Week 4 Customer Discovery

Goals

To understand where and in what form visualizing patrols could inform patrol scheduling, our team’s goal this week is to understand the day in a life of a scheduler and patrolling unit— how are patrol routes planned? how do patrols get rescheduled/skipped when a crew works extra hours doing a late SAR or interdiction op? how do you choose your specific patrol course when you step on the cutter?

From our MVP reactions, we want to test if these visualizations can spark a change in how schedulers and patrol units decide on their routes. We also want reactions on why a common operating picture like this doesn’t already exist, like it does for the Protected Seas at the Anthropocene Institute or the Navy.

Hypotheses

Hypothesis 1: Not sharing steady-state (that is, interagency asset allocation prior to identification) patrol schedules among agencies operations limits vessel identification.

Hypothesis 2: Visualizing past capture and route data will help the US Coast Guard identify choke points and narrow down patrol regions and asset allocations.

Test

Shadow a patrol unit on the waters and meet with patrol schedulers at Coast Guard Island in Alameda, as well as several more interview calls.