Technology Roadmap and Validation
Client Name Withheld | Monstar Lab
PROJECT
We were contracted by a major new smart city in Saudi Arabia aimed at transforming a heritage site into a global tourism and lifestyle destination, showcasing the rich heritage of the Kingdom.
I headed an experience team to transform the strategic aims of the Asset Management department into a technology roadmap for the next 3 years. The brief covered both operational and experience-based functions within the city site, from onsite security through to tenant payment systems and visitor loyalty programmes.
PROCESS
A key challenge was rapidly aligning multiple areas of the business in defining their requisite technology requirements and identify common functionality, data and map out the dependencies between the required features.
I ran a series of workshops, interviews and analyses to define goals and requirements, in the form of high level epics. From here we ran a series of prioritisation exercises to define phase 1 high priority initiatives, for which we then mapped out the current and future state service design blueprints.
These blueprints were instrumental in articulating the current painpoints and opportunities, articulating desired outcomes and getting buy-in for the future functionality from the relevant stakeholders. We prototyped priority functionality and tested with relevant stakeholders, and then wrote an initial Phase 1 requirements brief, in the form of a backlog of user stories and acceptance criteria.
OUTCOME
TThe roadmap has been well received, and the service design blueprints in particular have gone a long way to setting the focus of the initial development.
*The visual design direction was conducted in conjunction with Bernard Barsley