REFLECTION

Challenge

The bank’s financial reporting has been done by the MIS department for years. Any financial report

to any of the bank’s business lines/departments can only be requested from the MIS. A set of

monthly reports have been agreed upon, and they have been delivered to the business lines

unchanged for the past two decades. Each time any of the departments has a request besides

the monthly package, he contacts one of the business partners in the MIS department, he

evaluate the request, provide target date, implement the report and share it as an excel

workbook.

Waves of changes have happened, there is no MIS department anymore, the whole group has

been revamped to analytics and data management. Where the basic function is no longer

reporting, yet analytics and performance evaluation. The monthly reporting packages were kept

unchanged though.

This task has consumed many resources which we need to utilize for their main analysis jobs. And

we need to keep the monthly reports on going since this is the business lines only source of data.

Selection

I mixed the tools learning launch tool and ethnography in my solution for the challenge.

Ethnography is a study of the customer’s nature, needs and requirements done through a serious

of interviews and journey mappings. Learning launch tool on the other hand, is a tool where you

experiment suggested solutions to your challenge and test them in action before investing time,

effort and money in planning based on just assumptions. Based on the results of your experiment,

you either move forward with the solution, tweak it, or try another one.

Ethnography and learning launch have best suited my challenge, because we had too many

people involved, the reports requirements have been left unchanged for so long, the business

needs must have been changed ever since and we assumed the reports don’t meet these

requirements anymore. We needed to study our customers’ requirements and new needs. We also

needed to quickly engage with them to come up with a solution as fast as possible. We were not

sure if the suggested reporting automation through web tools would be acceptable to them. And

that is why learning launch is so special. You get to test your hypothesis and make sure they are

your quick fix before getting deeper into execution.

Video Reference: http://moore.com/explore/tagterms.php

Application

We started interviewing our customers in parallel to implementing a prototype of one of the old

reports. We replaced the excel workbooks with a report accessible through the web. Interviews

were scheduled with representatives from each business lines. They included intensive discussion of

what they need to report, their main performance KPIs, what they do with the data we provide

them and how satisfied they are with the current reporting packages and the report requesting

processes.

Once the prototype was ready, we started introducing the users to the new web tool, its main

features and illustrated the available data they could use to make their own basic reports. We also

collected opinions through feedback sheets and questionnaires.

Insights

Both the interviews and the learning launch turned out to be fruitful. The customers have rarely

used the sent reports by the MIS team, the data was insufficient and they don’t meet their

requirements anymore. They also didn’t like how dependable they were on other people for

producing their own reports. They said the process was time consuming and inflexible. The new

reporting tool has been faced with great welcome and acceptance. The new visualization tools

and dashboarding has eliminated the limitations in excel. And this opened the opportunity for a

new level of reporting.

Approach

If I get the chance to do it all again, I’ll follow the same approach and the tools used. They have

proven to be effective in my challenge. We were able to satisfy all the parties involved and we

managed to get out with a detailed plan of replacing the old process with a new automated one

in no time. It also made the customers feel engaged and involved.

