Portfolio - Mannan Gupta

.portfolio MANNAN GUPTA

Work

Skills

Digital innovations at TechnoServe

East Africa, Apr’20- present

Held multiple roles working closely with global & field teams in Kenya, Ethiopia & Rwanda to bridge the gap between strategy and operations using design thinking & digital solutions

Second to founder at Rural Changemakers / Janwaar Castle India Mar’16 - Feb’19

Managed operations for a social initiative based on design thinking and network principles to drive change in a rural village in India by building a skatepark

Explore Scouting

Lead Scout at SRISTI India Sep’17 - Jun’18

Planned and organised organization’s flagship field exploratory campaign (Shodhyatra) to document grassroots innovations and organise innovation workshops for children, women and elders.

Associate Engineer at Qualcomm India Jul’13 - Jul’14

Designed a model to compute the power usage of indigenously designed low-tier MSM (modem chipsets) for various scenarios (calling, video playback, 3G usage)

Human centred design User testing Innovate Database architecture System design Process design App design Operations and implementation

Stakeholder management

Coffee Program Design

Aligning social impact work with supply chain

Geospatial visualization

Context

Technoserve has supported coffee farmers in Ethiopia and Kenya for ten years. During this time, it focussed on training coffee farmers and coffee mills in adopting best practices to improve quality and production. For the 3rd 5-year phase, Nespresso, the donor, wanted us to design a program in a way that farmers and wet mills that adopted the best practices got the opportunity to sell to Nespresso consistently.

Goal Team

To create a strategy for the next five years of the program that builds on past successes and aligns the social impact work with roaster’s supply chain

Mills Volume Mills

Volume

A team of strategy consultants. My role was to work closely with the operations team and local suppliers to consolidate information from different sources, drive insights and propose solutions to formulate a meaningful strategy.

Challenge

● Earlier program designs were based on field surveys, scattered data, and program managers’ anecdotal recommendations.

● Minimal relationship with coffee suppliers

● No information on how coffee supply chain operated

● Unclear effect of bureaucratic government regulations, forex fluctuations, and climate change on coffee supply chain.

Process

●

● Tracked documents associated with coffee to map the supply chain checkpoints

● Consolidated program data to visualise impact and find overlap with coffee sourcing

● Reviewed existing systems in place by the roaster and suppliers

Design deliverables

● Data map and a consolidated geospatial database

● Maps to visualize past work and next areas of intervention

● Supplier engagement activities and timeline

● Supplier shipment sustainability KPIs and reporting templates to trace coffee to farmers

Impact Contact

In two years since the implementation of the strategy, I’ve worked with 10 exporters in Kenya and Ethiopia to traced 25000+ MT coffee to evaluate suppliers and generated sustainable sourcing trends to help Nespresso make socially and environmentally sound sourcing decisions.

Identifying KPIs to evaluate impact Creating a timeline for structured follow up

Assisting field work with digital tools

Context

Advising coffee washing stations is a highly intensive job. A business advisor supports 5 - 10 washing stations in a whole year. He/she splits time between training the mill team, conducting surveys, and advising the managers on improving operations. While training and conducting surveys are well documented, there is little visibility into how the business advisor supports the mill.

Goal Team Challenge

To create a mobile app that could support mill managers in answering questions about best practices and giving insights into their operations.

This is a project I led. I used lean human centered methodology to define its scope, collect user needs, design and develop the app, and make improvement based on used feedback and data. I had one team member for field support. Collaboration - Tech-labs for advisory & Operations for client introductions.

● Lack of comfort among managers to use even simple apps on smartphones.

● No documentation of business advisors’ support to processing stations.

● Use of smartphones limited to data entry.

● Even though a similar app was executed three years ago but was never tested in the field. Apart from the app documentation, nothing existed.

Process

● Conducted field surveys to document records kept and technology used by mills

● Created two intermediary apps – first, a business advisors’ app to document their visits and collect data, and second, a traceability app to let manager digitize their records.

● Used a lean and human-centered app development process to undergo multiple iterations based on client feedback and analyzed data.

Design deliverables

● Pivoted the solution into a process.

● Workshops with team and mill managers to document process, needs and feedback

● App prototypes for the traceability app, business advisory app, and database app

● Two-phased strategy to develop a virtual business advisor and an ecosystem that could sustain it

● Business proposition for mill managers to track operations by identifying gaps in operations

Impact

The process has created a foundation for a virtual business advisor by collecting real data from the first day. The implementing cooperatives found the prototype so useful that they have invested in smartphones and internet for their managers. This is a huge success as cooperatives in Kenya generally expect NGO to fund everything in such projects.

Contact

Application

Scott Overdyke – soverdyke@tns.org

for field associates to record advisory support

Application for field associated to map new areas of intervention

Human-centered design workshops

Build team’s capacity and solutions from the field

Context

Coffee programs at TechnoServe have run for many years. With experts refining its training and operations, TechnoServe has become one of the most impactful organizations in its space. However, even after proving the impact to the coffee farmers using demonstration plots, the adoption of best practices is low

MOOC for field teams to learn the basics of HCD

Goal Team

Collaborate with the field team to understand the reasons for low adoption and develop solutions ground up.

Online workshop with associates to practice HCD build solutions from the ground-up

I led this project in collaboration with the director of Tech labs at TechnoServe.

Challenge

● The human-centered design is a new concept to TechnoServe. While it is used by organisations to conduct one time workshops, in-house HCD experience for iterative improvement is even more unknown

● Program teams were spread in Kenya and Ethiopia where internet connectivity was limited, personnel spread across the region and with limited technical capacity

Process

● Developed a MOOC for the team to learn about the concepts of human-centered design. Provided training on how to operate the MOOC

● Followed the MOOC with an online workshop to practice the concepts on personal and real-world challenges

● Facilitated individual and group workshops to take the field team through the HCD process to identify challenges and solutions to improve stumping rates in Ethiopia

Delivered

● MOOC

● Three rounds of workshops - one online and two in person

Impact

● Used the process to test ideas and encourage field team to use HCD principles as a way of working Identified business advisers who are more participatory in approach than those who follow orders. The workshops brought a collaborative mindset between project teams and government officials. Instead of seeing each other as competitors or through the eyes of bureaucracy, stakeholders expressed genuine collaborative spirit for their colleagues. More long term Ideas have been generated through the workshop that are currently being tested

Contact

In person HCD workshop in Dilla, Ethiopia

Planning and Design for the Just City

planning a city from social, environmental and economic perspectives

Context

School of Architecture, TU Delft organized the summer school that combines spatial planning, urban design, and environmental technology to tackle spatial justice, sustainability, climate adaptation, and water management in urban transitions to sustainability.

Goal Team Challenge

Apply the concepts of spatial justice and sustainability in elaborating a vision and a spatial strategy and design of Scheveningen in the city of The Hague in The Netherlands.

5 members - Spatial planner, resource planner, me, urban designer, civil engineer

● The pier of Scheveningen is the most vulnerable to sea level rise

● A lot has already been done to make the region safer from climate change

● There is a massive influx of tourists during the summer that stresses public goods

● The old fishing neighborhood community is facing challenges due to the increasing prices due to gentrification

● While green spaces surround the area, there are huge spaces that are cemented cause urban heat centers

Process

● Conducted field visits to observe the dynamics between people and nature

● Conducted qualitative interviews with local citizens

● Desk research to visualize data gathered from different sources, for example, heat centers vs green areas

● Facilitated the team in creating a systemic change strategy

Delivered

● Current, short term long term spatial visualization of 50-year strategy for Scheveningen

Testing by design and design by testing

Concepts learned Contact

Roberto Rocco - r.c.rocco@tudelft.nl

Market system facilitation mapping tool

Redefining documentation process for MSF projects

Context

Traditionally, most NGO implement project based on direct approach, for example, by training farmers. Projects based on market system facilitation look for the market actors that could do the same instead of themselves training the key stakeholder. For example, an input supplier training the farmer. Such a project focuses on building market and network strength

Reporting template for field associates

Goal

A reporting template for projects based on a market system facilitation approach that automatically visualizes progress into a system map and creates network analysis.

Team

I led this project in collaboration with the representative from the donor, Rockefeller foundation

MSF project progress visualization

Challenge

● MSF approach require different skills as compared to a direct approach

● Most project transition from direct to MSF approach, without building capacity of their teams

● MSF projects have a non-linear progress

● Progress on theory of change is evaluated on annual basis. For an MSF project this can easily result in actions to digress from expected outcomes

Process

● Shadowed field teams to document progress

● Researched different system mapping tools

● Compared structural difference between reporting styles of direct and MSF approach

● Organised HCD workshops to iterate the template with field team, PMs and donors

Clustering to identify areas of collaboration

Network analysis

Delivered

● A Google sheets template to report progress, outcomes and impact of activities according to theory of change

● A tool that converted the template into a system map in real time to show new market linkages being formed and growth in network strength

● Workshops to ensure field team understand and adopts to tool to its full potential

Impact

This is the first tool to attempt a new way for reporting progress for project based on market system facilitation programs.

Understanding diversity

Contact

Other Projects

Open Library, Janwaar Castle

● We received a huge donation of books for the village.

● The books sat in the library room with no one touching it for months

● To encourage reading, I designed libraries at the most interesting spots in the village

● The books were stored in two chests with the keys given managed by the kids

● Even though some books were lost over time, these libraries increased reading exponentially and provided the kids with two new places to hang out.

Shodhyatra, SRISTI

● Independently traveled and established a network of entrepreneurs through 30 villages, engaged with stakeholders at all levels (villagers to District Magistrate), managed a 50 member volunteer team and documented innovations in the field of agriculture, education, and healthcare to lead two chapters of field exploratory campaign

● The idea was to discover and celebrate all forms of grassroots innovators and their innovations - in farming, cooking, teaching, health, medicine and all other phases of life.

● Conducted idea competitions and organised events for women to showcase their traditional recipes, innovators to showcase their inventions and centenarians to share their wisdom with the young to preserve traditional grassroot knowledge.

Contact

Ulrike Reinhard - ulrike@ulrikereinhard.com Anil Gupta - anilgb@gmail.com

Route of 41st Shodhyatra

Lake-side open library