Week 5 has flown past, almost as speedy as the Wellington wind! Below is our update.
Problem Statement: How can we help businesses in the horticulture and viticulture industries find enough suitable seasonal workers when they need them?
The key contributing factors are: current skill matching systems do a poor job; there are not enough people available in the labour market for some regions; there is a lack of visibility of employee’s skills, experience, availability and it is hard for existing systems to communicate with each other.
Our current solution concept is to provide a digital platform for horticulture and viticulture businesses to find employees when they need them. The solution matches employees with relevant skills, experience and availability, provides transparency in the recruitment process, enables feedback on the suitability of employers and employees to support decision‐making as well as auditing and reporting functionality. In the future, we will also deliver a finishing programme to supply trained and accredited seasonal workers to employers as a complementary service.
Hypothesis 1): If we verify the suitability of seasonal workers in the horticulture and viticulture industries, then business can engage more effectively with the total pool of suitable seasonal workers.
Hypothesis 2): If we can increase the pool of suitable seasonal workers, then businesses will find enough suitable seasonal workers when they need them and they will be more productive and profitable.
Hypothesis 3): If we can increase the pool of suitable seasonal workers and make it easy for businesses to employ them, then businesses will not look for non-compliant workarounds.
Hypothesis 4): If we map the hotspots of regional seasonal work and workers at key times, then businesses in those regions can better plan to have a reliable source of suitable seasonal workers when they need them.
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly – Week ending Friday 15 May 2015
The Good
- Documented the wireframes we developed last week.
- Talked to more people in government to understand their pain points and priorities, and where relevant, share wireframes, including with:
- MSD
- Immigration NZ operations and policy teams
- MBIE Employment Standards policy team.
- Had a good meeting with MSD who didn’t say no when we asked if they would share client data with us.
- Had a good meeting with Phil O’Reilly, Chief Executive of BusinessNZ who provided great insights around the importance of pre-screening and having pastoral care for workers, and government’s investment in skills and capability of workers.
- Met with a representative from MBIE’s tourism team and identified future possible application of our solution for the tourism sector.
- Had brilliant mentoring sessions with Geoff Nixon and Glenn Andert, who suggested a finishing programme to supply suitable seasonal workers to employers.
- Had team building exercise organised by CreativeHQ which was fun, and gave us time to do something completely different!
The Bad
- We were overwhelmed at the beginning of the week as we struggled with the amount of work involved.
- We’ve asked for external support to analyse data.
- We got Noel in from Boost New Media to review our scrum meetings and prioritisation. We’ve made some changes in the way we work (“grooming” they are called), including moving away from capturing all tasks on Trello. We now use Trello for our backlog and software development. We’re using a physical Kanban board, more actively prioritising tasks, and reducing the number of in progress tasks.
- We still need to tighten up our hypotheses and find data to support value proposition.
The Ugly
- We’ve found that there is duplication of work done between and within government agencies. We wish there are less silos and more people knowing that many complementary projects can happen concurrently.
Questions top of mind
- Our audiences are: government, businesses in the horticulture and viticulture industries, suitable seasonal workers. Are we missing any key entities or communities?
- What do seasonal workers think about our solution concepts? Will they use them?
- Could we link into existing training and other programmes to provide quality rating for employees or employers?
Quotes of the week
Julian – “Limit work‐in‐progress :: How do we live the words?”
Victoria – “Things are feeling more real now that we have wireframes.”
Suki – “Realising what it is like again to be in constant discomfort, launching myself off before I am ready but loving the challenge and growth.”
Cheerios til next time!
easypeasycompliance 