Team E. Alderson

Sprint 7 took was divided up into 2 parts. Originally it took place on Monday 23rd Oct in The Hub where our team met up to discuss all the work we had to split up for the upcoming week. We have done the BMC the week beforehand so we were happy with this being a lighter week workload wise. We split up all the tasks we had to do and updated each other on what we've been working on so far so that we're all on the the same page when it came to things like the production price and where it came from and who we talked to about our product ThawSafe amongst other things. We concluded our sprint and went about our week knowing that we all were aware of what we had to do individually and what all our teammates were doing also.   Throughout the week we noticed other teams talking and working on their deliverables for the module that we haven't realized we had to do. It was a busy week full of lectures so none of us had much time to meet up and recheck if we had all tasks account...

Sprint 6 took place on Friday the 20th of October 2017 in the Final Year IT room on the 3rd floor of the IT building. This week, due to our usual Sprint meeting place - The Hub - being closed for graduations, we decided to meet up in the IT room. Since this week we didn't have any classes on Monday due to Ophelia passing through, we weren't sure whether we should have a Sprint meeting or not since we weren't assigned any work for the week however as Thursday came, we noticed that indeed we have been given work to do so we decided to meet up. Our Sprint started off with discussing what had to be done during this week which which comprised of writing a Sprint 6 blog and completing the Business Model Canvas for our idea ThawSafe. The Business Model Canvas is quite a big thing to do for an individual and we felt it would be very unfair to assign such a major and stressful task to a single of our collegues so after discussing it, we all agreed that we won't overload an...

During the lecture on the 9th Oct we were presented with our toughest challenge yet. We were given an envelope containing €5 and given 2 hours to create as much profit as we could which will later be given to charity. We met after class and brainstormed in what ways we could convert that sum into a profit. We tried to be creative and innovative and did our utmost best to think outside the box which we found to be one of those things that sounds simple but is actually very difficult to do. We found the 'Money Challenge' to be very 'abstract', all of us had different ideas and understood this challenge in a different way. We weren't sure if we were supposed to spend the €5 and based on what we got try to invest in some way or if it was acceptable to not spend anything and preform some sort of tertiary activity like a carwash or bag packing and gain a profit that way. We never realized just how used to we are to being told exactly what to do for our assignments an...

This week we were presented with a number of challenges. We were asked to create our customer relations, to chart our competitive position, create our DMU, and take part in the money challenge. We discussed the details of the money challenge in the lecture on Monday. After the lecture we had our sprint meeting and delegated out the jobs. This was testing week as we all felt there was a lot more work in it than the previous weeks. This put a great deal more strain on the team especially in regards to the Money Challenge, which required a great deal of discussion to agree on something. You can read more about the details in the other blog post this week. As mentioned earlier we all found this week to be particularly challenging as there was an awful lot of work assigned this week and we had many other assignments due in other subjects. The added pressure made getting everything done in time much tougher. Thankfully we were able to pool our resources as a team to come together and get...

As part of week 5, one of the things we were asked to complete was a Value Proposition for our idea: ThawSafe.  A Value Proposition is a case for why a customer should choose one product over another or in case no products exist, it should tell the customer why the advertised product will be of use and how it will help solve problems the customer has or may not be aware they have yet. When creating the Value Proposition we started off by looking for statistics  relating to food waste and food poisoning from thawed foods. We presented those statistics as the problem households face today and went on to look for more statistics about how much food waste can be prevented with proper freezer management. We presented those findings as 'pain relievers' for our value proposition. Our value proposition resulted in looking like this. References used: [1] https://www.foodwaste.ie/web-images/Food-Waste-Prevention-Guide.pdf [2] http://www.thejournal.ie/food-cloud-social-entrep...

During this Monday's class, we were asked to come up with a storyboard for our product. A storyboard is where we draw out a scenario like a comic book outlining a use case for our product by telling a story from the perspective of a typical member of our target market. We chose to use the household. In class, we developed a use case. Then after being reviewed by our lecturer, she told us to expand it as it was short and to add some drama to it. With this information, we went forward using an iterative process, wherein we addressed one issue at a time. One of our goals was to flesh out the story with more details, with things like where to buy ThawSafe and how the person may feel when using the product. Draft 1  Then we developed the narrative aspect of our storyboard where we added the family angle with children and then we added some drama to the story with the child being taken to the hospital and we also added the narrative element to the final image of the happy cust...

This weeks sprint took place on the 2nd of October at 12:15. There were various items that need to be discussed and task that needed to be assigned. To start, we created a new channel in Slack for the week. We then discussed each task individually. Through discussion we were able to assign tasks that suited each individuals attributes. There was brief conflict as both Hasan and Joanna wanted to create the storyboard because they both enjoy working with design, in the end, we came to a compromise where Hasan would get this design task and Joanna would get the next. The other tasks were assigned with no issues. We discussed who we could contact in other to gauge the market. We decided to think individually on this task for the week and present our ideas during Monday's sprint. We decided this because we all initially had the same or very similar ideas such as surveys and emails to companies etc. We concluded that working individually on ideas for now, might lead to a more creativ...

New Jacket Design We were asked in class to design a new type of safety jacket for a trendy, fashion conscious 22 year old. We came up with a jacket that was woven together with phosphorescence material. Thus in the day it looked like a normal jacket but at night it would light up. This would look much better than many of the gaudy safety jackets you could get up until now. User's could send their designs into us and have anything they wanted woven into the jacket. The jacket also includes LED indicators which can be activated using pulleys in the sleeves.