Kicking Off Capstone

The kickoff meeting is such a critical moment in a project. We were the first team to start the kickoff meeting thanks to the quick reply from our client. We essentially started the journey of our project by conducting our kickoff meeting with Ilya — the director of technology in Acronis.

Prior to the meeting, our team met up and made a plan for how we wanted to utilize our time with our clients. With the guidance of our faculty advisors, Bruce McLaren and John Stamper, we focused our agenda around the scope setting and gathering information from our client. We discussed and curated a list of questions that we wanted to explore with our clients. We also finished the first draft of our project plan to explain our understanding of the project and the process of the eight months in the future.

On the afternoon of January 28th, we sat in the conference room in Wean Hall and started the kickoff by some quick introductions of METALS and ourselves. Then Ilya shared some information about the products of Acronis and their existing training programs. We were surprised by the number of their customers — 30,000 to 50,000. No wonder Acronis wants to improve their training program and make it more efficient and scalable.

After getting the information from Acronis, we brainstormed some possible directions for the solutions. We felt really lucky that Acronis is pretty open to the final deliverable. And here are some possibilities:

• Develop a methodology that can be applicable to all of the training programs and continuously help with the training design for learners.
• Develop an integrated and completed training system, including goals, assessment and instruction.
• Design metrics and experiments (A/B testing) to test the effectiveness of the training design and provide convincing data for customers
• Data collection and display for the trainers to help them track learner progress and improve the training design.

We left our kickoff meeting in high spirits, with a better understanding of our project and what we need to bring to the customers and the training team of Acronis. We will work on research over the next couple of weeks and reframe our problem space. We are really excited to get started!