title: ITunesCompetetorDesignProblem —
title: ITunesCompetetorDesignProblemGeneral —
ITunes® Competitor
Your company has recently formed a partnership with a Chinese company that is working on yet another IPod® killer. Samples of the hardware will be available in one month, with actual production hardware becoming available in limited supplies in 2 - 3 months.
Due to another acquisition, your company has agreements with several recording companies with permission to sell protected contented music.
Currently, your company has no presence on the web in either of these two fields. Nor is it really to have any kind of traction in either of these fields.
You have a chance to form a new startup with these two assets. To do so, you have to show some market penetration on the web and some ability to put these two assets together into a compelling product. You should consider targeting the teen audience.
title: ITunesCompetetorDesignProblemProductOwner —
ITunes® Competitor Product Owner
As a product owner, you have a little more information available to you. Here is some information you can share with your development team if they think to ask you about it:
- There are four models - all solid state:
- Very small footprint, can store approximately 4 hours of video - 4 GB of memory
- Very small footprint, can store approximately 8 hours of video - 8 GB of memory
- Medium sized, can store approximately 16 hours of video - 16 GB of memory
- Medium sized, can store approximately 32 hours of video - 32 GB of memory
- To make a profit on the hardware, the devices should sell for at least $100, $140, $235, $350
- The company wants to target youth market as a possible tie in for other future products.
- They have research which shows that this group is big on customization
- They want to be able to sell the device, games, accessories and customizations online
- Customizations include custom colorization, engraving, engraved uploaded pictures and stickers
- With the popularity of social-networking sites, they want to offer a compelling reason to keep people on the site
- Instant messaging
- Groups and Friends
- Share photos
- Video
- Blogging
- Second-life integration
- Etc., the usual social networking stuff, targeted towards teens
- They are concerned about predators, so they want different offerings to protect different age groups
- Title and track information is available via a 3rd party agreement with CDDB
- Of course, the client should be able to rip their own music.
- They want a solution that will work on PC’s, Mac’s and Unix.
title: GmOnStarCompetetorDesignProblem —
title: GmOnStartCompetetorDesignProblemGeneral —
GM OnStart® Competitor
GM offers a product called OnStart®, which provides several in-car features. Ford, with sagging sales, recently said they are going to have an on-board computer built into several models of cars for similar functionality. Other manufacturers are considering similar systems but this is outside of their core competence.
We have a little funding, enough for around 6. We’d like to offer a manufacturer=independent solution we can license to Ford and other manufacturers. We want to offer a complete service with some kind of revenue sharing agreement with Ford and other companies to give them a compelling reason to use us instead of building a proprietary, in-house solution.
We believe the only way we have a chance is to get something in front a manufacturer with a working system.
title: GmOnStartCompetetorDesignProblemProductOwner — ==GM OnStart® Competitor Product Owner As the product owner, you have a little more insight into the system. As your team asks you questions, feel free to share any of this information with them. Make them work a little bit.
- They real way to make money is to have some kind of a per-transaction revenue stream. For example,
- 411 service, with GPS-based location recommendations
- Hard to get restaurant reservations
- Concert & Movie tickets
- Finding stores with particular items in stock (e.g. a Wii)
- Etc.
- Of course, there should be some integration available with a drivers mobile phone
- There should be several categories of service:
- Wired: Diagnose vehicle problems, Remote entry, Locate vehicle, Roadside assistance, Virtual Advisor (google maps integration - some per-transaction fee basis)
- Traveler: Basic Service + trip planning (pre-paid, as opposed to per-transaction the basic service plan), Find a ride home with Ride Assist
- Corporate: for rental agencies with equipped services - e.g. Hertz, a plan that offers a per-use fee plan. The driver can enable or disable it after renting a car.
title: TimeTrackingForConsultingCompanyDesignProblem —
title: TimeTrackingForAConsultingCompanyGeneral —
Time Tracking for a Consulting Company
A consulting company has a large percentage of traveling consultants. Currently, time and expenses are tracked by sending an email with an excel spreadsheet. This does not scale well and the company is experiencing heavy growth.
The fiscal year ends in 4 months and billing cycles are twice a month. A minimal time tracking system needs to be in place before then to allow consultants to start using the new system. Given the existing excel spreadsheets, we’d like to be able to continue using them though some kind of import functionality.
If we can get a web-based interface in place as well, all the better. However, we’d like to keep the spreadsheets as an option simply because it allows off-line time and expense tracking.
title: TimeTrackingForAConsultingCompanyProductOwner —
Time Tracking Product Owner
As the product owner, you are privy to more information. Feel free to revel this information as you are questioned.
- Consultants typically work on a single project. However, they can work on up to 4 projects. This is handled by different pages in the existing spreadsheet. In the future, we’d like to allow for more than 4 projects.
- Consultants only record actual billing time. We’d like to allow for more fidelity, e.g. travel, corporate contributions:
- Corporate Contributions: Presenting at Conferences & User Groups, Publishing in magazines and books, Internal development such as course development, Certification
- Travel Time: Billable & Non billable
- Under Client time: Development, Mentoring, Infrastructure
- Configurable email reminders would be handy
- A formatted email, which could be replied to, to allow time tracking would be nice
- All projects have a single engagement manger. The same engagement manager can manage multiple projects. Time sheets, once turned in, are reviewed by the engagement manager. Engagement managers need to be informed when the y have time sheets to improve. When all parts of a time sheet are approved (e.g. working on multiple projects), the time sheet is successfully completed.
- All of this is true for expense reports.
- Generating summary reports of hours worked on a project, billing clients, expense reports, etc. are were the real time-savings could happen. This is very important as we’re running out of capacity to keep up on a monthly basis.
title: ClinicalTrialsTrackingDesignProblem —
title: ClinicalTrialsTrackingDesignProblemGeneral —
Clinical Trials Tracking
Small clinics are popping up all over performing specialized clinical trials and observations. One common example is labs specializing in sleep studies and sleep disorders.
We want to build a turnkey system to sell to these smaller labs. At the very least, it should track patient information, room information and schedules. Tracking anybody who works on a patient is also important and it needs to be very simple.
Given recent changes in federal laws, there’s a window of opportunity in the next year to develop a system we could sell to several clinics. However, before that we have an upcoming trade show where we want to begin to demonstrate functionality. We need something we can demonstrate in 4 months, but we probably need something sooner so we can train staff attending the trade show.
title: ClinicalTrialsTrackingDesignProblemProductOwner —
Clinical Trials Tracking Product Owner
As the product owner, you have a little more information. Feel free to share this if you are asked about it:
- We need a solution that we can host as well as one that can be hosted locally.
- HIPPA requirements are going to be an issue, especially if we host the solution.
- Here’s a typical process:
- Patient schedules appointment
- Patient arrives and fills out forms (or fills them out online before arriving)
- Patient is prepared by clinical technician
- Clinical technician applies tests and records results
- Patient finishes up and checks out
- Data and notes are recorded
- The information is made available to the doctor requesting the tests
- The on-side doctor can annotate with additional notes
- We’re concerned about ease of use by different groups of people whose computer skills will tend to vary quite a bit.
title: DvrDesignProblem —
Dvr Design Problem
<hr />
<p>title: DvrDesignProblemGeneral —</p>
<h3 id="digital-video-recorder">Digital Video Recorder</h3>
<p>Trying to beat the competition to develop a better set-top box, the company you work for has designed a new DVR with built-in MPEG-4 encoding, hardware based high-definition HD up and down sampling (it can handle 720 I and P and 1080 I and P), all with a terabyte of storage and 2GB of memory. It also includes two HDMI ports, Ethernet connectivity, optical outputs, etc.</p>
<p>We need to create an amazing user experience that includes watching live TV; recording up to 4 additional channels while watching a 5th already-recorded video and creating something similar to a season pass that will record all occurrences of a given show on a given channel.</p>
<p>There is an upcoming trade show in 19 weeks and we need something to demonstrate if we want to have a chance at making any kind of impact in the next year. Since we generally spend most of our marking dollars at this trade show, the deadline is important.</p>
<hr />
<p>title: DvrDesignProblemProductOwner —</p>
<h3 id="product-owner">Product Owner</h3>
<p>During initial discussions with the product owner, a few things might become clear (if asked):</p>
<ul>
The system downloads program information over Ethernet. It offers a dial-up service for a small monthly fee, but the Ethernet service is free.</li>
A season pass needs to allow some amount of configuration: <ul> <li>number of episodes to record</li> <li>the same show on other channels</li> <li>to keep the episodes before automatically deleting them</li> <li>only new or new and repeat episodes</li> <li>watches this show – so if two or more people in a household watch a show but don’t watch it at the same time, the show won’t be deleted until everybody has watched it.</li> </ul>
Shows can be rated when watched. This information is anonymously fed to an online service that tracks ratings.</li>
The system can make recommendations based on what you like compared to what other people like (all anonymously).</li>
The system should integrate well with FaceBook, YouTube and SecondLife (or other popular social networking/web 2.0 sites)</li>
The system can both be connected to a TV and a monitor, with PiP support on the TV and the monitor can either show a second show or show a browser and general access to the system.</li>
The system should use open source where possible and the solution should be open sourced itself</li>
The system supports both playing music fed over the network connection as well as by the service provider. It can also access your ITunes music and other music on your network, if available.</li> </ul> </div>
</section> </div>
title: HeavyEquipmentRental —
Heavy Equipment Rental Repair Shop
The Problem
Currently we rent several kinds of heavy equipment such as tractors, forklifts, cement mixers, etc. All of this equipment has a maintenance schedule that is poorly followed, at best. In practice, much of the equipment misses its scheduled maintenance, which leads to more breaks in the field. We believe that preventative maintenance costs less money and requires less time than repairs caused by a lack of maintenance and we want to better manage our resources by:
- Knowing the maintenance schedule for each kind of equipment
- Knowing the usage history of each piece of equipment
- Knowing what scheduled and preventative maintenance needs to be done on a piece of equipment immediately upon its return
- Knowing what scheduled and preventative maintenance is in the near future when a piece of equipment is scheduled for a rental and when it is actually rented
- Based on rental history (average rental times for each kind of equipment along with margins based on rental rates), knowing which scheduled maintenance, preventative maintenance and repairs are of the highest priority
- Track the work of a piece of equipment from cradle to grave
- Maintain the history of all work done on a piece of equipment during our ownership of that equipment
- Know the inventory of parts and materials used for all of the equipment in our shop
- Automatically order parts and materials based on current schedules and inventory levels
Notes
Interview with Joe—Repair Shop Manager
The way things work around here is this: We have a bunch of broken things come in. We fix them and ship them back out. I don’t have much time to go into more detail, but I’ll give you what I have. The rental stores are always bugging us to get equipment back to them—each piece is always the most important so I’ll be really interested to see how this “demand driven” mojo you guys are making is going to work.
So what happens is: when a piece of equipment comes in, we run a diagnostic to find out why it’s broke. We also take a look at the maintenance log (if we can find it) to see when the last scheduled maintenance was so we can figure out all the jobs we have to do on it while we have it. Usually we do all the missed jobs on the maintenance schedule and anything coming up soon because we never know if we’ll get it back before the scheduled time. It’d be good for the new system to keep track of those for us automatically since we sometimes miss one or two jobs.
Each job requires certain parts, tools, and skills. If we don’t have the parts, we order them and have the technician work on something else—there’s always work to do. I don’t worry about the tools: the techs own their own tools and they’re not my problem. Not all techs are certified to do each job, so we look at that too.
We get the job description from the Mitchell Labor Estimate Guide, and it tells us the standard time to do the job, the skill codes for the job, and the part #s & quantity we’ll need. It also mentions tools that were used to come up with the standard time.
I don’t assign work to people. The techs are paid a rate based on the standard time for the job. That means they’re always trying to grab the work that takes 5 minutes with the right tool when the standard time for it’s 60 because those times were set by people without the right tools—they can bill 15-20 hours on a good 8 hour day. They check off the work in the maintenance log when they’re done and put down anything they think the next tech needs to know about.
After the OSHA audit a few years ago, I have to worry about making sure that a tech doesn’t take on a job he’s not certified for, so I make sure that every tech is certified to do every job, every time.
I don’t really know what William has in mind for the system other than he seems really interested in prioritizing the work based on rental store demand. I’d like to see the stores send in the equipment for its scheduled maintenance on time—but you’ll never find a store owner that will give up a rental until the thing’s broke. I’d also like to see purchasing do their job, but it’s like pulling teeth sometimes to get the parts we need.
Interview with Pete—Repair Technician
Joe takes a walk after lunch every day and stares hard at us if he thinks we shouldn’t be doing some work. ‘Course, he fired someone last summer for doing stuff he shouldn’t, so we’re pretty good about it.
I built my own computer from parts at Fry’s last summer, and I spend a lot of time playing Half-Life 2. I can’t get into World of Warcraft and all those fairies and elves games—but I really like the shooters.
The scheduled maintenance is pretty easy. Each type of equipment has its own schedule, and we do jobs based on what the schedule tells us. Some schedules are based on mileage, some on time, and some simply on use (like we clean the margarita machines out every 2nd use and recharge the porta-potty every time). We’ve gotten away from the mileage-based schedules and just assume the things that move will get rode hard all the time they’re away, so we mostly use time-based for them (like changing the oil in the backhoes every 2 months).
Notes from William Parcell—Head of IT
Currently some equipment is coming into the shop long after its scheduled maintenance due date because it’s broken down in the field. While this isn’t such a big deal for lawn aerators, it’s expensive for the larger equipment (like the forklifts). The primary goal of this new system is to pull equipment in for scheduled maintenance when it’s due.
The current repair Shop is running at breakneck speed and not really keeping up with the needs. We believe it’s mostly because repairs are so much more difficult than maintenance. Until we get things in hand, though, we need to help make the Shop operate more effectively and we’ve noticed that one of the big time sinks is the wait for parts—so we’d like to quickly put together a simple inventory control system that re-orders parts when they get below a certain threshold.
We looked at buying this stuff—but we didn’t like what we saw out there. Most of it was fine for garages, but it won’t work for us. What we really need is to prioritize our work based on the demand for the equipment in the stores. The existing rental system can tell us for each store and each type of equipment how many times it was rented in the last month. I really think that will increase our rentals by thousands of dollars for each store—and so do the store managers.
I have to run. If you have any other questions, talk to Dave.
Notes from Dave
Yeah, it’s kinda crazy. But, we already have an electronic version of Mitchell’s, so we don’t have to do any of the data entry for all those job descriptions.
Plus, I’ve been playing Halo 3 with Pete, and he says we probably don’t need to do that scheduling system right off the bat since they already know what’s hot and what’s not. We still gotta convince William though—and the stores. I think they bought into this whole idea because of that.
Hints
- External systems will be actors
- Not all the actors are explicitly mentioned (the roles that business people usually forget are forgotten here too)
- The SMEs tell us different things are important
- The central concept to understand how to manage the repair Shop is talked about, but not in 24 point font
- It’s not already broken down into iterations for you
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