Reflection -  Learning Launch

By Joe Ferrara

Challenge

As a member of a team who manage a large portfolio of critical IT projects for a big national company, I’m  invited regularly to collect the needs from my clients, launch and manage new projects, and especially to  meet the deadlines, the budget and requirements. It’s such as successive challenges I faced in my business  life, especially when client’s requirements and needs changes continuously. This is the reason why I was  always wondering the following: When I have a challenge, how do I approach it? In reality, even in our  personal life, we face many problems and we go through different challenges every day. We solve most  of them every day too.  The most important thing I learned from this “Design Thinking” course is that we  should resist the temptation to jump directly to a solution and that the value is in realizing that we can  create something that can help people make their lives easier.

Selection

There are several tools and techniques of understanding the needs of a user, client or a customer, but in  my point of view, Learning Launch is the most effective way. To rephrase “Learning Launch”, it is a manner  of creating a minimum viable product that let customers or users test their key assumptions and get an  answer to the big question “What if?”. The point is to start creating a minimum and test it, then we quickly  get more feedbacks and clearer ideas that led us to a prototype. We could also iterate this operation as  much as we need until we get sufficient prototypes, and finally choose the appropriate prototype for our  project or product.

Application

In one of our first learning launch application, I focused on providing an online platform to our users. This  platform was technically complex as it exchanges many encrypted informations with a couple of high  secured systems, using different communication protocols. We were facing another major constraint  when client changes some of their needs every time. We didn’t have any other choice, but adapting our  work and processes to be more agile. After organizing an agile workshop and training to all staff members,  we started being more flexible and soft after receiving any change request from the client. After testing  every milestone of the deliverable, we conducted interviews with users to understand their experiences  and to find out if this new prototype meets their expectations with a priority to ensure that users could  use the platform easily.

Insight

By applying this learning tool, we designed and tested our solutions / product following the agile  methodology. Through the learning process we got to improve our online platform to meet client’s  expectation even if it was changed a lot of times all along the project phase. It’s through this process we  realized which version of platform that users were more comfortable with. We also realized how agile  approach can improve our processes. From now on, all team members and stakeholders welcomed any  new requirement’s change and accepted to review the task’s priorities according to the new change of  needs.

Approach

Therefore, I’m convinced that the Learning Launch is the ideal and appropriate tool four our kind of IT  businesses. Since I already experienced this experience in my professional path, I would recommend this  approach in the future in case of similar activities and/or circumstances.

