Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

I am working as a Supply Chain Management Professional in one of the leading telecom tower  companies, my challenge is to improve “supplier satisfaction” who works closely with us for  operations, Repair & maintenance of telecom towers. “Suppliers” who are referred as “Partners”  in my company are the key stakeholders who runs telecom tower sites to provide 100% network  uptime to our customers, hence it is very important to keep Partner satisfaction index on the top  which is a clear evidence for the sustainable network. The secondary stakeholders comprises of  Operations team, Estate Management, Deployment, Technology & Telecom operators. Hence  focus is required on increasing the Partner Satisfaction which is all time low in current situation.    Selection

Since Mind Mapping tool looks for patterns & insights in the large set of data, it generates creativity  between common minds, it helps generating new design criteria & creates insights before What if. Broadly  speaking, it shall help us to get an insight on low partner satisfaction index & shall help us to establish  criteria for What if Idea Generation Phase.

Application

The requirement was to improve the Partner satisfaction by a significant no. of points. So in the process  of using Mind Mapping Tool to generate new insights We organized a workshop where multiple  stakeholders from Partner community, Supply chain, Technology, Estate & Deployment along with subject  matter experts were called upon to provide new insights on the current Partner Satisfaction index  formulation process. Stick notes were handed over to participants along with current process followed in  our organization and they were asked to provide their thoughtful inputs and intuitions on sticky notes  which comes to their mind. After a reasonable amount of time, inputs were collected from participants &  they then were clustered using stratification. Connections were established between clusters by  workshop attendees’ team. Finally the insights were translated into Criteria for new Partner Satisfaction  Index Process which covers the holistic view of the Partner’s expectations.

Insight

By applying the Mind mapping tool, we were able to generate new insights on the Partner satisfaction  formulation process by getting new intuition & thoughtful ideas from different stakeholders. Hence these  insights will place an important role in Design Thinking Process.

Approach

Mind Mapping Tool shall be horizontally deployed in many such similar situations in our company where  we want to get more insights from different stakeholders. Later, Learning Launch technique can also be  used to do an experiment with limited partners and see that how partner satisfaction Index has improved  with new formulation process.

