Thinking to Mapping

Ola Amigo!! 

Como estas....

I guess we are getting bit used to this language now... hmm. “Practice makes a man perfect”... We got it Mom!! Great learnings from childhood.. is’nt it?

Alright!!! Lets get back to real work... Third meeting, back to Y-Center

Pujara’s first question “Think about one and only one company you like the most”... God!! Tough question... At the back of the head all of us have many companies we like..  But coming up with one... That’s hard!... 

But we did it.. we finally chose one and only one company we like the most and listed five reasons why we like it.. There you go.. from that we started the design thinking, real word “thinking”. Great starting question Dhairya, it actually made us “think”.

Then after an hour of design thinking and then mind mapping ... we got out with this... Looks good right?

Then we reorganized the ideas and processes on four different components of our project within a hour.

Isn’t this cool?...why our schools don’t do it this way. This is so much fun and so much effective. This is called Design Thinking and Mind Mapping. It is very impressive that how all three of us came up with some different aspects in each part of our project. We have been working on this one project for quite a while now and we are on same page, but still different perspectives. At last we could put all of that together to make it work. This shows that we are a great team that complements each other with different aspects...good for us.

Another thing we did during our meeting that was not related to our project. Usually this does not happen in a project meetings, but as we say our mentor Dhairya is a cool person. We do some fun stuff in our meetings. That's the reason.. We love to go to this meeting. All of us came up with our favorite companies. Another surprise…. all three of us...the tech geeks...came up with IT companies and our mentor’s reaction on this...You guys are nerds! Okay... That's from where we started to think out of the box... Lesson from the meeting “Use common sense even for complex things specially when you get stuck somewhere”.

Thanks to our mentor Dhairya.. for this different design thinking and mind mapping session.

Laying the Foundation!

Finally, Friday is here. At 8:10 am, we were all set to take off in septa and land at Benjamin’s Desk conference room to discuss the next stage of our project. Our official meeting location for this project is Dhairya’s office, Office of Y-center. This is the place where everything started when we participated in the competition “Impactathon” which made a runway and led us to this day. This is where we get the encouragement to make this project a success. Great office place! Good choice Dhairya!

“You can't build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid foundation if you're going to have a strong superstructure.”

                                    -Gordon B. Hinckley

Everyone is definitely familiar with this. In fact, we remember our parents teaching this. Thanks to our parents. Our parents will be happy to know that we are finally following this.

48 hours of the competition went really fast, from what we remember we did almost everything we could for the project that was required for the competition. But, everything in 48 hours, then may be not precisely “everything”. So we decided to start over from the basics, the way it would have been for any real project and not just for a competition. Hence.. to start by laying the foundation.

We did some research about SMS based systems that already existed in Africa. A project named SMS for Life caught our attention. SMS for life allows health workers to report stock levels via a weekly SMS text message on a simple phone.

SMS for Life can dramatically improve and even eliminate medicine stock outs at the remote health facility level. SMS for life has scaled to several African countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon and Democratic Republic of the Congo. By using this simple SMS based inventory management system, the medicine stock-outs were reduced dramatically.

We wonder that this amazing SMS for Life project was around from almost three years now, but why no one ever tried to do something else other than the inventory management system. Also, what exactly did they use, a commercial API, or something through the collaboration with the Telecom Services. Vodafone is one of the major sponsors of this project. What did Vodafone do in this project? What can we learn from the SMS for Life? We will conduct a detailed research on SMS for life next week. We hope we will find the answers to our questions soon and we will let you all know.

Another huge thing that we discussed today, that grabs everyone’s attention in the U.S for sure, “Confidentiality and Anonymity of the data”. We were in the elevator when we were discussing this. But this concern was soon resolved and all thanks to Dhairya, CEO of Y-Center. He mentioned that we should use a unique ID for the patients to register so that the information is anonymous and we had a sigh of relief about another big concern we had regarding our data going to the cloud service. Also, this idea we thought could take us to contribute to something huge, like, EMR (Electronic Medical Records), EHR (Electronic Health Records), and all that fancy stuff.

And oops!!...we forgot to do the research on Malaria Kits this week. We promised Dhairya that we will get that done before our next meeting.

Official inauguration of “Connect the Dots”

Ola Amigo!

Yes.. thats the progress.. It means “Hello Friends!” in Portuguese.

“Connect the Dots” is finally in its initial stage. July, 11, Friday, we had our first meeting with the CEO of Y-center, Dhairya Pujara, the host of this whole show. The meeting started with an excitement seeing our project name on the whiteboard of the conference room. Thank you so much Dhairya for a warm welcome to the first official meeting of this project. We discussed about different parts of the projects that we are going to work on and do more research on, and what kind of challenges we might have to face during the implementation of the project. While discussing the logistics of the project, we realized the difference between winning the competition and actually succeeding by accomplishing the goal of this project. Until now, these words sounded same to us... you won the competition...you succeeded.. But now we know the difference...

It’s the other way... If we succeed in implementing this project in the real field, then we will be the winner. At this point, we just won the Impactathon (a hackathon styled event organized by Y-center) but the real work starts now, in the real field with real logistics and challenges.

Starting with language barrier.. Portuguese.. It’s not that hard if you know Spanish.. wait what if we have no clue about Spanish either..  But the challenge won’t finish until we start, so we went ahead and got our first short Portuguese lesson by Dhairya Pujara, CEO and Founder of Y-center who learned this language when he went to Africa for the first time.

We discussed about the components of our project, made a list of main components which are necessary for the implementation of this project in Mozambique, Africa. So... Mozambique..from this I remember that using Google earth, we also saw the amazing glimpse of the location where we are going to stay during our project. Imagine 5 - 8 minutes walk to Indian Ocean anytime. We cannot wait to be there. Natural beauty.. Milky way.. Who want to see it? .. We do.

It was a great starting of the project.. bit of excitement.. bit of nervousness thinking about the challenges we have to face and definitely to solve them is the encouragement.

We know we will make this happen.. . We have faith in our team.