Coursera: Design Thinking for Innovation - Reflection

Challenge & Selection

As an IT Business Analyst in the financial industry I was confronted with  the task to elicit the requirements for tool which creates investment  proposals. The existing tool has been used for many years and needs to  be updated due to technical constraints. At the same time, some new  features shall be implemented.

The development process in our firm includes Scrum as a simple and  lightweight framework for software development. While in Scrum the  concept of user stories is a way to specify requirements I wanted to use  the design tool of storytelling (see also the lecture for week 2) for  discussing the requirements in order to see whether this concept can be  leveraged.

Application

A workshop was organized with the relevant stakeholders where the  project was introduced. After that, the stakeholders were split into three  groups based on the areas of the new features and were sent to  brainstorming in short breakout sessions.

After the good ideas had been selected the stakeholders were asked to  work out a story for each idea. The stories were discussed, validated and  approved or dismissed.

Insight & Approach

From what I have learned during the workshop when applying the  storytelling design tool is that it didn’t worked well for all requirements. It  also is turned out that it is not a good idea to just use one design tool.

Although I had a story for each idea and there was a common  understanding on how it should work it was difficult for some features to

show HOW it would look like and how they fit into the existing advisory  process.

I decided to mix the use of the design tools and to add visualizing with  models and/or user journeys to the storytelling tool so that a good output  of the workshop can be reached.

Besides the story, the Scrum user stories would not only contain the  requirements in form of a story, but they would also be more complete  by adding an example and a visual where needed which supports the  creation of acceptance criteria.

© 2020 mso

