Business & facilitation
business case · market analysis · unit economics · cost modelling · process improvement · AS-IS / TO-BE process mapping · product configuration · stakeholder management · workshop facilitation · project and risk planning · Scrum
- Skill
- Business & facilitation
- Methods
- business case · unit economics · cost modelling · AS-IS / TO-BE process mapping · product configuration · workshop facilitation · project and risk planning
- Learned
- X-Tech Entrepreneurship, DTU · Project Management: Tools and Practical Leadership, DTU · Staging Co-Creation and Creativity, DTU · Mass Customization, DTU · Technology and Innovation Management, DTU
The commercial side of engineering is the part I did not expect to enjoy, however it turned out to be where a good idea either survives a meeting or does not, and a number is usually what decides it. Here Herlev is the example I use, since an observation study of how samples moved between the PCR lab and zone 3 would have been an interesting finding on its own, while putting it at 98.8 staff hours a year against a system quoted at 4,874 DKK is what made it a decision rather than a report.
Furthermore most of what I have done here has been as the person in the room who makes the process run rather than the one with the answer, and this is due to three DTU courses in facilitation and co-creation, and to running my old school's rapid prototyping lab for eighteen months, which is a more useful apprenticeship in facilitation than it sounds, since nothing exposes a badly planned session faster than a room of teenagers with a laser cutter.
Business cases and cost modelling
A business case is mostly an argument about where a number came from, so I try to build them from something measured rather than from an assumption. At Herlev the team timed the interruptions in order to arrive at 98.8 staff hours a year against a system quoted at 4,874 DKK, while CETO was costed from the other direction, in that the saving for a medium-sized utility came out at roughly 3 million DKK a year against an addressable market of 320.85 million DKK. Furthermore Forsøgskassen was the smallest and probably the clearest of these, at 80 DKK per box against 52 DKK of materials, since a unit economic that simple is one you can defend in a sentence.
Keywords
business case · cost modelling · unit economics · cost-benefit analysis · saving and payback estimates · costed bill of materials
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Microbiology department storage room with a row of sample fridges and shelving
Cutting interruptions in a hospital microbiology lab
Team of 6, observation study, time measurements and the costed case
Observation study and costed business case at Herlev Hospital
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Receiving the third-place award at DTU Green Challenge, holding the framed prize plaque
CETO Innovation
Team of 7, industry outreach, market model, customer validation and forecasting
Predictive maintenance for district heating networks
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A foam chemistry demonstration running over on a plastic-covered classroom desk, part of a Forsøgskassen experiment
Forsøgskassen - practical science teaching in a box
CMO, marketing, market analysis and the teacher validation interviews
A venture built on teachers' preparation time
Market analysis
Market work I have done mostly in order to decide whether something was worth building rather than in order to pitch it. On CETO I owned the market model and the forecasts alongside the industry outreach and customer validation, which is what produced the 320.85 million DKK addressable market and third place at DTU Green Challenge. Here the licorice company was the more interesting case, since the argument I wrote individually was that benchmarking would fix a missing strategy while personas would let it scale production without losing the customers who buy it precisely for being handmade, and the two tools were chosen against that constraint rather than for their own sake.
Keywords
market analysis · market sizing · addressable market · customer validation · benchmarking · competitor analysis · business plan
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Receiving the third-place award at DTU Green Challenge, holding the framed prize plaque
CETO Innovation
Team of 7, industry outreach, market model, customer validation and forecasting
Predictive maintenance for district heating networks
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A brown paper-wrapped Bagsværd Lakrids salt licorice caramel bag on a table
Innovation tools for a Danish licorice maker
Sole author of the individual analysis, the group ran the investigation
Consulting analysis for Bagsværd Lakrids
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Rendered interior view of the SkillWalls honeycomb-panel partition dividing an open-plan flat
SkillWalls - a reusable room divider
Team of 6, jointly responsible for prototyping, pitching and researching
Replacing single-use plasterboard partition walls
Process improvement and AS-IS / TO-BE mapping
This is what I do at SAP, where I have been Scrum Master on an internal UI project and where mapping the AS-IS process together with the people who actually use it cut the workflow from 10 steps to 7. This means that the mapping was the intervention rather than the preparation for one, since most of the removed steps existed because nobody had drawn the whole thing on one page before. Furthermore COBOD was the same problem at a different scale, in that 41 printers had been sold with only two of them identical, and that variation turned out to be costing R&D a seventh of its capacity.
Keywords
process improvement · AS-IS and TO-BE mapping · process flow diagrams · workflow simplification · Scrum · operational excellence
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A COBOD BOD2 gantry 3D printer mid-build on a round concrete house, outdoors under a blue sky
COBOD
Team of 5, facilitated the process and ran stakeholder interviews
Finding the cost of a product that was never the same twice
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Microbiology department storage room with a row of sample fridges and shelving
Cutting interruptions in a hospital microbiology lab
Team of 6, observation study, time measurements and the costed case
Observation study and costed business case at Herlev Hospital
Product configuration
Product configuration came out of the Mass Customization course at DTU, and the project was a mountain bike manufacturer still quoting every build by hand. We produced an AS-IS and TO-BE analysis of its specification process together with a Product Variant Master and a configurator specification, in order to move the company from manual quotation towards configure-to-order. Here my part was the process flows, the class diagram and the engineering view of the variant master.
Keywords
product configuration · configure-to-order · Product Variant Master · variant management · configurator specification · class diagrams
Workshop facilitation
Facilitation I have three DTU courses in and a reasonable amount of practice at. The largest was a creativity workshop for roughly 100 first-year students at NEXT, run as four parallel sessions of 25 to 30 and planned by nineteen of us, where I was co-facilitator and the contact person for the school, and the report afterwards examined why the first exercise produced weaker material than the ones that followed. Furthermore Vision5 was the attempt to write that down properly, being a five-chapter playbook covering theory, an inclusion framework, technique, tools and participant engagement, while on Facilitating Innovation I was assigned another student team and coached them from assumption mapping through to a prototyping roadmap without taking the work off them.
Keywords
workshop facilitation · workshop design · co-creation · brainwriting · I DO ART framing · teaching and instruction · session planning
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Workshop materials laid out for the NEXT snack workshop: coloured sticky notes, printed scoring sheets for innovative, tasty and healthy, and a storage box
Running a creativity workshop for 100 high school students
One of 19, co-facilitator and the contact person for the school
Four parallel workshops, and an honest look at why the first exercise did not work
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Title slide for the Vision5 workshop playbook, DTU
Vision5 - a facilitation playbook
Team of 5, equal contribution across playbook, workshops and poster
How to plan and run a workshop when nobody taught you how
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A 3D-printed toy tractor prototype with a fold-out ramp, photographed on gravel
Facilitating innovation in multidisciplinary teams
Facilitator, coached another team through assumptions to prototyping roadmap
Coaching another team from assumptions to a prototyping roadmap
Project and risk planning
Planning I have done at the scale a course allows, which means the documents were real while the consequences were not. The M4 metro extension was the fullest of these, covering the organisation of the participants, a milestone plan, time and budget estimation, a business case, a stakeholder analysis and a risk analysis for an extension from Ny Ellebjerg via Hvidovre Hospital to Rødovre Centrum, and my part was the project planning together with the stakeholder and risk analysis. Furthermore the Snickers accelerator ended in a transition plan rather than in a report, since the company makes over 5 million garments a year and the recommendation had to say which two initiatives to start with.
Keywords
project planning · milestone planning · time and budget estimation · risk analysis · stakeholder management · stakeholder analysis and mapping · transition planning
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An escalator rising to street level at Enghave Plads metro station, with departure screens for services via København H and via Frederiksberg
Extending the M4 metro line
Team of 6, project planning, stakeholder and risk analysis
Project plan, business case and risk analysis for a new stretch
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Close-up of a construction worker kneeling in Snickers Workwear trousers with a KneeGuard patch
Circular transition path for Snickers Workwear
Team of 5, worked jointly throughout on the transition plan
A prioritised route to circularity for a 5 million garment business
The research these cases are built on sits under User research & testing.