Interviewee: F8
Role: facilitator
Date: —
Interviewer: —
Interview Summary
Personas
Project manager for every project
Facilitator role
my role was essentially to bridge different worlds — connecting municipal staff, private sector partners, and donors, and making sure everyone trusted the process.
Facilitator s relation to decision makers project leaders
No response recorded.
First phase start
No response recorded.
Second phase understand
I needed a 360-degree view of everything, because what project managers report doesn’t always reflect the full reality. Once you build trust and a shared language, that becomes easier — but you always need access to concrete information from every angle.
Fourth phase experiment cocreate
No response recorded.
Fifth phase transfer
No response recorded.
Sixth phase finish
No response recorded.
Tools used
No response recorded.
Monitoring progress
No response recorded.
Collaboration
The municipality had little experience taking projects from start to finish, which made engagement difficult at first. Public sector staff often work on isolated parts of a larger whole without ever seeing a full project through — like people designing different parts of a car who’ve never actually assembled one. So we brought in private sector engineers and project managers to fill that gap. What I found is that once municipal staff realised these projects were actually going to happen, they transformed completely. They became internal champions who pushed things forward from the inside. That shift in engagement was one of the most important things to cultivate.
Specific painpoints
The biggest frustration is that all this work — involving hundreds of people and organisations — simply disappears when a project ends. It lives on a hard drive somewhere, and that’s it. A platform could change that in three ways: by keeping pressure on for continuity, by keeping people connected so something new can evolve, and by serving as a permanent record — not a blueprint, but proof that it happened, who was involved, and what was built.
Room for improvement
On repetitive tasks where software could help: meeting preparation is an obvious one — briefing participants, maintaining a track record, handling logistics. And more broadly, being able to access how something was done before — even just a few lines left by a predecessor — is enormously valuable and almost never exists.
Platform requirements
A platform like Alkemio shouldn’t primarily be thought of as a project management tool — its real value is in giving the community ownership of the project and the space to connect and communicate independently. In our projects, people would only come together when we organised something. An online space lowers that barrier significantly. For community members, the added value would be threefold: coordination around shared activities, inspiration and ideas for new initiatives, and — perhaps most importantly — a living history of what has been tried, what worked, and what didn’t. If someone proposes an idea that was already tried and failed, a shared record could prevent that wheel from being reinvented. Reporting to donors always came down to two things: showing exactly where the money went, and demonstrating whether the project was on track. That’s straightforward in a construction project, but much harder when you’re trying to show impact on something like social services. A platform with open access for donors would let them see for themselves — going deeper than any report could.