Reflection – Visualization

Challenge & Selection

I was a member of work group in my organization, which was responsible for introduction of a  new data source for financial reports in our company. This process affects many people from  different departments of our company and some people from outsourcing company. Our  purpose was to find out what data is available, how good was it and how we could connect our  current financial reports system with a new data source.

I chose the visualization design thinking tool as it perfectly suited for organizing that process from  scratch. It helped us get a clear understanding of what we have had, describe any possible ways  of solution of our problem, choose the most appropriate way from proposed variants and to  control and improve the final result.

Application

We started the process by drawing the current scheme of loading and transforming data for  financial reporting, indicating all intermediate databases, deadlines and participants in that  process. That made it possible to see clearly with whom and with what we will have to work.

Than we changed the initial data source and tried to adapt our scheme with various options so  as to choose the most optimal option in terms of completeness and accuracy of data, deadlines  and the necessary IT resource for changes.

When all necessary changes were ready and transferred to the production system, we returned  to the scheme to find bottlenecks that could not be identified during development for further  improvement of the process.

Insight & Approach

By using visualization, even at the stage of the discussion of future development, we were able  to identify most of the difficulties that we may encounter, for example, the lack of necessary data  transformation mappings, which due to that were created in a timely manner. Visualization also  helped us to immediately identify all persons with whom it was necessary to agree on changes,  which made it possible not to delay the development process due to such formalities. In addition,  in the process of visualization, certain archaic processes were identified, the rejection of which  made it possible to speed up the readiness of financial statements by 1 w.d.

When I have discovered how helpful and convenient design thinking in general and visualization  in particular could be I start trying to motivate my coworkers using it in their project even if at  first sight, the process does not look like something where you can apply design thinking.

