Challenge

I am a member of an organization’s analytics team and we had to come with an action plan to  improve organizations data & insights consumption for better decision making, thus making the  decisions more objective. The project scope included 5 people in the team with diverse backgrounds  and skill sets to create a roadmap and feature list for a product which would promote the use of  data in everyday decision making. We also want this tool to cascade and give a unified view of the  key performance indicators from the CXO to the operation manager at the same time give enough  degrees of freedom to allow for data exploration at operational levels . We knew there were existing  solutions but were not widely adopted so we sensed there were  hidden challenges which we  wanted to uncover and solve with the new product.

Application

We applied the visualization tool [Module1]and the mind mapping tool [Module  3]as  our primary  motivation was to get a holistic view of the problem space

We start this process by drawing a problem map based on current understanding. Each of us are  from different backgrounds and we referred to variety of sources – existing dashboards, training  materials , documentation,  SOP documents, SLAs etc. We collaboratively mind mapped all the  problem areas we could uncover from our research

We also conducted interviews with different stakeholders at different levels to get their points of  view and pain areas. For each of the areas we listed what was needed for a customer and what  process  enabled or blocked this to have both points of view – the need and the constraint. With this  information collated, we sketched broad personas for stakeholders and for each persona we used  jam session with the stakeholders to help close any open ends in the problem space.

Some example personas were

– IT function leader - Bob , who wanted prescriptive suggestions and does not want to explore  insights himself

-Operational Manager - Mark , who was very hands on and wanted the freedom to explore and play  around with the data

Each group went to small group discussions to list down and we collated all problems on the jam  board

Once we had all the problems listed we collated them to a unique list of issues the product is to  solve and validated these back with the stakeholders to agree and prioritize activities . Then the  implementation started which made the roll out and adoption much more seamless and was  welcomed by the stakeholders.

Insights

The problem mapping and prototyping sessions were very useful as

1 – They created a visual for the problems and opened new ways of looking at the issue at hand

2 – Opened new ideas due to small group brainstorming exercises

3 - By doing this sessions we uncovered some key problems which we as a team have not listed  before. It also helped us validate some of our assumptions

4 - The team and the stakeholders were usually open to reprioritization of tasks making the  implementation planning much more collaborative and seamless. It was a shared learning as the  stakeholders were educated on some of the process & tool constraints so they were more sensitive  to the reprioritization making the whole activities far less rigid than initially hypothesized

Approach

It’s a relatively new approach in the organization & we used a couple of  tools but using the entire  design thinking approach with the 4 questions will be useful

Also , With challenging times these days, the whole approach is being rethought from a digital  execution perspective – virtual jam boards, brainstorming sessions , collaborative mind mapping are  some of the options we are considering for the second iteration of this exercise due to start next  month

