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Employee Journey

Team

KLM team

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Freddy Ramaker

Vibhor Chopra

Eva van Kempen

Saskia Doets

 


Commissioner:

Description

Time to say goodbye.

Hi guys,

last week we’ve tested our game during the final presentations at the MediaLAB and the people over there were enthusiastic! So that really got us excited as well! The day after the final presentations at the MediaLAB we had our final presentation at KLM. Unfortunately not all the people invited could make it since the weather circumstances were so horrible (rain and thunderstorms) that flights got cancelled and they had to work!  But the Vice President of Operations was there and he was really positive about our final product. He even asked us to give our presentation again for higher management, which is awesome of course! They also told us that they want to continue our project, so tomorrow we are meeting up with our stakeholders one more time to provide them with all the data we’ve collected so they can continue the project.

With handing over our data to KLM our time at the MediaLAB is coming to an end. We can honestly say that time flew bye. It’s time to say goodbye. Thank you for reading our blog!

The KLM Team

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saskia

The Big Board(ing) Game!

Hi guys,

our time at the MediaLAB, and with that our time at KLM, is coming to an end.

The last one and a half sprint we have been working on creating the real time performance tool. In this tool we show all the incoming flights to KLM’s F terminal.

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So here you see the F terminal displayed. With 8 flights departing almost all at the same time.
(All the data on the screen is dummy data, that means that we have created it ourselves).

When you click the gate 6 the flight to UIO (Quito, Ecuador) you’ll get this screen:

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What you see above are all the Orange PAX (short connecting PAX) that arrive at all different gates and terminals at Schiphol and will all have to catch their connecting flight at F6.

The abbreviations in the screen stand for:

ETA: estimated time of arrival
RCT: required connecting time, the time they need to get from the gate they arrive at to the gate they need to go to
CDCT: is the difference between the time they need and the time they have. For the Orange PAX this is a number (minutes) between 0-10. Meaning that they need more time than they actually have.

So if your passengers have lesser time than they need what can you do about that?

That’s where the touch points come in, which are listed below. The touch points are points that the KLM comes in touch with their passengers, on board of their first flight, when they arrive at the gate etc. With our tool the shift leader has a couple of possibilities to optimize the transferring process and make sure that even short connecting passengers will catch their connecting flight.
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They have among other possibilities the possibility to send a MaC (Meet and Connect Agent). This agent will wait for the passengers at the arriving flight and will lead them to their connecting flight. But there is more..

And if you’d like to know more about the touch points of the shift leaders we would like to invite you to come to our final presentation next Wednesday (22/6) at the MediaLAB @ 17:00 and play our Board(ing) game.

It’s a cooperative game that you can play together with three of your friends and it will give you a taste of the tasks that a shift leader has to perform and the decisions he or she has to make to optimize the passenger flows.

We have already played the game a couple of times and as you can see, it’s lots of fun!

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Hopefully we will see you next Wednesday!

Later guys!

The KLM team

Sprint 4 is done and over!

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Hi guys,

during our third review session with KLM we had some communication problems, with us not knowing all the abbreviations they use and their terminology. So during our fourth sprint we focused on presenting our data in the same way as KLM would so we don’t have any further communication problems and we can purely get feedback based on the content of our presentation.

The fourth sprint lasted only for two weeks because our third sprint took almost four weeks. So it was a short sprint, but we worked hard and KLM was really enthusiastic about the end result.

The fourth sprint was the first sprint that we didn’t pay a lot of attention to collecting new data but more on putting the collected data into concept. Starting this conception phase gave us new energy (I think I can speak for the four of us when I say that we were quite done with the researching phase). We started this sprint with making a lit of 11 problems that we have faced during our time at KLM but we phrased them into ’11 expected improvements’, to keep things on a positive note. You can see the list below:

  • Gate Changes
  • Staff at the gate
  • Mass disruptions
  • Incidents
  • Difficult Flights
  • Transferring PAX
  • PAX Feedback app
  • Up-to-date information
  • Ahead of the curce
  • Delay reasons
  • Facilitate innovation

We rephrased these expected improvements into user cases because KLM works with user cases (so this is for improving the communication) and discussed all of them with our contact from KLM and together choice the one that focusses on transferring PAX (passengers) since 70% of KLM’s travellers are transferring passengers.

So the user case we choice was:

In order for team leaders to anticipate if flights are going to board on time the team leaders need to know where PAX are coming from, for this they need an easier operating tool, to access already available information

Use case: Team leaders need an overview of the already available information on connecting PAX.

We focus on the already available information because we know KLM collects all the information a team leader needs to perform their daily tasks they just don’t structure it in a logical way, and that’s where we come in!

We developed concepts with this user case in mind. I’ll give you a quick look on all three of them but they might be a bit difficult to fully understand with me not standing next to you to lead through all the screens ;).

The first one is from the arrival point of view. We looked at it from the arriving point of view because normally you would look at flights from the departing point of view but we wanted to do a little out of the box thinking.

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you start with a view of all incoming flights into Schiphol

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after that you have to possibility to filter all these incoming flight to just all incoming flight with transferring PAX that will have their next flight departing from the F terminal (a KLM terminal)

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you can also look at a all the incoming flights with passengers that are transferring from a specific gate, in this example gate 6

If you click the red line you’ll get more information on the passengers that won’t make their connecting flight

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You can see that these passengers have a 50 minute delay, which is the reason they won’t make their connection flight. As a team leader you have the possibility to reopen these seats so you can resale them, since you don’t want a plane to leave with empty seats.

You can also click on the orange, passengers with a short connection, who might make it or might not

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In this the team leader has the possibility to inform their manager (DPM) to see what they can do for these passengers or mark them as red (not going to make it) or green (will make it)

 

Concept 2 – performance based

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They start with an overview of the terminal

 

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Green flights mean that is everything is going as planned so a team leader would probably be most interested in the one at the top. When they click that plane they get:

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this overview of all the passengers that will be on that flight and if they will make it on time or not. The green ‘fresh’ ones are the passengers that start their journey at Schiphol, so they are not transferring. Since fresh are almost always on time we made them green.

You click the orange:

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And see all the passengers that might well/might not make it. You see where they are transferring from, how many minutes they have for transferring and what seats they will have in the plane.

When you click the red:

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You see the passengers that won’t make their connecting flight and the possibility to reopen these seats. When a team leader reopens these seats they have the possibility to resale these seats but another possibility is to see if other passengers might want to upgrade from economy to business class.

Our final option

Concept 3 – PAX centered

less focused on reselling seats and more centered on what can a team leader for a passenger that won’t make his flight

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Starting with the overview of the terminal again (played with the design a little)

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Press on one of the flights:

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You see all the incoming flights with the number of passengers that will together form one new departing flight. Click the green:

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everything is going as planned over there. Click the orange:

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We thought of sending all the orange passengers a message when they land that tells them that they only have a short connecting flight and need to get to their transferring gate right away.

Click the red ones:

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So now you know that these passengers won’t make it on-time for their departing flight, what will you do? Maybe send a DVP to their arriving terminal to help them get a new ticket, comfort them and make sure there is enough staff at the transfer desk.

So these were our first three concepts real quick. We had more features for all of them but we will keep that a secret for you right now, since we are still working on them. We discussed these three concepts with KLM last week and we mixed and matched them a little a came with one final concept that we presented during our sprint review yesterday. That concept will be the base for our last two sprints. I will discuss that concept with you guys when we have worked on it a little bit more!

 

Thanks for reading our blog!

The KLM team

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A sunny lunch at the MediaLAB with 3 of the 6 teams working here 🙂

Have been sprinting for a while now..

Hi guys,

Even though three weeks have passed since the beginning of our third sprint, it hasn’t come to an end yet. This time our sprint is a four week sprint instead of a three week sprint because that came out handy for KLM and it turns out to be more handy for us as a team as well. So just a short update on our project, since we’re pretty busy at the moment!

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here you see us, being super busy and all..

What have we done since the last blog:

  • the islands we’ve created in the beginning of our sprint have become the main focus point our research
  • defined 18 problems that we believe a team leader runs into on a daily basis
  • created a team leader journey with all their functionalities in it

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above you see some of the pages of the team leader journey. Note: in KLM ‘the New Organization’ the job title of the team leader will become shift leader. So we’ve looked at how things our going down right now, what the pro’s and cons are and we’ve made a recommendation about how we believe a shift leader should function in the New Organization.

At this moment we’re working on an infographic in which we want to include all our major insights that we believe are of importance to KLM. During our meeting with KLM we’re gonna discuss the problems that we’ve found during our research, come up with a top three of most important problems en concepts to tackle these problems.

From next sprint up on our main focus will be concept development and making a prototype so we’re really excited about that! With building a prototype the project becomes more and more tangible and we become closer to the development of an actual product!

Only three days left to our meeting with KLM! Fingers crossed!

Talk to you soon,
KLM team

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New sprint, new goal

Hi guys,

It’s a new sprint and so we’ve created a new goal! This sprint we’ll be focusing on: making a presentable analysis of the needs of the team leader within the scope of repeatable activities and incidents.

This means that we will have a closer look at:

  • What are the main tasks of the team leaders? (Their job description is a little bit fuzzy and they aren’t all on the same page about it, so it’s good to have a look at that).
  • What do we believe that their main tasks should be?
  • Review/analyze all the data we’ve got so far
  • Look at other companies with similar (team leader) roles
  • Motivate our choices for the scope. Motivating our choices isn’t just to show KLM why we chose the topics that we’ve chose but also for ourselves. It’s always good to have a critical look on why you’re doing what you’re doing.

 

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Look at us, all excited to get started!

 

The islands

The last two weeks we didn’t focus on collecting data but on analyzing the data that we already have. We did this because we’ve noticed that we were just collecting more and more data but we didn’t process the data that we collected properly to draw compelling conclusions from them.

So this meant, analyzing the islands (topics) that we’ve talked about last time. We’ve looked into methods that could help us grade all the different islands so we could have a quick look about what topics are most important for us to focus on during the next couple of sprints. The goal of this is to narrow the scope of our project down, at this moment we’re still working on a very broad view but it’s impossible to look more detailed into all the topics that we’ve collected so far so we have to make decisions on what to focus on.

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Here is our poster with all the different islands on them and then on the top you can see the beginning of our grading process. We will be discussing the highest graded topics with KLM to come to an agreement on the focus for our next sprint.

 

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We’ve also took a closer look on the job functionalities of the team leader. In one of our first weeks at the mediaLAB we did an online survey among team leaders about what they believe that their job functionalities are, we also interviewed three team leaders and we did two shadowing sessions of a team leader. So by putting all this collected data together we hopefully have a pretty clear view on what the main tasks of a team leader are and what they should be. In the end we want to create a team leader journey that shows what a team leader does from the moment they step into their office until the moment they leave.

So as you can read, no meetings with KLM this sprint, so far, but we’ve got a shadowing session of a gate agent and an interview with a team leader scheduled next week!
We should get back to work! We’ll talk again soon!
Team KLM

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What have we done so far?

Hi guys,

we’re back again!

We’ve had some busy days the last two weeks so sorry that you haven’t heard from us in a while! We had two shadowing sessions with a KLM teamleader which give us a chance to see what a teamleader exactly does during the day and create a ‘teamleader journey’, a map of all there activities during the day. We were also given the opportunity to shadow a teamleader apron, this is a teamleader who works at the platform and is responsible for all the bagage/ hand luggage. The flight that we did while shadowing him was quite a difficult flight for the employees involved in the bagage handling because the flight had two destinations so you have to put all the bagage for the first destination at the back of the plane so you can get them out easily when you arrive at your first stop. And we can tell you it’s a big puzzle, cause you have to consider the weight of all the bagage and you also have the different destinations.

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We weren’t allowed to take pictures at the platform so we made this picture at what ‘the bridge’, so that’s in between the gate at the entrance of the plane.  Here you see us walking towards the cockpit to inform the cockpit crew about how the bagage process is going.

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If you work at the platform you have to wear a safety jacket, shoes and headphones.

But we weren’t only on field trips these last two weeks. We also gathered all our data together and analyzed it. We put all the data that we have collected since the beginning of our project at the MediaLAB on post its and we put all the post its with kind of the same subject together so we get a overview of all the problems and where the biggest problems occur.

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It started out pretty clear.

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After that it might have became a little bit chaotic.. but just a little…

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So we had to do some readjustments..

But in the end it became pretty clear. We might some big ‘islands’ of the major subjects that we’ve come across, we also took some post its out because they were not of any interest for our further steps in the project.  In the end we visualized the big islands like this:

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The overview is in the middle, since it’s the major subject of our project; creating an overview. Others problems we run in were, transfer passengers, communication problems, staff sticking to their habits and not adjusting to new technology and many more!

 

 

Thanks for reading our KLM blog and we’ll talk again next week!

 

Putting everything into retrospective

Hi guys,

today we had our first review session at the KLM Convair building! This was our chance to show our KLM contacts what we’ve been doing during the first three weeks at the mediaLAB!

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*Here you see Saskia presenting our first findings.

The main focus of our first sprint was to figure out what kind of information the teamleaders need in the application, since we are making an app that should help the teamleaders getting a broader view of all the processes going on around the gate. We’ve used multiple methods to help us find out what the problems are that they are facing, what information they need to deal with these problems, what information they miss at this moment and why they believe an app could help them with these processes. The methods that we’ve used were:

A fishbone diagram that identifies possible problems.

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A stakeholders map to have a look on all the parties involved. We’ve used all the abbreviations that KLM uses as well so it might be a bit hard for you guys to understand this map. But to give you a short insight, the operational triangle exists out of:

DAM: Duty Area Manager

Gate Agent

and TLA: Team Leader Apron

All these people are of huge importance on all the processes regarding the gate and the boarding starting on time but our main focus during this project will be TLP, Team Leader Passage.

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Next to that we’ve also done a survey. We have received 20 responses on the survey so far, 16 from teamleaders and 4 from gate agents. The survey was all about finding out what the teamleaders find important, what goes wrong and how we can positively influence them and the processes regarding the boarding process.

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*All the quotes in the survey and presentation are in Dutch since all the participants filled the survey in in Dutch and we didn’t want to change the meaning of their comments while trying to translate them.

Last but not least we’ve also made mindmaps of possible solutions to the problems that the teamleaders face.

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So as you can see, we’ve been really really busy the last three weeks because we wanted to make a good impression on our KLM contacts! Thankfully they were as enthusiastic about our project as we are!

We’ll talk again next week!

Visit to KLM

Slack for iOS UploadYesterday, Monday the 22nd of February, we had our second visit at the KLM office at Schiphol. After the first visit, a week ago, we were still a little bit unsure about what the scope of the project, more specific the scope of the first sprint, would be. But after our second visit we are happy to inform you that; things are becoming more clear! We visited terminal F, had a look at the HUB control center and talked to a shift agent and a gate agent as well as  to our contact Martine. The people that we spoke to on Monday really helped us to clear our view on the scope.

For the next couple of weeks we will be focussing on finding a way to get information across in realtime, making the (desktop) apps more accessible to the staff and trying to put all information that they are now getting from different kind of apps and sites into one big app. We want to provide the staff with an app that gives them an overview of everything that is going on surrounding the gate.

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A realtime app with a total overview of everything that is going on will hopefully make these portophones and all the heaps of paper with passengers info unnecessary.

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Here the passengers can print their own boarding passes.

So the MediaLAB journey begins..

Our first day at the job!

On Wednesday we had our first day at the MediaLAB! In the morning everybody had to give a Pecha Kucha (presentation) about themselves, telling the others about their background and interests. After these presentations and being introduced to our group members we got given our first group assignment! For this groupassignment we had 3 days to make a movie about the KLM project. Unfortunately, we hadn’t receive a lot of information about the project at that point. 

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Getting started!

We started to look for some background information and context, looking at the possibilities of the project and how our individual skills might come in handy. We broadened our view on the project. By interpreting the small amount of information that we received and with the knowledge of our research, we tried to define the main goal of the project. The goal that we came up with is:

“Making KLM’s Passenger Operations a high performance organization.”

To reach that goal we made 4 sub goals, also based on the information that we received:

  1. Increasing information availability to staff.
  2. Increasing information and behavior sharing between staff.
  3. Speed up and empower staff decision making.
  4. Increase passenger satisfaction.

 

With the main goal in the back of our heads we tried to get a sense of the problem that we will be working on. This helped us to come up with an idea for the video. For the video we made a scenario, storyboard and we came with a couple of person’s. The story that we eventually came up with goes as follows:

An engineer calls his supervisor (manager) to tell him that they are running low on fuel and the plane cannot take off. Here after the supervisor has to inform all the people that are involved in the process of refueling. This takes him a lot of time and makes him more and more stressed. Additionally, the process is delaying further and further, costing time and money.

Curious? Check our video down below.

 

When we had to present our video we got some feedback from the other teams and their coaches. One of the coaches said that it looks like KLM passenger operations is very chaotic and this might come across as insulting. 

 

Difficulties

The difficulties that we endured over the last few days were that we couldn’t find a clear description of who works at KLM passenger operations. Because of this we weren’t quite sure about who to include in the video. Additionally, we have no clue, at this point, how the communication inside of KLM passenger operations functions. We tried to make a satirical video.  The video is supposed to be funny, not critical.