End of year reflection
The approaching holiday season at the end of the year is always a good time to halt, and reflect on the past year, the challenges we faced and the achievements we have accomplished together.
One challenge was of course the extraordinary situation that COVID19 has placed us all in, both professionally and personally. From a team perspective, personal interaction with stakeholders was replaced by countless WebEx meetings, skype sessions and phone conferences. As useful as these tools have proven, we are very much looking forward meeting you all in person again.
However, despite the difficulties, these tools have allowed us to stay in contact with you, coordinate the further development of LARA, provide online training sessions and alike. And as much as the end of year is a good time for reflection, it is also a good time for saying thank you.
We want to say “Thank you” to you, our stakeholders, for the excellent cooperation this past year and the continuous active interchange despite COVID and the shattering effect on our industry. We have received a lot of valuable feedback for further improving LARA, eventually developing LARA V4 and releasing patches for V3.1 and V3.2.
This year we would also like to take the opportunity to say thank you to a group of people that has been key all these years in our work, but remain often in the background. There is a EUROCONTROL LARA Team, and then there is a Graffica LARA Team, and these guys have a significant impact on the success of LARA since the beginning more than ten years ago. The Graffica team is composed of a group of young engineers that have always been very eager and interested to address even the most tricky requests we or you (our users) have managed to come up with.
Next year will be Graffica’s 21st anniversary. Since early in its formation the company has worked closely with EUROCONTROL on a number of projects, from developing ATC simulators and HMIs to prototyping and simulation platforms.
Graffica is based in Great Malvern, a small town halfway between Birmingham and Bristol in England. For us from the EUROCONTROL LARA Team it has become a regular travel destination for management meetings, acceptance testing and specific sessions to address difficult new requirements. Together with users we met at Graffica to brainstorm with their engineers to find the best possible solutions.
We did this for example with supervisors of the Belgian Air Force very early in the program to fine tune the HMI of LARA and later with colleagues from the Finnish AMC to find a way to address the Dynamic Mode of Activation and making the functionality useful for a wide range of LARA users.
Graffica engineers have joined us to meet users on-site to see and feel how the system is used and what the challenges are that operators face in day to day business working with LARA.
Wherever we went, whatever the challenge, in the past 10+ years it has been a pleasure working with the “lads” and we hope you join us in thanking them for the good support!
To all our stakeholders: the best season’s greetings from the LARA Team(s). We are looking forward working and meeting you again in 2021.
