Design Thinking for Innovation (Jan – Feb 2018)  Final Assignment - Learning Launch     Submitted by Jyoti Ward – 2 February 2018    1. Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.

My company has in invested in Microsoft Office 365 – a suite of software services and apps to aid  collaboration, document access and productivity. Whilst adoption is gradually increasing, our staff  are not yet taking full advantage of these tools (and so not harnessing savings and benefits to the  company). Some people are relying on ways of creating and sharing documents that they have  become familiar with over many years, but which don’t have the benefits new functionality offers –  e.g. they will email a document to colleagues rather than collaborate online through the enterprise  social network, Yammer.

We want to foster a mindset and skills base across our workforce where the digital tools offered  by O365 are routinely used, providing demonstrable benefits to the way people work.

Using a ‘design thinking’ approach, we carried out some ‘skills insight interviews’ in November.  Assisted by a group of around 15 Office365 (O365) champions (individuals who have taken on a  role to support colleagues in the use of the Microsoft Office 365 suite) we sought to understand  what’s holding people back. We have used these insights to formulate hypotheses that we can  test. This covers the ‘What is?’ and ‘What if?’ steps described in the Design Thinking for  Innovation course.

The next step is to test some of the ideas we generated using experimentation. The ‘Learning  Launch’ tool provides the means to do this in a practical setting with real end-users. This will allow  us to test whether the action taken meets our requirements: namely to increase the skills and  capability of end users in using O365.

2. Selection: In your own words, briefly describe the tool you selected (e.g., what it is and

why you selected it for your challenge -- including any appropriate video lecture  references).    A learning launch is a way of getting real-life feedback on an idea without the need to invest  significant amounts of time and money. The module refers to ‘placing small and affordable bets’  so that you can take stock of what you’ve learned then either refine the idea (iterate) or pivot  (change direction). The purpose of a learning launch is to improve and learn. If assumptions are  true you can scale it up. If assumptions are untrue – you can ‘table it’ go back to others ideas that  have been generated to test these.

In the interviews people had said that if they were unsure how to do something in O365 they said  they would seek support from someone who was more ‘tech-savvy’.     So our ‘fast and cheap’ experiment using the learning launch tool was to test whether end users  would take up an offer of a 30 minute 1:1 personalised support session on using O365. We  anticipated this would prove popular, being bespoke to the needs of the individual and not taking  up too much of their time.

3. Application: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., what

you did and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).

To apply the ‘learning launch’ tool we asked each O365 champion to send out a standard email to  3 individuals offering a personalised 1:1 support session lasting 30 minutes. A screenshot of this  email is shown below:

To quantify what ‘good’ would look like our expectation at the outset was in excess of 50% of  people would take up the offer.    To gain further insights into how people are using O365 and the difficulties experienced we  created a data capture sheets for the champions to complete after running the 1:1 support  session.

4. Insight: Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your

challenge (e.g., how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and about  design thinking more broadly).

We were surprised that less than 30% of people receiving the email offering a 1:1 support session  took this up. We had thought this would be an attractive way for people to ask ‘burning questions’  or develop their skills in using the new software. This is a good example of us ‘failing fast’ – we  didn’t invest inordinate time in implementing something that was not going to work.    When we explored this further with the O365 champions they told us that reasons people gave for  not taking up the offer included:

•  No specific questions to ask about O365

•  Lack of time / other priorities

•  People thought they were already competent in using O365 (but the champions refuted  this – they could see the individuals were not using the functionality of the software to the  full extent)

We also noted that whilst some champions had had 3 positive responses (people who took up the  offer), others had no positive responses to the offer – so there may be something about the  relationship between the champion/end user that is worthy of exploration.

5. Approach: Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same tool you

selected or a different one -- and the reason(s) why.

The findings from the learning launch has led us ‘pivot’ from our initial hypothesis that having a  1:1 support session would be beneficial. The reason for doing this is the take-up being less than  30% – below the threshold we had identified at the outset. This hypothesis been discarded for  now – but we will keep this idea ‘on the shelf’ in case elements of it have merit at a later stage in  our discovery process.    Instead we have turned our attention to another of our ‘portfolio of ideas’ that we wanted to test  that was uncovered in the ‘What is?’ and ‘What if?’ stages – namely that people don’t understand  the benefits O365 can offer. This builds on the finding from our first experiment people did not  have specific questions to ask (perhaps because they don’t understand the benefits?) We have  now designed a second experiment or ‘learning launch’ that will help us explore this.    So we are on a journey. The design thinking methodology has already helped us avoid investing  in something that seems to make intuitive sense, but in practice was shown not to work.

