Reflection – Stakeholder Mind Mapping

By Melvin Lu

Challenge

As a Senior Manager of a Shared Service Center(SSC) I work with multiple stakeholders for multiple  countries across Asia Pacific region for an FMCG company. Challenge on hand was the Quality of  operations that I run. Stakeholder including business in the country were really not happy with the  Finance Services delivered and constantly saw SSC as a task oriented team which really impacted the  morale of the employees who felt too disengaged with what they did. With the dissatisfaction of the  business it really impacted future projects which had a lot of dependency on upstream processes to  achieve the larger Finance Strategies. Missing deadlines on implementing/executing Finance Strategies  was not an option and we as a team were given 2 Quarters only to turn it around. Hence it was decided  to come up with a Design Thinking strategy which is scientific and can provide results too.

Selection

With several tools at our disposal, we as a team felt Mind Mapping for our stakeholders would be the  key tool to understand the AS IS situation and current minds of our stakeholders. We also understood it  was a ‘what is’ phase and not a ‘what if’. And since we had multiple stakeholders it was important for us  as a team to look for patterns through this tool.

Application

I invited all of my Direct Reports who are SSC country managers and managed these stakeholders  directly day in day out. Since we were 16 of us so we formed 4 groups of 4 each. I took my team through  the broad Design Thinking process for the first 1 hour and then discussed the tool we specifically chose  for the same. We assigned a white board to each group and gave 45 minutes for them to list out what  feedback we received from our stakeholders in terms of what they think, what they feel, what they say  and what they do. Another 15 minutes for the group to summarize and structure their exercise for a  teach back to the other 3 groups.

Once all groups had their white boards filled up with the sticky notes I asked the groups to walk around  and read what other groups had captured. Post the walkaround, I asked them to cluster the feedback  onto the 5th white board to look for patterns and most common ones and start bucketizing them into  themes such as People, Process, Data and Technology. Post this we worked as team to draft the  meaningful insight statement. While we didn’t had solution in mind but at least reached to a stage  where we felt where to start from. In our another session we firmed up the insight statement and  involved representatives from the country too who were in essence our business stakeholders and run it  pass through them to take their buy-in.

Insight

This exercise really made a huge difference in involving our teams together and looked at problems with  a wholistic view. It brought the sense of togetherness and the spirit of working as a team. We could  capture closure to reality feedback through the Mind Mapping exercise. This session was a stepping  stone for us to work on Idea Generation phase. Under each theme listed in Application stage garnered  ideas which were again bucketized under Process, People, Data and Technology. In collaboration with  our Management we started to assign timelines to these project ideas and started to prioritize them in  terms of efficiency and effective through feasibility study. Overall it was such a methodical process  which really helped teams looked at problem in a more strategic way.

Approach

I would like use Story telling and Visualization Tool in my day to day experience too. Would also like to  improvise my workshops in future. Reason why I want to work on Story telling tool is because I feel it  will also help me in my articulation of a problem better in sharing the purpose of the idea  implementation which basically is the cause. Visualization is also in a way connected to your story telling  and I am very certain if your visualization is strong your story telling will be very effective. Those were  my ideas overall.

