Project 2

About the Project

Digital communities is a first of a kind pilot initiative run by the Israeli ministery for digital services, and the national program for promoting digital orientation.
The main aspiration of this endeavor is to prepare the ground for a future where all government services will be available only through digital means, by educating under-exposed audiences such as jewish orthodox, retirees, and palestenians on how to use this technology to their advantage instead of avoiding it.

The Team

the team is composed of a manager, 3 local project leaders who work mainly in their designated neighbourhoods, 1 regional project leader who works on larger-scale collaborations with organizations and with municipal coordination, and finally a data researcher.
They all work towards the same goal of imparting digital skills to their audience, by applying various tactics and strategies in their work, yet it sometimes felt as if they were working on separate organizations

My Contributions

I first joined the project under the title “Service Designer” but of course that could mean a whole bunch of stuff.
From making infografic presentations to User Research and Strategy design, I used the freedom they gave me to explore and to implament my curiousity and creativity to the project’s needs

Making Sense Together

In order to facilitate a more profound understanding of the project I began by meeting each one of the project leaders individually.
I asked them to provide me with all the necessary information for me to function confidently as a project leader myself.
At the end of each meeting, we agreed on a specific concept, that they will present to the rest of the team in a common meeting. My part was to understand and creat a visual representation of their concept, and here are the results:

Betzalel Stauber

The 6 hats of a Project Leader

Talking to betzalel tought me a lot about how a project leader thinks and what processes he goes through in order to carry out his initiatives. It wasn't the simplest thing to extract knowledge from him due to his extraordinary rapid thinking patterns and intuitive yet profound understanding, but eventually we came up with the 6 Hats of a project leader:

inventor

Coming up with fresh ideas on new projects using intuitive thinking

Researcher

Learning about cevillian needs and blockages through field research

Scientist

Carefully examining ideas and choosing the ones most likely to succeed

Diplomat

Telling the story of the project in a way that encourages participation

Treasurer

Taking care of the finances necessary to carry out endeavors

Producer

inspecting multiple procesess and managing people to make it all work

Ahmed Hasna

Characteristics of a good partner

Talking to betzalel tought me a lot about the way a project leader is thinking and the process he goes throw in order to carry out his initiatives. It was'nt the simplest thing to extract knowledge from him due to his extraordinary rapid thinking patterns and intuitive yet profound understanding, yet eventually we came up with the 6 Hats of a project leader:

Avigail G. Amit

Collecting data to improve services

Avigail insisted that the most important thing for her wold be the ability to collect data for every citizen that participate in an activity initiated by the project. after some discussions we decided to creat a mockup that demonstrates how such CRM system should look like. making this made her very happy as she could finally visualize and explain to the projects manager her vision.

The Methodology

After spending over a year with the project, it was time for them to reflect and present their conclutions to their superiors. I suggested we develope a model of work which is shared by all the project leaders and which will give an idea about the process of initiating, carrying out and finally learning from execution.
you might recognize this model which is based on the "lean start up" model:
LEARN - PROTOTYPE - TEST

Digital Communities