Interview-frame and comments based on the course personnel's feedback about our blogposts

Hello and welcome to Knowledge Boosting Diamond´s 10^th blogpost! 💙 Crazy how fast time has gone and how little there is left of course Human-Centered Product Development. It is quite weird to also think how far along in spring we actually are and how soon Wappu is! Sadly Wappu-celebrations won’t be the epic teekkari-celebrations this year either, thanks to Covid. However, it’s nice to enjoy some sun which gives to much energy for the last few weeks of this school year. 🌻🌞

 

This blogpost is about the interviews we have organized already ages ago. The solution we are coming up with is based on these interviews but for some reason we completely missed to include the interview-frame to our blog. So, thanks to the feedback our team got from the course teacher, this post is dedicated to the interviews we have organized. We really appreciate the feedback we got a lot, and it will absolutely help our blog to be even better. 

 

For clarity reasons, this post dedicated to the interview process is done as a separate post. However, the other improvement ideas will be made straight into the specific blogposts. We’ll mark clearly the items we have edited or added to the posts. We think this will keep the work and blog clear and easier to follow. 

 

The Interview-frame is presented underneath. We used this frame for all interviews but as of course each interview situation is different because the interviewees are different and have different roles at Solita, we focused more on some questions in some interviews etc. In some interviews we also altered the questions as the interview went along. By doing this, we were able to dig in deeper into some themes we hadn’t thought before. All the interviews were held in Finnish and the original interview-frame is also in Finnish. But as this course is in English, we have translated the frame also in English. 

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Interview-frame:

Welcome and thank you for being able to attend the interview and finding time for this. Our group is doing an exercise on the HCPD course with Solita, and we aim to focus on enhancing learning and knowledge sharing between projects at Solita. Our goal is to focus on finding and sharing information and simplifying it, and possibly to find some technical / technological solution to this problem. We’ll first quickly introduce all team members. 

 

Can we record the interview?

 

We have already asked from our contact person from Solita about what kind of projects you have, but we would like to hear more about them and more about project work in general.

 

1. Professional title and job description

2. If applicable: are you involved in the projects?

3. What projects have you worked on?

a. In what role?

4. What size projects have you worked on? In terms of time / number of people?

5. Does Solita have common policies or guidelines for projects?

a. Ready-made plan templates or other documents

6. What kind of communication tools are used internally in projects?

a. What about the customer?

7. What issues are documented in the project?

a. To the customer

b. What is left of the documentation for you?

8. For example, do you use a cloud service to store documents?

a. Is it in active use?

b. Does it meet the needs?

c. Finding information

d. Something to improve?

9. What challenges and problems have been encountered in the projects regarding information sharing?

a. At the start of the project

i. What kind of information?

b. During the project

i. What kind of information?

c. At the end of the project

i. What kind of information?

10. What are the steps involved in completing a project?

a. What is done to the documents?

b. Is any documentation done?

c. If something is learned in the project, will the lessons be passed on or will it remain within the project manager or project team?

d. Are lessons learned from previous projects being used?

11. If new information needs arise during the project, where do you start looking?

12. Is Solita developing new ways of sharing information internally or between projects?

13. How do you spread knowledge or learning about projects yourself?

14. How could Solita encourage the sharing of information and the dissemination of learning?

15. How would you go about developing the sharing of knowledge and know-how between projects?

16. What should be done / changed? What kind of tool / technical implementation could help in information sharing?

a. What prevents change or thought? What would reduce people’s resistance to change? Are there any technical problems with sharing the information? Are there any cultural problems?

 

Ending words

 

** 

The above interview was held for four Solita’s employees. Our contact person from Solita organized the interviewees for us, which was extremely helpful. He had picked out four employees from different roles and backgrounds, which helped us to get more ideas and viewpoints. It was extremely insightful to hold the interviews for these people as the answers to the questions differentiated from each other quite a bit. All of the interviews were 45 minutes long. It was a long time but as the topic of our work sparks conversation and questions quite easily, all the interviews flew by so fast. The time went by so fast during the interviews that we actually hadn’t time to ask all of the questions from all interviewees.

 

We believe that it is best that we won’t translate all the interview notes from Finnish to English as it would probably become impossible to understand anything. The interview notes are of course written under pressure and in a rush during an interview, which would make the translating quite tricky. Anyhow, we want to share the notes with the course personnel, so we’ll share an excel-file with the course personnel. We have collected all the interview notes in the excel. Some information about the interviews has been purposely left out from the excel-file due to GDPR-reasons. 

 

We feel that in addition to the notes, we want to highlight the challenges and pain points we recognized during the interview. Also highlighting what already works well is important. These topics will be added to the same post where we discuss the user study results. 

 

This is all for this time. We’ll keep working on with the blog and finishing our solution. 💎

 

Best regards, 

KBD