Design Thinking course final task - Reflection

Challenge

I work as a Technical Consultant in my organization’s Digital Identity & Security Global Business Unit. As  part of the Technical consultant’s team, we are responsible of the design, implementation, validation and  delivery of the technical products requested by our customers. I and my workmates must ensure the  products delivered to our customers fulfill all the technical requirements according to their needs and the  reference standard specifications, but also we need to assure they are delivered in the less time possible.  Quality, compliance and time delivery are critical in a market that has been exploited by many other  providers in the last years. In the whole product deployment time line, product validation is one of the  most time consuming tasks, most of my workmates think there are no enough tools to ease product  validations, thus, this reflection focuses on the meetings done by the team to find out solutions that will  help decrease product delivery time.

Selection

Recently, our organization proposed us two sessions to find out a solution for the time variable concern  in the product validation. The first step was to identify the real problem and the scope of the solution to  be proposed. Co-creation was used to find out an objective view of the problem, we wanted people to do  give their own perspective of the problem to identify patterns and themes. To ease the pattern  observation we used the Mind Mapping tool using sticky notes and a board. With this tool we were able  to identify the What is in this context and then start looking for solutions based on common criteria for  all the team members.

Application

For our first session, we focused in the two first Design Thinking questions, What is and What if. In the  beginning of the session, we did short interviews to all of the team members, finding out that the main  factor that increases time variable in product validation is always the lack of tools that allows the  execution of all the tests. To understand the type of tool we were expecting to have, we applied the Mind  Mapping tool using some sticky notes and a board to allow all the team members expose their vision of a  tool that will ease the work and thus, the production delivery time to customers. We divided the board in  three sections, one to put notes with facts that increase validation time (e.g., complexity to understand  and use the tool), the second one to write our thoughts about product validation process (e.g., ensure

quality) and finally one to write ideas about what we expect a tool to have (e.g., a graphical interface and  test reports). After this, we observed and found common comments between the team notes, we  associate them and we questioned them. At the end we found an objective idea of the tool we wanted  and the tedious tasks for the team. This helped us exploring solutions for our problem.

For our second session, we worked in the third question of the process, What wows. We took all the ideas  gathered in the first session. We found the required tool should ensure the quality of the product is still  the best according to the technical standards and that many of the existing validation tools can be re-used  to develop the one we expected. We did some sketches of Graphical User Interface (GUI) as a prototype  and wrote a list with all the requirement of the tool we expect.

The last step related to What works is in process since all our ideas where sent to our organizations  development team to determine the viability of developing a tool that fits all our requirements and then  create a prototype of it to know if it really works or not. It is really important to have always in mind that  the efforts spend in the tool development should be minor to ensure it is cheap and quick to get out if our  ideas don’t work.

Insight

I think that the Mind Mapping tool eased the problem definition and the solution proposal since it was  helpful to gather all the member thoughts and then propose a solution that in the beginning was not  conceived by any of them. During both sessions, I found the expertise of each member is different, thus,  each individual is able to contribute with different ideas. The sessions helped us to understand the  problem we have in a deeper level. We found that for many years, our developing teams have been doing  tools to solve single validations but without a global purpose, so at this moment we have different tools  (some of them we don’t even know yet because of the huge amount of single validation tools that they  had been developed) that somehow can be used to develop a single tool that fulfills all our needs. Having  everything in on single tool decreases time spend in validation considerably and also complexity. Co- working is important to overcome problems and to come up with new and creative ideas. With design  thinking we found our problem was not about just having a tool that executes everything at once, but we  found that if the Technical Consultants feel comfortable, the way they face product validations and the  attitude they have will executing tests is really important too for the time variable.

Approach

Product validation is a task done day by day by each of the Technical Consultants team members, so each  of them has something to say about the way the feel and which improvements should be applied for this  process, thus, the Mind Mapping tool was the appropriate tool to reach an objective solution for the  problem. For future sessions it would be better if the tool developers are involved too so we have a multi- disciplinary session were they will give their appreciation of the new ideas proposed and somehow give  the solution more structure according to the viability of the ideas proposed, this will allow the whole  Design Thinking steps execution to know final results.

