the ZappScan application. We were thinking about ti implement this solution into our application. The idea: if you "ZappScan" your buscard, you can check you account if there is enough money to use your card or recharge needed. Furthermore should be useful to build an online platform where you can recharge your buscard with money using your credit card. Sounds very comfortable!

No-slide pitch (04.03.2014.)

To prepare the first pitching session, we needed some homework individually. After all we decided what to "pitch" on the event. Good basic were the materials from the value creation workshop, but of course as we had already a "vision" about the project, we presented more details.

Just easily check the video taken by Eric from our (Sun & Gábor) performance in this meeting. Ilkka supported us via online.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152251607693890

Great event, good feedbacks, what else should we wish? Lets continue!

Brainstorming @ TUT (08.03.2014)

Sun, Ilkka and Gábor went through all the possibilities. The technical side (vehicles, supporting IT, apps), social side (result of the survey published by Ilkka) and economical side were thoroughly discussed. We found that the public transport here in Finland is one of the best in Europe, and there are a lot of existing supporting applications, we have to collect them and shape a user friendly application with all the available services in one hand. Additional to it we want to get some feedback from the public audience (young, student, worker and retired) to know the weak points of the service in end-user point of view. 

Tero give us opportunity to review the cost side of this service, we will set up the meeting with

the responsible persons ASAP. Ilkka informed Ani about our progress, she gave further supporting

documents.

http://www.lut.fi/documents/27578/270423/playbook-for-strategic-foresight-and-innovation.pdf/ef1df345-eeb8-4fea-a664-3f8f0c39e35b

We do not stop working!!!

Ilkka: cumulative: 28 h

Sun: cumulative: 25 h

Gábor: cumulative: 28 h

Eric: cumulative: 25 h

3rd week - Value creation workshops+meeting with Anni

We created value. What did we do? We got familiar with the project lifecycle, NABC, pitching (we need these things a lot of time during our job). We did our first pitch in 1 minute. Really useful, because you will think about it deeper, if you have to present your tasks for unknown guys. This paper is our bible.

The team members attended on different value creating workshop due university duty. Sun & Ilkka on Tuesday, Gábor on Friday.

After the Tuesday workshop we sit down to prepare the Playbook. We had to review the template, and find the appropriate answer & use proper text. After the meeting we individually gave our answer for the questions (homework) and on the next meeting we will write the best ones.

On Friday we had a great discussion with Anni, who clarified the “dark points”, and she gave us a good “kick” to find the way. Finally we shaped our Playbook with sweaty work. This day was long, especially for Gábor, as he connected the Workshop and the Playbook finishing event. Most of the event was spent revising the Playbook and its contents while trying to find a way to figure out the direction project is going to take.

Ilkka: 8h +2h homework     cumulative: 16

Sun: 6h +2h homework      cumulative: 14

Gábor: 8h + 2h homework  cumulative: 16

Eric: 4h +2h homework      cumulative: 12

2nd week - Initial meeting 11.02.2014. and individual researching

The most important meeting. We met first with our support team, thanks Anni, Raine and Tero in
advance!

What they want with this project? It is simple and difficult in the same time. We have to develop a concept to improve municipality’s public transport and reducing the costs with -50%. Hard task, isn’t it? We clarified the rules, contact persons, and the most important ! USE THE CAMPWIRE ! It was nice to get to know the details and to meet with Anni, Tero and Raine (via skype). Decided to communicate via Facebook groups (one group for the team members only, one where Anni, Tero and Ville is participated to avoid unnecessary spamming…), and Google Drive to store and share our common documents.

Let’s speed up ourselves, first individual research in this topic.

After getting the main point of our project,everyone of us would try to find as many supporting studies as possible to support our work with some basic theoretical knowledge. We have searched the information from several parts

1) Anni provided her thesis work draft with a lot of useful information. It was essential to start working in this topic, as most of the team member not really expert in public transport.

2) For some of us,  we are not very familiar with the public transportation system here, so we searched some websites to get some basic knowledge of this field, which would be useful for our further brainstorming of our project.

3) some of the innovative public transportation solution in some other countries, such as uber.

here are some examples of the finding:

http://www.vtpi.org/tranben.pdf

http://mek.oszk.hu/10900/10971/10971.pdf

www.epito.bme.hu/uvt/hirek.../t_l_kozltarskoltsei-tanczosbokorcikk.doc

Ilkka: 4h cumulative: 6

Sun: 4h cumulative:6

Gábor: 4h cumulative:6

Eric: 2h cumulative:4

1st week - Kick-off meeting 04.02.2014. DEMOLA New Factory Building

The “really first” meeting for everybody. Great atmosphere, nice starting. During the awesome Kick-
Off event we got the essential information about Demola, about project lifecycle, and the support
provided by the guys at Demola. Our facilitator Ville will be our first and most important support
person.

The eagerly awaited time: the TM2TL team members meet with each other. Sun, Ilkka, Eric and
Gábor started to getting know each other, and the project. We have a lot of things to do (involving the responsible teachers, collecting the basic information about our project partner, and get well know our team). Four different attitude, one big and common goal, let’s start it!

Ilkka: 2h cumulative: 2
Sun: 2h cumulative:2
Gábor: 2h cumulative:2
Eric: 2h cumulative:2