Team 2 Week 1 Blog

Insights

  1. Trend: There’s a “trickle-up” effect- if each team underestimates its costs by a little, it means that the company’s costs are off a lot, and can eventually mean that the battalion is missing out on using millions of dollars.
  2. Trend: high rates of turnover means that any product we develop must be easy to learn and understand
  3. Hypothesis: Green Berets are constantly following a systematized, uniform, training program supported by rigid budget.
  4. Results: Commanders make individualized decisions when it comes to training for their specific teams and do not use a standardized process for creating, tracking, resourcing, and authorizing training.

Decisions

  1. MVP elements: A tool that allows users to select a category of training, then a specific subcategory, and enter the number of soldiers, and get historical data on the costs for such a training trip.
  2. We decided to focus on the military professionals that Major Schubert recommended that we talked to this week. We needed to get a good idea of the problem and what people working with that problem everyday say that they need. In following weeks, we will consult professionals in other fields that can help us as we continue to develop our product.

Beneficiary Discovery

  1. There’s a gap between what teams estimate for their mission concept (MICON) and their after action reports (AARs), and AARs are not as accurate.
  2. The AARs focus on the training and how to improve it, not the costs, because the pace of the work is incredibly fast.
  3. There is a lot of historical data and a number of training activities that are effectively cookie-cutter as far as resourcing – making them amenable to automation.
  4. Planners should be able to input all the training requirements and easily search through past training costs to easily create a budget rather than recreating the budget each time without too much hassle.