Estimated Journey Times – A Tale of Data, Predictive Analytics & Human Stakeholder Engineering
The Estimated Journey Time Project
This business case goes back in time to 2019, 2020 when this distinctive project work was completed. The client had historic problems across integration and data ingestion within their newly purchased data lake, meeting the customer needs, as well as, executing towards a specific transport and network performance strategic objective.
This also manifested in numerous previous failed attempts with different contractors, team changes and the utilisation of numerous vendors to unblock some tech and business issues.
The Problem
The network and operations team manually collated various data extracts, imported, merged, manually manipulated data via Ms Excel to get some BI & Reporting. The output was to measure and provide Real-time Network Performance Monitoring, including Motorways & Roading Network, monthly reporting to the senior exec stakeholders.
The business and team have attempted to fix the manual collation of these records process on a couple of occasions with different solutions, all being unsuccessful.
At the heart of the problem was a mandate to make changes for the correct strategic reasons, however, without complex business and system interactions level solution and experience. The devil really was in the detail and as we see often, it is difficult for internal directors across different business units to get the bird’s eye view that ensures effective problem solving and change delivery.
The outside in approach
The complexity of the project clearly needed an experienced tech, analytical trouble shooting, problem-solving skills approach and background in the best practice in data integration, API solutions and vendor management to re-design this complex data, predictive analytics, and machine learning solution.
My ability to negotiate and influence with key tech vendors and other internal business stakeholders meant we turned around some very negative perceptions into actionable project delivery milestones that were met and delivered.
This complemented and enabled a collaborative delivery between my transport sector client and New Zealand’s Transport Agency on journey times data sharing, which also meant cross agency data quality improvements not to mention enormous costs savings for these government and taxpayer funded client.
Breaking it down, the outcome and benefits
The solution was very complex, entailing:
o Several tech data ingestion pipelines and API integrations,
o New features and improved solution design
o Improved tech operations service delivery
o Improved data ingestion pipelines and other API scalability
o Automated some of the Networking and Performance Team Reporting
o Introduced and build new Power BI Reporting for the same team.
o Enabled cross government agency collaboration with NZTA.
o My client then rolled out these Estimated Journey times signs across Auckland
With limited capacity and a small team, a more flexible agile mind-set was a must to get things done. My experience in setting up and leading global teams, vendors also gave us the edge in enabling this multi facet complex delivery to take off.
Staying ahead, being agile and coming up with innovative, fast-paced solutions as I am describing above, is the competitive edge your organisation needs to stay ahead.
Is your business ready for the disruptions that are coming in tech and global markets e.g. tight liquidity market due to increased inflation, costs etc, therefore needing to get things done with tangible benefits realised? Perhaps time to try a different consulting approach!
I and my company Propelius operate from New Zealand but have a proven record of helping clients globally. Get in touch with us: Contact Us