Lattice

Inspiration

We are the millennials. Current company structure is evolving with growing tech. Look at Tesla: from their co-op applicants, junior programmers to senior managers in the company. How are THEY so successful? I am a second year in an engineering co-op program who dreams to work in such companies. They told me if I were to work for them, I get to choose my own projects. I get to create my own project. I have ownership to my project because of my passion.

Now what if we could change all existing companies and start-ups with the same structure instead of being assigned to some project YOU as an employee don't like to do?

Here is the problem:

-Employees do not feel valued in an organization

-Business owners can’t virtually know every little thing going on in a company

-Micromanaging wastes too much time on staff

-Lack of organizational transparency

Succession plans:

Shorten the gap of communication and interaction between departments. Employees EXPECT transparency and lack of this means turnover problems and hiring problems. There goes a saying that “Your team can become fearful of expressing their ideas and concerns to each other and to senior leaders”. Leadership is required, but we also need company-wide efforts in sustaining the business as a whole.

This is where Lattice comes in

-Large companies need a lot of people working a wide variety of jobs to operate

-Transparency (employees can access to company structure, connections, who is in which project, where to get guidance, support and information; HR can learn who has which specific skill sets, experience, past projects, etc.)

-Employee progress tracking (employees aren’t appreciated, management don’t know who are the keeners to support)

-Create a rich and new environment for the employees which ultimately creates a variety of work for the employees

What it does

Lattice web app is created as a platform for small to medium end companies to ensure that their employees can produce the best results in their respectful projects. Essentially, there are just two easy steps to match employees with dynamic projects within the business:

1.) Project Managers create projects base on several skill levels and interest tags

2.) Employees enter all of their skill levels (and is partitioned within the company so that it display relative skill levels in comparison to their co-workers) and #interesttags

Whenever a project is created from the Project Manager side, our algorithm will match suitable employees within the firm that optimizes their skill levels and interests; in other words, we connect skilled people with passionate work!

Challenges we ran into

Challenges rose as we talked to multiple mentors and employers about how this would be effective in their respective jobs. Every one of the mentors saw potential in our product but in a different way and because of too many potential suggestions, our business problem diverged. Our initial idea pivoted at least 7-8 times before we reached a consensus of what our product is actually trying to accomplish- and even then, there is still a lot of add-on functionalities! Two great things came about from our predicament:

-We had ENDLESS of ideas which meant a huge potential of growth in Lattice

-All of the ideas were interconnected and easily implemented in conjunction

The end result meant that our 90-second pitch to the judges crashed and failed because there were so many things to cover! However, it doesn't deter us from believing in the potential of the project just because of the judges and therefore we hope this will be an ongoing project after BizHacks finishes.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were able to come up with a prototype of Lattice and showcase it to others, but most importantly.... we really BELIEVE the potential of it.

What's next for Lattice

Oh man.... So. Many. Things. One of the major implementations we thought of was for sub-contractors and contractors. There is really not a lot of platforms for contractors to find projects that companies throw out to the public. We could use the advantage of Lattice to search for contractors and form groups within them with the perfect skill sets and interests. Every thing is tailored to the contractors which in turn ensure a high success rate of the project made by companies.