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Employee Journey

Team

KLM team

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Freddy Ramaker

Vibhor Chopra

Eva van Kempen

Saskia Doets

 


Commissioner:

Description

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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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!

 

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.