Junior Wallace  Design Thinking - Assignment

Design Thinking - Assignment - Design Tool ‘VISUALIZATION’

1. Challenge

I work within the technology consulting domain focussed on banking and capital markets. We  serve a large European bank with an in-house solution. After working with the client successfully  for 3 years, the client expressed cost pressure and the need to bring down cost of operation. Client  gave a specific mandate that the additional cost savings would have to come from (a) building  scale in the solution (b) mutualize cost with other banks in the market by proposing a common  Utility model. This posed huge challenges -   (A) LOT OF REDTAPE - The business that we operate in 'Banking' is fraught with Compliance, Risk  and Licensing laws & regulations which made it almost impossible for us to realize this solution  requirement.  (B) SELF INTEREST GROUPS - Key vendors that provide data to our current solution do not want a  mutualized solution which would lead to consolidation and reduce their own revenue generation.  (C) UNCHARTERED TERRITORY - As we found out, there was only 'one' other company in this world  which is 'trying' to build a similar solution with another bank. We were stepping into an unknown  territory.

2. Selection

As any product/solutions designing company will tell you that it is a highly competitive business  and hence information is highly secretive. There are non-disclosure agreements signed annually to  ensure employees do not divulge key information to competitors. There was no comparative  data/knowledge available for reference. This led us to using VISUALIZATION as the core design  tool. The rationale behind using VISUALIZATION was precisely because 'imagination' would play a  key role in this solution design challenge. We knew key challenge areas would need  VISUALIZATION techniques applied to generate ideas and WHAT IF scenarios/Use Cases. Key teams  had to unlock their creative side and VISUALIZE a solution as described in Module-1 of this course,  VISUALIZATION.

3. Application

VISUALIZATION Workshops with 4 different groups were organized. We identified (a) Business  Development/ Legal Team, (b) Technology, (c) Operations Staff & (d) Business Analyst as the core  groups we need to visualize with.  (a) Business Development/Legal Department (2 members) - We asked them to visualize all possible  worst case scenarios linked to contract we had signed with client bank or vendors companies. We  asked they divide the whiteboard vertically (two halves). One side would capture breach of  contract scenarios with client, the other would focus on vendor.  (b) Technology Department (2 members) - We asked them to VISUALIZE using a high level  architecture diagram. We gave them a scenario where 50 banks would like to use the existing  solution under a common platform. This question was sufficiently broad enough to help us get the  right scalable technical design visualized.  (c) Operations Staff (3 members) - As an experiment we asked them to list down all the areas of  improvement and challenges they face on day-to-day basis. This was intended to stimulate their  thought process to foresee challenges in managing a platform used by more than one bank.  Something they are not used to handling. The initial white boarding process focussed on current  Bank's staff challenges. Once these where captured, we ask them to visualize the same problems  under a multi-bank design, so they could validate if the problem/challenge would further  deteriorate or remain same.  (d) Business Analyst (4 member team) - were given the same challenge as the Technology team.  They had to image the current platform being shared among 50 Banks. They had to VISUALIZE how

Junior Wallace  Design Thinking - Assignment

each module within the solution would cater to 50 different banking clients. How the different  business requirement and timing differences in markets location would impact us and which  functional components would fail or deteriorate in functionality. They would visualize using MS- VISIO based Flow Diagrams.

4. Insight

VISUALIZATION helped us unearth some very interesting risks and opportunities. Having 4 groups  visualize in isolation helped reduce the chances of each group getting influenced by the other. This  ensured that we got a large set of diverse data points for further brainstorming and WHAT-IF/  WHAT-WOWS analysis.  (a) Legal departments visualization - made it clear that there was bad news - the scalability of this  solution was tied down to convincing vendors to a different contract terms and those terms were  not something vendors would agree to. This had the highest level of impact in our final solution  design. Good that we had these session with them  (b) Technology Team - made it look like cake walk. They backed their architecture requirement  visualized in the diagram with clear reference to Retail/Healthcare domains where similar  technology was already in use. This provided us a lot of relief and confidence that this is doable  (regardless of legal issues)  (c) Operations Staff - Though the insights visualized through this team were not adding to our  overall solution design decision process. The data points visualized helped capture some long- existing pain areas in current solution. We added them to a to-do list as they had the potential to  be our 'WHAT-WOWS' feature enhancements.  (d) Business Analyst - This visualization exercise was taken up for several weeks due to the sheer  size of the scope. These Visualization sessions brought out a clear functional design and pointed  out components that would regress and those that would need to be newly built. In subsequent  sessions with BA Team, we added new constraints to the visualization criteria that were based on  Legal department's contract related constraint. This lead to significant changes to our functional  design

5. Approach

Though VISUALIZATION worked wonders for us, we might have also used Learning Launch in this  case. The key argument against using learning launch was the requirement of dedicated people  and resources for several weeks which would need significant funding and approval.  VISUALIZATION is more cost effective and easy to implement. Learning Launch might have added  advantage of providing us additional insight into risk areas that may have been overlooked in the  VISUALIZATION exercise, however, that was not a significant concern for the stakeholders.    VISUALIZING with Legal, Technology, Business and Operations staff provided us not only the  required data for solution designing, but also helped build a second layer of network group that  could be utilized for more consulting, prototyping & testing opportunities down the line. The  solution design was not addressing all the constraints we would have loved to address, however,  with VISUALIZATION data on our side, we were able appropriately call out the constraints as out of  scope areas.

