Preparing For And Minimizing Risk

With just two weeks left before student groups finalize their projects, this week’s studio tackled identifying risk and smoothing out any project friction. Groups were advised to work together to brainstorm what potential problems might pop up and create contingency plans to solve them.

Potential roadblocks came from a variety of sources. As of this week, there were three major tasks that groups needed to complete: the product, their product’s narrative, and the presentation. Groups were reminded that even though they may know the elevator pitch, project journey and their product’s impact, not everyone else in the room during their presentations would be as familiar with the project In many ways, good storytelling is just as important as having a product that’s 100 percent functional.

The team working with JP Morgan learned that one area their project could stumble is in the company’s implementation of their product. The group is creating a search engine for JP Morgan’s internal analyst reports. They recently showed the company’s engineering lead a beta version of their API to see how it could be used in production. After receiving extremely positive feedback, they’re currently working to finalize their API and provide detailed documentation so that JP Morgan can easily use the tool going forward.