Challenge   I was allocated to head the application support team of my company which has customers around the  globe, the challenge was the current application which was built in-house had multiple issues, very  frequent system outages end up multiple escalations, while providing application support, management  asked me to assess the current system strengths/weakness and submit proposal on whether continue  current system OR replace with vendor partner system.

Another challenge was, company to move forward with a decision as quickly as possible to retain the  customer and marketplace, additionally all existing issues to be resolved as quickly as possible.

Selection:

I have formed 6 members team and worked as 3 groups (2 members in a group), we have had multiple  brainstorming session and chose learning launch tool for our assessment, so that we could quickly  gather/generate the ideas and develop the required hypothesis, submit the proposal to the  management.

Application:

We have conducted 2 learning launch sessions for the period of 2 months and followed agile  methodology, so that all 3 groups update/review the progress daily basis.

During first launch, we have prepared the team already had different sets of questionnaire to get the  information and ran 3 groups with exclusive tasks. The 1st group engaged with customers to gather the  feedback, pain areas and what improvement they look for. 2nd group worked with internal  IT/Engineering/support team to gather application issues and what real improvements and the 3rd group  engaged with vendor partner to assess/gather their system.

During our second launch, we focused further gathering inputs from customers and our management on  the budget and vision on the current system.

Insight & Approach:

After completion of second launch, we gather all inputs/suggestions and created a pivot to create our  hypothesis, the feedback from both customers and internal IT team were same and they were happy  with existing system provided the list of predominant issues are resolved, customers felt much  comfortable with current system as this provides all their needs, this matched with our 6 member team  assessments.

However the management feedback was to replace the system as they saw the maintenance of current  system is overhead and they were ready for vendor partner system.

We have submitted our proposal to retain the current system based on the ideas generated from our 6  member team, customer and internal IT teams.

Besides, this learning launch activity produced lots of data and experience as we conducted workshops  with 3 different areas (customer, internal IT team and management) and were able to complete them in  a quick period of time, hence I would use learning launch tool whenever quick ideas required and large  amount of people involved in the exercise.

