When Cognite kicks off a project with a new customer, we obsess over making the path to value as fast and inspiring as possible. For the last few months, we’ve been talking about what it would take to onboard a customer--ingesting a critical mass of data into Cognite Data Fusion® and launching a number of MVP use cases on top of it--in a single week.
Our big idea was RAPID: a one-week, sprint-style co-location project.
Digitalizing industry changes the way companies work, both top-down business models and daily routines. With easy access to the right data at the right time, people can make fast, insightful decisions, incentivizing creativity and reducing the cost of failure.
Agile ways of working are intense and can be a lot of fun. Done right, a sprint leads to quick victories that add up to a surprising amount of momentum after such a short runway. Unfortunately, the “agile” concept can be tough for conservative industrial companies to nail on their own. But we think this will be the way everyone works in the future.
Teach an industrial company to “agile” and they win for a lifetime.
Our scrappy RAPID team entered the New Zealand office of a new customer on a Monday morning in February. The group was highly technical, but also cross-functional. Project Managers and Solution Architects from Customer Success worked alongside Data Scientists and Product Managers from R&D.
Pictured above: Data Liberation Front in New Zealand (left to right): Patrick Mishima (Solution Architect), Karolina Luna (Head of Solution Architecture), Ane Eide (Manager of Customer Success), Maciej Mrowiec (Director of Product Management), Gunnar Staff (Head of Production Optimisation), Customer Systems Architect, Sarah Martens (Solution Architect Intern)
The goal was to engage the customer on a number of critical levels. We wanted to attract their attention, bring them and their resources into position to make the most impact, and earn both their trust and their enthusiasm.
From the first day, the RAPID team did everything they could to get the customer's pool onboard, communicating actively with IT, field technicians, production engineers, and other stakeholders. Anyone who could help define the use cases to be answered with data. Everyone who was interested in making data work for them.
Almost immediately, the result was clear. The agile structure and on-premise access to domain experts accelerated data ingestion and use case formulation. Better yet, being physically present in the remote offices jumpstarted the level of trust. Asking people to share data is a funny thing, even when the data isn’t personal. Even when it stands to increase their individual insight one hundred fold, making it easier to do their work well.
When you’re around to answer questions in person, when you’re able to sit alongside a user who has hit a roadblock, the other barriers begin to fall away.
Our customer's New Zealand office was the perfect place for this project. Eliminating the 12-hour time difference streamlined the onboarding process, cutting off an estimated week or more of preliminary questions. By the end of the week, we had demo-ed multiple operational use cases, including one to increase production for a gas-condensate field in tail production by adjusting back-pressure on the receiving facility. On the customer side, folks were even more excited about what Cognite had to offer.
With this success under our belts, we're ready to run RAPID again soon! Want to join the Cognite adventure? Check our careers page and find a role that sounds like you!
