So, first of all, thank you everyone for joining us today.Basically, what I wanted to do today with you is to share a little bit of my lessons learned during my trajectory as project manager and how that impacted when I started to, to work as project manager in the tech sector. So, first of all, um my name is Mariana La Roche. Um My background is in law. I'm from Colombia. I'm based in Germany and I've been working as project manager for the past eight years, more or less. Um um Currently, I'm the lead project manager of the AOTA Foundation and I'm the co-chair of the Social Impact and sustainability working group of in A P A which is the International Association for trusted Blockchain applications. And today I want to walk you a little bit through my journey as project manager and giving you some like really important lessons learned that like, I wish I would have had at the beginning. So first I wanted to tell you a little bit about my trajectory. So I started in 2013, from 2013 to 2016. I work as project manager for an organization in the human rights sector. Uh We were working in child protection and um and transitional justice back in Colombia.

And then in 2016, I moved to Germany and I started to work as project manager for social businesses in Germany. And that was the first time that I noticed that the approach of organizations to projects is completely different. So for example, in the NGO you focus in the beneficiary, you have an agenda that is dictated for the headquarters. Uh Basically you replicate the same project in different geographical locations, you adjust to the context, but it's basically the same recipe and there's a lot of limitation in the budget and in the decision making process. And then with the social businesses, the focus is completely different.

You have like the focus on clients, you have freedom of your agenda, you decide where to prioritize you are. Um you are able to use new methodologies, then agile comes there because with like the NGO S, you have a certain processes that you need to follow and sometimes they are quite strict if you want to get the the funds from the, from the, from the headquarters or from the fund institutions.

Um And the other thing that I noticed was completely different is that with the social businesses, uh you have a small budget but you have more freedom in how to allocate the budget. Can I go back? I don't know if that was someone. OK. No that's, I think everything is OK. Um OK, so then in 2018, I started to work with the AOTA Foundation. I started a social impact project manager because they were looking for someone that even though didn't have all the technical skills, had the experience of working with projects in the development sector. Um When I started, as I mentioned, I was a social impact project manager right now, I'm the lead project manager of the foundation. And I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the projects that we're implementing. But I oversee uh more than 20 projects by now. Uh 12 are actually under implementation. Some of them. Uh We already hand over uh in full. And since 2021 was also appointed as the co chair of the Social Impact and Social Ability Working Group at in a a and basically what I do there is leading the actions um to showcase the social impact potential of Blockchain projects uh in society and also like kind of like a mediator between the private sector and um and international institutions uh mostly at the European level.

So the main challenges I face with all this switch and things that were like clicking in my head all the time was that um when I started it uh to work on Blockchain, I had non technical knowledge whatsoever. Uh And also it shocked me uh the different mindsets that you have from uh established organizations to the start up world. And also to understand that different from the development sector, when you sometimes replicate the same recipe adjusting to the context Blockchain projects are completely called universe one from another. Like they, there's no recipe that you can apply to all of them, which requires as project manager that you are completely flexible and more willing to adapt to, to the to the partners and the content that you're working on. I saw also some really good opportunities. For example, like understanding that um like the understanding that I brought from, from the development sector really help us to keep impact as the North start. So to focus in what we were doing, so not only focusing on, on, on, on showcasing the technology, but also like how the technology could affect people. And this is how I understood like development sector, social businesses and the technology sector are completely different.

So as I mentioned before, like the focus in one is the beneficiaries in the other one is the business. Well, the focus in tech normally is to showcase the potential of the technology. Um There's a more free agenda, you have a a variety of your use cases that you can implement to showcase that potential, especially with Blockchain, you use agile methods. So you don't have any script of processes that you need to apply one by one uh on the projects. But it's more like a matter of like um testing and adapting and more like a reiterative approach with the people that is involved in the process. And, and that also comes more from like the start approach. Uh I I dare to say, but also um like this freedom that you have to decide with whom to work in what to work and in what to focus. So um jumping a little bit to the projects, as I mentioned, we have right now 12 project implementation and 16 that we already complete. As you can see from the map, we have projects almost in every continent. And this presents more challenges because you need to adapt to the cultural um kind of like cultural customs of the people that you're working with and the way that they communicate the times in which they work and some other like more uh underlying challenges that you normally don't face if you are working in one project in one area.

And also what it makes it more challenging is the amount of partners that you work with. So right now, we have like over 100 40 partners for like those projects. We have projects where there are like 2030 partners and the strategies that you need to put in the process that you need to put in place to actually engage them are completely different and more challenging. So one of the things that I would like to say um there is that the, when IOTA, when I started in AOTA, it was quite new, the organization as well. So there was no processes in place. There was no um a guide of like what we needed to do as project managers. So we needed to, to create it from the scratch, which was really interesting for us. Uh And it was a really good opportunity because what we did was like learning by doing and I think that that's um a lot uh or like brings a lot of value to, to how we implement the projects because I like really customize the methodologies to each of them. So of course, you have traditional tools that you, that I like that you learn in any other like kind of project management, uh management settings, like theory of change or the three of problems or stakeholder analysis or logic frame.

So of course, all of those you can bring it and, and starting um uh and applying them to the projects, especially at the scoping level, but at the implementation level, uh I would really recommend agile because it just like help you to understand and to reiterate and have like feedback loops of the time.

So basically you don't and I'm gonna talk a little bit more about this later. You don't wait until you have something ready to deploy it and showcase it to, to, to the clients or partners. But you have like a small releases to actually like reiterate what you're doing and collect more feedback and adapt So one of the projects that I wanted to use as an example is the DGIT. The DGIT is a project that we have with the European Union. And we have like more than 10 partners and we are creating a digital twins of mines in Europe. The until 2020 is wrong. The date. Sorry for that. It is 2024. Um But basically we are creating um digital twins where we are putting also some sensors to measure the quality of the air, the conditions of the mine, the production levels and the health conditions of the workers. And we are comparing these also with the environmental impact of the mine to do this. We have like as I said, like over 10 partners and our role at Toyota is like really small. So this happens a lot also when you work in in in coalitions like this one.

So basically we depend on the progress that other partners are doing and we need to adapt to their needs and the speed that they work in order to ask uh for us to do our our job. So basically what we are doing here is creating the the the underlying network where the different like um partners are going to communicate and share information to Blockchain. But to do that, we need the people that is collecting the data, the people that is deploying the sensors, the people that is actually owning the mine and know like or like have the data of the mine. So we, we need to coordinate with them. So it's a lot of like uh partners, management and relationship that needs to be involved, to know where they are, how you can support them to, to get from A to B and in which moment your interaction is going to be valuable or needed. So here's when I was mentioned also about agile because with agile for me, it's like one of the best uh methodologies to apply when you are talking about like or like deploying tech or working on tech like Blockchain or like any other kind of tech. Because as I said, you don't wait, you don't wait until the end to present your solution. Rather you have like a small releases where partners or clients can come talk to, you see what you're doing and provide feedback and you can adapt and then reiterate.

So the the phases are the same as as in any other methodologies that like uh for like software development uh methodology. So it's like you, you define the technical requirements, you do the planning and how you're actually going to to do the development, then you crane and implement and then you review a monitor that is where you just collect the feedback loops and then you go back again. So this is like the the key component of how to do it. And of course, as project manager, you are involved in all the process of coordinating between technical um leads and the developers. What are like the main um actions that they need to take in the moment, also coordinating that they are not spending much time that they should because that will impact your, your your budget but also coordinating with partners that are non technical. So sometimes you work as a translator from the technical part to the non technical. So they understand why, why certain requirements are needed or like even how Blockchain works uh in some of the cases. So one of the things that I wanted to bring uh to you as well is what we are doing within a a. So in 2021 we conducted a report with 69 projects, Blockchain projects working with sustainable development goals.

Um Basically, most of the projects that you can see were in the global North and they were trying to do impact um in the global South, which is the the same case scenario with development uh projects normally. And um the conclusions and what was important of the report is that we were trying to understand what were the challenges and opportunities that they face when trying to address SDGS or generate impact. And the four challenges are those that are presented in the slide. So the first one was that there was not a unified method to measure impact, they don't have a unified definition of impact. But also like there is not a unified definition. They don't know exactly what impact means. So they don't know how to showcase that. They are like actually creating impact interoperability between different protocols, which is something that doesn't happen only um to those working in social impact in Blockchain. But like almost every Blockchain project then education and research in Blockchain technology, especially for people that is not technical.

So they can understand why do they need the technology? The what what we always say is just like most of the people don't even understand how the phone works. They don't need to understand how the phone works. They just need to know how to use it. And the idea is to come to that point as well with Blockchain in which we see the value and where actually is valuable to implement and employee Blockchain projects. Um But for like non technical people or people that is just approaching uh Blockchain, it might sound like a really complicated uh area that they don't want to explore. So how we actually like land, um these concepts in a way that everyone can understand. And then the last one was access to resources to implement and scale the projects that also comes because of the fact that they cannot prove that they are doing impact. So if they cannot show to their funders that they are like creating impact, why they will allocate more resources to them. So right now we are working with the social impact and sustainability working group in creating a super simple model that they, that the projects need to follow to showcase that they are creating impact.

So it's like really simple steps considered and these are really small organizations or small projects and they don't have experts in impact measurement or that they don't have resources to allocate for an external consultant. We hope to release that model in the couple in the next couple of months. So I I'm more than happy to share some, some, some information about it later on and some important finance remarks that like I wanted to do because I wanted to open for four questions. Um Is uh if you are working in the technology sector, like one thing that you cannot do is like lose the social impact side of things because technology always impacts society. Like if we just like thinking that well, no, but I wonder like we always think by granted like when the cars were invented, that actually changed the way that we trade and the impact in society was massive and technology is evolving faster than anything else. So it's really important to keep the Human Centered design um at the core of what we are doing. So we don't lose track of for whom are we developing those solutions, then keep learning? Because as I said, uh technology is developing so fast that if you take for granted that you already know everything that you need you probably will be left behind because it's changing all the time. And companies normally are really, really good at documenting what they're doing.

So there's a lot of like white papers or like uh presentations of the projects or sometimes really um easy articles to read um about what they're doing. So you can just like keep track of what is going on. Then if I can recommend something for the project managers is the agile methodology because it's super useful. And also it's just like one of those methodologies that everyone use like agile and prints. So it's really good to um take a course or like try to just like get familiarized with the concept. It's super simple and easy to apply. Once you understand, then uh also for project managers, strong things make everything easier. So if you have in your team, people that you can trust and that you can work together with and you can actually delegate and make it easier. Like um I couldn't just like do 12 projects by myself. I have a really strong team and I can delegate projects to them and then I just oversee uh what they're doing and help them uh with whatever they need. And then the other thing that we actually do all the time with the projects and with our personal work is retrospective and lesson learned is like kind of like coming from agile but like to our individual work and also to the projects to understand what is going, well, what is not going that well, it needs to be improved and how we can help each other to uh overcome those, those challenges.

Um I'm gonna open to Q and A but then I will need to go back, but like here is my linking on Twitter if you want to stay in contact um or want to discuss anything else like I tend to answer really fast. Oh, well, I'm happy you like it. Um What kind of protocol do you use? Ah OK. So I didn't talk about that because we didn't have that much time and I didn't want to do it like complicated. But um um AOTA has their own protocol. So we are not um traditional Blockchain. We are ad lt. So this, this um uh the centralized technologies uh but we don't work with Blockchain concretely, we work with something called the D A which is the uh is a direct a cyclical graph which work with a consensus mechanism. I'm not a technical person. I barely can explain it, but I can share more information about it. AOTA has a really great blog if you want to read more about it and we explain everything really, really easy. So everyone can, can, can understand uh what are we doing with the technology. So you are more than uh welcome to go there. Let me see if I can create a that uh here, you go and we are super active to publish everything that we do.

So we, every time that we have a project, we, we publish an article about uh with whom is the project, what are the main goals? What are we doing? Where are we at right now? So you just like find all the information there. Um And also there are like um uh articles about the development of the core protocol right now because there are some major changes that are coming. Uh Also we have a super active community. So I don't know if you all know how Blockchain works, but like normally the protocols have. So just see the foundation more as a research and development uh foundation where we are like actually improving the technology. And then there are like some community networks um outside of the foundation that are building on top of our protocol. Um don't belong to the foundation but they are working uh with our protocol and they are super active in deploying a lot of solutions if you are interested in NFTS. Um Soar Birds is one of my favorite community projects. I'm gonna leave you here also the link. So you can just like take a look. And as our technology, for example, doesn't need the miners um because it worked with like this consensus mechanism and there is no like the the like the mining is not required so they don't have time to explain that right now.

Um, the, the, the, the gas fees are like, at minimum and sometimes it's just like, even zero. So I will really invite you if you want to just like, test NF this and try it just like, go to sooner and play with it because it's really easy to use. Um, I don't know, we have one more, more minute. I don't know if someone else has questions. Let me check. Mhm. Mhm. Ok. I don't see anything else. Yeah. So then again, thank you everyone. I'm glad you like it and that it was clear. Um You got my contact, just reach out to me if you have more questions or you have something else you want to discuss. I have some questions in the Q and A where is the Q and A? Am I missing something? I don't see it. Um I'm sorry, but um but yeah, just contact me via linkedin if you need something else and then I will go back to you. Do you feel drive innovation for this initiative? OK. But do you feels drive innovation for this in oh partnerships. That's like for me, the main thing like um the main idea is to actually like get more people that adopt the technology and that make it easy to understand for people.

So um one of the things that I like about like the projects is that like if you talk about Blockchain or the protocols of how everything works is like for like non technical people, it looks like it's like that no one can understand. But if you have projects and you can showcase actually like where to implement and what is the value of the technology that will help them to understand? They will be like? Hm, maybe we can also apply this here or uh this solution can be applied here. There are also projects and partnerships for me is what drives more innovation if you have more questions? OK, then, great. Then I'm happy you, you all like it. Um As I said, just contact me if you need anything else. Um And yeah, thank you for joining and hope to hear from you as well soon. Bye.