We’ve begun our Sprints! (I’ll explain what that means below.) However, I’m a distance girl. On January 14th I ran the Houston Half Marathon. The Chevron Marathon/Aramco Half is one of the biggest marathons in the country. It was a great way to get pumped up and start the semester!
Tired, but all smiles after finishing the half marathon
Despite my love of distance, we’re moving onto the Sprints for GMI. For those of you who don’t know, Sprints are a method developed by Jake Knapp and colleagues while working at Google Ventures. The method is a five-day process to solve problems through prototyping and customer testing. We’re adapting this method for our own implementation projects. Here’s how the sprints will work. Siri and I are teaming up with Tasha and Callie. Each week we will rotate who leads the sprint and work on her implementation project. So when Callie leads, we will bring together all our minds to work on Consultika. Likewise, Tasha will lead StentX and Siri or I DialOasis. Let me tell you, we’ve already done one “meta sprint” the first week to plan out the semester and the method definitely works– maximum output for our effort. The method also allows us to put our skills to use on other projects. After the meta sprint, our first real sprint was led by Tasha. Before the Sprint began, we had a brainstorming session with the whole StentX team from Fannin. While I went into the meeting a bit hesitant because I only have limited knowledge of StentX, I came out of the meeting with not only a better understanding of the project but a sense of confidence. It’s exciting to dive into another project and add to my skillset and knowledge base.
While the implementation projects from last semester roll over into this one, our other projects do not. No longer am I working on Activated. Instead, I’ll be working with Callie and Josh on a design project related to detecting common food allergens. At least that’s the topic right now. Since these projects originated from the 100 needs we all collected last semester, we must still further validate and refine them. We’ve already had a meeting with our mentor in the med center and even had a few patient interviews. I’m looking forward to working with my new teammates and will keep you updated as the project progresses.
In addition to the GMI courses, I am also taking a Strategic Thinking course and a Medical Human Factors course. There are a number of us GMIers in Human Factors and although it is a lot of reading, it’s a topic I’m passionate about. If you’re an engineer and design a brilliant device that can save lives, yet the doctor or whomever your customer is cannot use it, it’s essentially useless! If it’s not intuitive, it may very likely fail. There’s a reason that I conducted clinician interviews at my internship last semester. We need to understand what the customer wants and needs. Thus, this field of study is extremely relevant to anyone wanting to work in medtech. Medical errors are a huge problem, the statistics staggering. So if I could learn (all of us could learn) to design devices that minimize the chance of error, just imagine!
It’s crazy to think we have less than four months to graduation. There’s still so much to do. Sometimes it can feel like a marathon, but we’re ready to Sprint our way to the finish. Let the excitement begin!