Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

My organization assigned me the role of a Principal Investigator to identify the requirements needed  to develop the next generation of effective electronic system that requires fewer men to operate by  leveraging through advances in technology. The intention is to use this phase to prepare for a major  project that the organization intends to embark on for our key customer. It is important that we know  what we want to and need to do that fits the organization’s  capabilities, to scope the project to what  the customer wants by offering the best value and an accurate project costing and schedule to meet  the financial objectives.       There is limited resources assigned, and it does not help that our competitors keep knocking on the  customer’s door wanting to showcase their latest product. We will need to start small and act fast, do  more with less.

Selection

We want to provide our customer with the new user experience that they can get with our new system  that reduces the operating cost, what we view will give us as an edge over our competitors. We want  to learn quickly from the customer what works well for them and what needs to improve. From the  various design thinking tools and activities, the learning launch tool suits well in this context as we can  build prototypes for our customer to use it so as to experiment with our hypothesis, get the truth to  confirm or dis-confirm our assumptions and iterate the process to learn from the data gathered and  improve. Not forgetting that we want to do the experiments quickly and inexpensively due to limited  resources.

Application

We engage our customer to learn more about their usual workflow in operating similar electronic  system. We follow through the daily routine in their real-life working environment, ask questions to  uncover the rationale behind the way they work as well as interviewing their senior staffs on their  experience to find relevant information and search for the pattern of usage. From the insights gained,  design criteria are established and we brainstormed to come out with the idea of automation of the  user system software with an interactive graphical user interface that require just one person to  operate. We asked a few software developers to help develop a rapid prototype, the first spiral for  the learning launch and deployed the software with our customer to test out our new proposed  automated workflow. A workshop to demonstrate the new features of the interactive graphical user  interface provides to the customer to be familiar with the hands-on experience.

Insight

By applying the learning launch tool to test our assumptions, the feedback that we gathered from the  customer’s hands-on experience highlighted that we have missed out a few key insights about the  customer. The operators that use our new software come from a vast background of experience and  education levels, and each one has a preference to do things in a certain manner. Some of them are

used to having the information presented in tables, while some would want to add in graphs and  statistics that can aid them in making decisions. We realized that while the customer appreciates the  high level of automation that help to reduce the cognitive workload, there is a need to allow  customization on the interactive graphical user interface. This is to allow viewing of processed data in  various formats to suit different preference. We learned from the first spiral prototype and  incorporated the feature of customization of the interactive graphical user interface in the next spiral  prototype.

Approach

As we review through the approach in finding out the pain of what our customer experiences with the  current system, we gathered that the learning launch is an appropriate tool. However, in its  application, it seems like we do not know what we do not know, which is the lack of the ability to  capture the mind of the operators. We can probably involve them during the prototyping to co-create  the test ideas, to confer a sense of ownership, to get their opinions heard, and to provide visualization  of what to expect. These can help to understand each other better.

