Example Reflection – Visualization

Challenge    I am a recent graduate from one of the national business school which was established in the  year 2007 in the city of Amritsar, India. Amritsar is famous for the 16th century built golden  temple and attracts a major chunk of revenue from tourism. However the city is connected  with various national and international flights, the institute, being newly established, is not  very notorious among locals.   As there is a culture among Indian B-schools to heavily invest in cultural & management  festivals (events) scheduled every year, the footfall of attendees coming from the whole  nation was limited to 400 students for the previous years. The challenge is to manage the  “Campaigning” for the fest to achieve a 1000+ footfall for the current year.       Selection     As the target was seemingly ambitious, the campaigning team was looking for innovative  ideas to achieve the desired footfall. The whole team sat on the table to apply design  thinking methodology and use the visualisation tool to draw out the complete campaign  together. As the same activities of campaigning were done in the past year, the team had a  fair idea of their achievements and shortcoming which must be kept in mind before rolling  out the final action plan for the current year.    Application    Traditionally, the campaigning was done by appointing campus managers online from  various other institutes, whose job is to forward the event details to the students of their  college. The interested students may visit the hosting college website to explore and  register themselves in various events ranging from cultural & management to sports.  With the help of design thinking and using the tool of visualisation, the campaigning team  explored the “what is” part of the designing and came up with the issues of leaving  everything to campus managers. The whole event seemed to be at the discrete of the  campus manager, who may or may not enthusiastically participate in glorifying the events of  the host college. The whole idea is to increase the participation as it would imply a better  competition and leaning opportunity.    Once the team was done with “what is” part, we moved to “what if” and explored various  options. After doing a considerable amount of design thinking, the team realised the  importance of physical (offline) presence in other colleges to drive the whole campaign. We  divided the teams in “local” & “outstation” units. Various colleges were identified which  were in the vicinity of the city, where participation can be expected from. Using visualisation  tool, we draw a complete system where the Campus Manager would report to the Region  Manager, who would report to the State Manager who would in turn report to the  Campaigning Head. The reporting would ensure that the information is being passed to  each and every student of the college by situating ourselves in their study groups, e-mail  chains and physical posters.

Insight & Approach    Using the design thinking methodology of achieving our 1000+ students footfall mark, we  get to know that the problem lies with the communication channel which was  unidirectional. Visualisation tool helped us to build the channel which was bi-directional and  hence can be used to resolve the queries of the students in real time. The approach was to  clarify all the participation related query within 12 hours, source and maintain an  information channel that would imprint the details of the event in the memories of a large  number of students, in turn kicking a high number of participation and overall campus  footfall.

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