Week 7 — Key Insights
Key Learning Moments:
[1] “[With the filters and color coding on the visualization tool] hell yeah, I want this” (7.06 — Commanding Officer, Golden Gate)”. We’ve heard the same thoughts from coordinators and schedulers in the LA-LB sector. A heat map interface with filters based on sea-state and time is desired.
[2] It’s not enough to focus on the above, though. Simply having a visualization that people want is not enough to ensure it actually gets acquired and deployed. We need to have a better of what requirement or need we’re satisfying with the product, who controls the funds that are allocated for acquisitions, and how much they can provide for development and deployment (H4D Teaching Team, Donnie, and Craig).
[3] Talking to APMs who provide solutions to the DoD can yield insight into how products are developed and sold to the government (7.03, 7.04). More importantly, though, we need be thinking about where this product goes next. Specifically, who will be developing it further and how it will make it into the USCG acquisition pipeline.
Additional Learning Moments:
[4] OTA (Other Transactional Authority) is a good option to explore. Commanders/Officers of a unit are entitled to spend up to $150k on their own authority. (7.07)
[5] SBIR Grants occur in three phases and are another avenue to fund the project, provided we can identify a need. (Donnie, 7.07)
[6] We already have a good example of the visualization we want to build in Kepler.gl (The Earthquake Data demo). Even if we don’t have the time to build out the entire product based on past interdiction data, we can show our beneficiaries the Kepler.gl model to give them an idea of what we envision.
New Hypothesis:
OLD HYPOTHESIS: By creating a user-friendly interactive map of past interdictions, we will enable patrol operators to extract insights to increase detection, and by doing so, we will obtain buy-in from our beneficiaries.
NEW HYPOTHESIS I: We can identify a specific need/requirement linked to one of the Coast Guard’s statutory missions that enables buy-in for our digital visualization tool of past historic interdiction data.
NEW HYPOTHESIS II: If we add in filters for environmental / time-based variables and including a color gradient that corresponds to frequencies of interdiction spots, our beneficiaries will champion our product.
MVP:
We’d like to build two MVPs for this week.
The more important one is a flow diagram of the acquisition and deployment processes. We’d like to identify not only which agencies are responsible for providing funding and infrastructure for the product, but also the specific people who we need buy-in from.
Time permitting, we would like to port data ( likely randomly generated for security reasons) of interdictions to Kepler.gl to show our beneficiaries our vision for the product. If we do not get to this point, we may use a combination of our old MVP and the Kepler.gl demo for California Earthquakes.
Interviewees:
7.01 — Sector LA-LB Enforcement Division Chief / LA-LB ReCoM Coordinator
7.02 — Sector LA-LB Assistant Enforcement Division Chief
7.03 — H4D TA with experience investigating the DoD acquisitions process on a former H4D team
7.04 — PM for the Navy’s MTC2 software
7.05 — Project management for the MTC2 representing Booz Allen Hamilton
7.06 — Sector LA-LB Enforcement Division (87' Patrol Boat Scheduler)
7.07 — H4D Alum, Co-Founder of Zenith Aerospace
7.08 — Sector LA-LB Enforcement Division — Sector Boarding Team
7.09 — Sector LA-LB Enforcement Division — Sector Boarding Team Scheduler
7.10 — Station LA-LB Operations Petty Officer (Scheduler)
