Challenge: Workflow Improvement

I am working for marketing department and our challenge is to improve the workflow within the department

in order to increase productivity and to spend marketing budgets effectively. The project scope includes the

marketing team composed of 10 employees, as well as the larger marketing department and IT department.

The project is limited to internal resources such as budget and employee time. The project should last within

30 business days. We will focus on trying to uncover what our team members consider to be ineffective or

problematic with regard to the workflow.

Selection

As our team has not gone through any design thinking activities/tools and tended to stick with documents

based discussions, we have started to try visualization tool. We used straw man visualization to visualize how

each stakeholder work and feel in each event.

Application

For our first session, we focused on drawing the existing workflow of our marketing tasks. In particular, we

wanted to see how we are collaborating among the organization. We drew straw man diagram inside

marketing department for the process of event marketing. To develop the straw man graphic, we used existing

materials available to understand the environment. The existing materials include operational or procedural

documents, training materials, marketing materials, or other auditing reports. In the case materials were not

available, then we conducted informal interviews with the stakeholders. When we draw the straw man graphic,

we sometimes referred the simple icons and shapes of power point and also used some photographs. After

drawing the straw man graphic, we did the group discussion consists of 5 to 6 stakeholders and asked the

following questions.

1) What key elements are missing from the graphic?

2) What would you change about the graphic to make it more accurately reflect your problem space?

3) How did you feel in each step of workflow and how it could be improved?

After the session, we summarized the answers from discussion groups and discussed what kinds of shared and

new insights we could get from the group discussion.

Insight

What we have learned from this exercise is as follows. The graphic gives stakeholders a clear understanding

about their problems and makes it easy to share each of their perspectives. It worked pretty well to develop

insights into potential root causes of their problems. They didn’t have so much experience to use graphic,

however, they could quickly adjust to use the graphic to express what they think as a problem and also it was

easy for them to identify what other people would like to share. Based on these activity, we could identify

what would be the potential causes of the problem and where to start to improve it.

Approach

As we have not done any activities after the visualization, the next step would be to try something based on

the assumption. We assume the next potential tool would be learning launch tool. By using it, I believe we

can easily find viable solution based on the result of some trials.

