Design Thinking Final Assignment

Challenge & Selection

I am a member of our Data Analysis team in a small organization where part of my role is to produce  monthly reporting for various lines of business.  This reporting has been going on for many years without  change or modification to them.  Recently it has been discovered these reports are generated and  distributed but are not being consumed. They contain detail information for each line of business  containing month to date, year to date, month over month and year over year comparisons for both  financial and total product quantity information and distributed to all stakeholders. Our challenge is to  make the reports easily consumable and relevant for the stakeholders.  Our Data team is moderately small  and was given until the next reporting cycle to come up with a solution. For this I will be using the Mind  Mapping tool of Design Thinking.

Application

I began looking at all of the most recent reports and started to pull out key pieces of information and  began placing them on poster boards, this was done by enlarging some pieces of the reports.  Next, we  printed out multiply copies of the reports and placed them on tables in the boardroom, with pads of paper  and markers.  We invited all stakeholders into the board room for a casual discussion on the current state  of the reports.  All stakeholders were invited to walk around the boardroom and look at the key pieces of  information enlarged on the poster boards.  Afterwards the stakeholders reviewed the current reports  and made markings on them outlining which information was important to them and what they would  like to see.  Once this was complete, we regrouped to review the findings.  Since the group of stakeholders  and Data team are small (under 10) we regrouped into only one group.  We had each stakeholder share  their changes and information they wanted to see on the reports.  After each stakeholder had taken their  turn, we turned this into a round table discussion while a member from the Data team took notes on the  white board.  Once the round table discussion was finished, the Data team took all the marked-up reports  and notes from the white board.  We used these to make a complete redesign of the current reports.

Insights

By using the Mind Mapping tool, this allowed me and the rest of the Data team to gather firsthand insights  from the users of the reports as to why the reports were not being consumed and what information was  important to them on a monthly basis.  By combining the information on the marked-up reports and notes  from the round table discussion it was clear to see the stakeholders wanted to see high level data with  some visuals to make the reports easy to consume, with the needed detailed reports in the last few pages  of the reports if they needed to review the detail.  This has also shown the need to have dashboards  created from the reports.  This Design Thinking tool was a great approach to understand why the current  process of reporting just wasn’t working and allowed the data team to get firsthand insights from the  users.

Approach

The Mind Mapping tool was the right approach to tackle this challenge, it allowed us to gather insights  and understand what the end user needed.  The most valuable portion of this process was gaining the  firsthand insights from the stakeholders during the round table discussion.

