Reflection – Fast Forward

Challenge

I am a member of my company organization on IT department and my/our challenge is to improve the  workflow of project deployment within our department in order to ensure the project needs is well  defined and the delivery is on-budget, on-schedule, enough resource and on the right quality. Our IT  deployment team is composed of 4 employees that covering regions all over the world. In most cases, we  are working closely with markets in our region as well as the central team. The project is not limited to  internal resource and can be triggered whether from market or also from central. We are trying to focus  on what is the best way to define the effective workflow in order to meet our team’s objectives.

Selection

Our team has already tried some design thinking tools like visualization and storytelling, however we see  that most suitable tool is what we called ‘fast forward’ which allow you to experiment quickly with  minimum cost, test the idea by creating small prototype, validate it with your stakeholders and ‘un-plug  the cable’ (fail fast) if it’s not giving the expected value.

Application

As our first assessment, we focused on the information that we can use/collect in order to complete the  deployment task. We wanted to see if we could structure this information systematically so it can be  retrieved by anyone in our team without additional effort to check it again with respective stakeholders.  We tested our assumption that the main causes of ineffective workflow is because of the structure of the  information in regards to the project, how it’s being retrieved and how quick this information should be  updated. Our team is conducting several meetings to list down all the required information to  deliver/deploy the project, structure it into more readable list by keeping only the important information  and build small prototype to cover some of our projects.

For the next assessment, we focused on getting more clarity about the project and to order it based on  priorities. The aim is to test our assumption that prioritization of the project was also part of the main  cause of ineffective workflow. Our team was working together to gather this information from various  stakeholders in the IT and business department. We took the opportunity to share our small prototype,  check and validate the information with them and make the necessary adjustment based on their  feedback on the completeness of information and understand the level of prioritization that’s expected.

Insight

By applying the fast forward tool, our team validated the initial assumptions and designed the better  prototype based on the given feedback. We expect that with more centralize information and accessible  to our stakeholders, it would be fairly given the transparency in terms of project that we should deliver.  This will ensure the join efforts from our team to build source of truth that would improve the significant  efforts and time to get the necessary information. We are now starting to use the prototype in our day- to-day project activities in order to prove the value while keep improving it in order to build the MVP  (Minimum Viable Product).

Approach

As we have gone through on several design thinking activities/tools and we believe that Fast Forward is  still the most suitable one. The reason is because it gave us the better view on what’s needed by our  stakeholders, allow us to test using small prototype and validate the result so we may adjust or fail  quickly without having significant investment on cost, resource and time.

