The Anatomy of A H4D Sprint
The Marines have a problem that will keep them from reaching their peak operational capability. Their problem is that Marine Corps maintenance is not keeping pace with the expeditionary needs of the operational Marine Corps. Maintenance systems, and therefore maintenance operations, are slow, cumbersome, and full of needless inefficiency.
By leveraging DIUx’s innovation expertise to meet with industry leaders throughout Silicon Valley, and in partnership with BMNT Partners, the Marines refined their understanding of their problem into a more targeted long-term goal: Increase the productivity of Maintenance Battalion Marines by making it easy to share and collaborate on design files for custom parts.
Marines Deploying to Silicon Valley
From the 17th until the 21st of October, 12 Marines and 3 product designers came together to begin solving Marine Corps Maintenance’s problem. They underwent an intensive level-setting process during the first day of the Hacking for Defense sprint, allowing the designers and non-machinist Marines present to gain a deep understanding of the challenges faced by the machinist community, as well as allow the Machinist Marines present to validate their individual experiences with each other.
The group was split into 3 teams and the decision was made to divide their efforts in order to conquer pieces of their goal instead of swarming efforts on one critical point. One team, after choosing the name War Unicorns, elected to focus their attention on the beginning of the maintenance process — when a 2161 Machinist Marine receives a repair request that they are unable to quickly fulfill manually, but before they begin using convenient workarounds to avoid a full reverse-engineering of the part.
Becoming a Problem Expert
War Unicorns initially thought that their piece of the problem revolved around a lack of collaboration within the machinist community. However, while mapping their How Might We statements onto their GV Map,
War Unicorns realized that the problem isn’t a lack of collaboration, but rather inefficient collaboration. This realization, that collaboration only occurred in reaction to events, led them to craft a new How Might We statement to guide their sprint: How might we make a proactive rather than reactive sharing culture?
Team War Unicorns envisioned a mobile application, affectionately referred to as ‘Snap Chat for machinists’, which would allow Marines to quickly communicate their problems and solutions. They envisioned the ability to share data files, machine settings, and engage in live troubleshooting Marine Corps-wide. With this application, they imagined a world where the machinist’s ability to repair equipment was unhampered by their geographic location and access to the centuries of expertise amassed by the community.
Getting Scientific
After beginning to sketch out a nascent solution that would take their How Might We from fiction to reality, War Unicorns was asked: what are you assuming to be true that might not be? A Critical Hypothesis is a fault line upon which large segments of a project’s success or failure rests. The War Unicorns settled on Machinist Marines will utilize a mobile application to quickly request help or share ideas to the Marine Machinist community as a whole as their primary Critical Hypothesis. This question of whether Machinist Marines would USE a platform if provided one directly inspired the form of their Minimum Viable Product, or MVP.
A good MVP tests and validates not only a team’s understanding of the problem but also the viability of their solution. Team War Unicorns’ MVP consisted of a closed Facebook group exclusively for the 2161 machinist community. Within this group, Marines are free to share successes, failures, and challenges regardless of rank. Additionally, by using the new Facebook Live feature, Machinist Marines can engage in real-time troubleshooting. Team War Unicorns planned a 30 day experiment with the Facebook Group to test 3 different parts of their Critical Hypothesis:
1. Is there an appetite within the machinist community for great collaboration and socializing?
2. Will the community respond to requests for help?
3. Will the use of a live-enabled mobile application increase the speed that complex problems can be solved?
Testing MVPs
The team seeded their group with 20 invitations to the machinist community to test the appetite for the service, intending to measure acceptance rate and rate of unseeded growth. Within 24 hours, over 70% of those seeds had joined the group and an additional 9 unseeded Marines had requested to join. By the end of October, over 60% of the entire machinist community was in the group.
Next, the team seeded a series of planned requests for help from Marines unassociated with the sprint. To date, three requests have been submitted; all received their first response within 2 minutes. Two were provided with a definitive ‘no’ to requests for excess parts or specific tools within 30 and 60 minutes respectfully. The other, a request for guidance on running a complex function on a machine was 75% resolved (initial guidance provided) within 15 minutes and 100% resolved (answer to follow-up questions) within an hour and a half.
The final test is a planned competition where one shop is provided access to the Facebook Group, while the other is limited solely to the text messaging and phone calls that were the previous method of operation.
The Results
Already, within 2 weeks of finishing their Hacking for Defense sprint, Team War Unicorns have successfully validated 2 of their 3 tests. Their impressive results have shown the wider Marine Corps that the problem of Marine Maintenance is not unsolvable and that an adaptation of commercial products is feasible. With their success, their command is now armed with solid justification for moving forward into a Pilot Program.
