Learning Launch – New Product Induction

Challenge

We are part of the Project management office (PMO) in our company that is responsible for evaluation of  new products and software that could be used in the organization. Currently the “Project Engineering  Department” comprising of about 700 people use at least 5 completely different tools to monitor their  project progress , maintain team responsibilities, track changes to projects (scope or schedule), use  various activity flows for standard tasks, maintain team information, etc. The PMO team has researched  and evaluated a new single product that performs all the above mentioned functionalities that would  greatly reduce human errors while reconciling monthly updates that has become highly cumbersome. It  would also give the organization more powerful reports that enables decision making a seamless and  action oriented activity.

The objective for the PMO team is to convince the key users of the Project Engineering department of the  benefits of this new product so that 5 different tools can be eliminated and the organization can make  use of a single powerful product that will make the department more productive and efficient. The Key  users are seniors and experienced folks who have seen the amount of time it takes to make the  organization adopt a new product and have serious objections to change the current way of working. Also,  the finance department needs to know within the next 60 days if they have to include the product license  cost in the annual budget. So a feasibility study report has to be completed in the next 6-8 weeks.

Selection

Since the Key users and PMO have had multiple meetings and discussions and they were leading nowhere,  we realized that a more practical approach needs to be taken to have a more meaningful conclusion. The  discussions were leading us to the same questions - How user friendly is it? Are the reports meaningful?  How easy is it to shift our current data to the new product? etc. On one hand the PMO team had seen  demonstrations and read the documentations of the new product but on the other hand the Key users  wanted their practical questions to be seen in real-time and not rely on a sales pitch or a promotion  documentation.

Based on the above scenario we collectively decided to use the “Learning Launch” concept of Design  Thinking that would bring all the right people together and evaluate the product in a unbiased manner. A  time bound access to a limited set of users would provide greater insights to the product much more than  the documentation and demo videos that we had seen and been discussing so far.

Application

As a part of the Learning Launch, we first made a full list of all the different use cases that the 5 tools  provide us today. We then spoke to the Product company and explained them our company’s scenarios  using those use cases. That gave the product company a clear insight on how are our teams organized,  what kind of data do we collect and how do we use these tools.

The product team then took a week to setup a test environment of their product and provided exclusive  access to our key users to it. In the meanwhile we setup 5 groups of volunteers headed by one Key user  each and listed out clear functionalities to test and experience and make notes.

We setup a weekly review with the Product company who were very forthcoming in understanding our  situation and to discuss our concern and findings. These discussions gave great insights into the product  as well as a better way of addressing our scenarios. We clearly documented our observations on a scale  of 1-5 on various parameters like ease of use, integration with other systems in our organization, access  to relevant reports , etc.

Looking at our due diligence , in week 4 of the learning launch , the product company shared one of their  success stories that they had collected from implementing their product in a company that is twice as  large as ours and is also in the same industry as we are. This greatly shifted the approach and attitude of  the volunteer teams. Their doubts on a large scale implementation was greatly answered when they learnt  how the product has simplified the operations and governance of the larger company. Also the product  company shared certain quantifiable benefits that could be achieved by the product that gave us new  insights that we had not considered.

Insight

At the end of the learning launch session we had much more documented scenarios than we initially  hoped. The Volunteers created their own cross team discussion groups and shared their findings and  inferences. All the use cases were looked under a common objective instead of treating them  independently as per our current setup. The documented discussions with the product company brought  out more clarity into what the product could offer and how could it enhance our overall operations. The  success story that we reviewed brought confidence into the volunteer teams and addressed their  concerns on a large scale implementation. It funnily even brought out how we were using certain  functionalities in our current tools the wrong way! The quantitative results gave the leadership team a  good data driven reasoning  on why we should go ahead with the product launch. Finally the team made  a well documented statistical and analytical feasibility study report on the benefits of moving to such a  system and how it would impact the company’s revenues in the years to come.

Collectively it was a good decision to give ourselves the opportunity to come together on the same side  of the table and look at the situation from a common ground. The activity brought teams across industries  and even across regions together and address a crucial issue that couldn’t have been appropriate to  complete with just the PMO team. It also gave us great insights into the way people think, speak and  behave. How their personal experiences in their careers and lives influence the decisions they make in  their day to day activities was very insightful to observe and learn.

Approach

This whole experience over the last couple of months was an eye-opener for all of us. We are glad we  made an informed decision to go ahead with this approach to the product implementation and are well  on our way to execute a thorough plan in the coming months. We all know each other at a more personal  level now and the product team and our key users are working together as one team. There would be  other scenarios in future like the phased sunset of existing tools, deriving the same metrics as of today  from the new product , establishing a common training and product support team, etc. We believe that  the highly interactive Learning launch tool from Designing Thinking would be appropriate in those  scenarios as well and would give us a much faster result into addressing real scenarios much before we  encounter them.

