This week, I was invited to attend a meeting with the main point of contact for the company with whom we conducted the pilot program. This was a great opportunity to develop my stakeholder management skills and to receive direct feedback about the application and its use on the mine site.
The meeting was very insightful; at first, the customer was hesitant to share openly, but I believe we received some very honest feedback as the conversation went on. One of my biggest takeaways from the meeting was the information they wanted to receive was much simpler than we anticipated. They also had no opinion on the app’s appearance; they wanted to know what action to take in its most basic form.
Another big positive was that they were okay with end-of-day or start-of-next-day reporting, which no longer required offline processing. This was one of the major difficulties in preparing the application for the pilot, so having that restriction lifted made me optimistic that we could deliver a performant app to them.
The client presented us with a major challenge, as they currently have a no-devices policy on site for safety. Our pilot was conducted on the small subset of staff already permitted devices due to their roles, but this would be a hurdle to roll out to all staff. This is a major challenge as the wearable device needs to pair with a smartphone device frequently to ensure that no data is lost throughout the day. As a team, we’ve discussed ways to address this in the long-term but have discussed with the client since the meeting to have the initial roll-out scoped to users who are permitted to have devices on them.
I appreciated that Omni trusted me to attend an important business meeting, which allowed me to feel the impact of my work. In software development, we often refer to people as ‘users’ or ‘admins’, but this experience reminded me that the tools I create play an important role in people’s lives and enable them to do their best work.
Artfect: Redacted Notes from the Customer Meeting