Anas Naser

1. Challenge:

I work in a special sales unit inside a big multi-national manufacturing business.  Our Sales unit is specialized in Travel Retail channel (Airports, cruise ships, boarder  stores, etc). The unit is semi-autonomous in terms of structure, strategy, internal  processes and business objectives than the rest of the company.  The unit structure consists of three departments: Sales, Marketing, and Finance.  The other resources (example: HR) are leveraged from the total group.  The challenge that the unit is facing is in internal communication between the three  departments.   The current communication is intense, casual, and repetitive in many cases. This is  causing considerable time to be wasted in answering communications and providing  information.

2. Selection:

An ambassador was selected from each department (Sales, marketing, and finance)  to tackle this issue.  It was agreed to use Visualization as a tool to highlight the current What Is?  Situation.  According to Fatma Ivanova and Sandeep Jones’s book “Designing for Growth”, this tool  transforms information into images and is used to make sense of our observation of  customers and their journey, in our case the customers are actually personnel in  each dept.

3. Application:

The ambassadors agreed to be included in cc in any info or feedback request sent by  someone in their department to another department.  For example, if a marketing personnel sends a request for retail prices overview to a   sales personel, he or she needs to put the marketing ambassador in cc in this email.  Then all ambassadors will collect data over a certain period of time and all  information will be demonstrated in one visual.  A geometric symbol was assigned to each unit (Rectangular: sales, triangle:  Marketing, square: Finance).  Arrows were used to indicate the direction of info request or communications from  one department to another.  The font thickness and colour of the arrows indicated the number of times an info  was requested (for example: blue Thin arrow/1 to 2 requests – red thick arrow/3 or  more).  Since there are many types of requests which could not be demonstrated on the  visualization tool, this type of information was left to the ambassadors to highlight in  a summary below the visual.

4. Insight:

After compiling and translating all data into the visualization tool, the following  observations were clear:

a. Thick and red arrows heading from finance and marketing towards sales

department.

b. Thick and red arrows heading from sales to marketing (thus two-way heavy

communications between both departments).

c. Black thin arrows heading from marketing and sales departments towards

finance.

Additionally, the ambassadors indicated below the Visualization tool that some  requests were actually repetitive.  From this overview it was clear that sales and marketing departments lacked a  coherent-single data base to share with the other units.  Since the red thick arrows pointed out mostly to sales from the other departments,  this indicated that this department was a major source of information from the field  of business while it didn’t have a common and regular source for this information.  Each sales region had a different form of the same data and each kept it in isolation  of the rest of the regions and departments.  Marketing had the same issue to a lesser degree.  The best practice was finance department, which managed to keep a meaningful and  updated source which they used to systematically share information with the other  departments.  By using this design thinking tool, we were able to demonstrate dull data in an  interesting way to all stakeholders in one snap shot.   We were able to indicate the magnitude of the communication problem per  department and where mostly the problem lays.   Also we were able to indicate a department that might have a best-practise  approach that we might be able to build on (finance).

5. Approach:

The Visualization tool was a great indicator but it had limitations too.   As can be seen above, ambassadors from each department had to quote impressions  or feedbacks from remembers of their departments.   Perhaps in next round of finding out What is, we could use Journey mapping to add  another layer of info.  This layer would simultaneously present the highs and lows of each dept in  connection to the others on the same journey or process of work. In this case we  could capture stages of struggle between the departments, where a high point of  one department is a low point for another on the same stage, and try to make all the  journey of all departments a journey of high points.      Thank you.

