REFLECTION ASSIGNMENT FOR THE “DESIGN THINKING FOR INNOVATION” COURSE

PREPARED BY Gonzalo Rodriguez (sheena82@yahoo.com)

MARCH 2017

Challenge:

The challenge that I face is how to improve the sales process of new and emerging technologies- like  Internet of Things - that is often falling under a cycle of over promising and under delivering creating  confusion and deception among our customers. In the last years the sales process of technology  solutions has follow a path where the IT area of a customer is briefed on the advantages of the  technologies and during these briefings the technical components are described as well as reference  cases where the technology has helped to solve customer pains, and the next step normally required  to/from the customer is a Proof of Concept (POC) in order to show the legitimacy of these technologies  in their own business/challenges. These proof of concepts require the coding of the specific solutions,  done by developers and architects, and the process takes from 2 to 5 weeks.

The challenge of using this exact same journey as a way to sell these emerging technologies is that per  the “cool’ factor that is inherent to them, it makes the customers want to jump even quicker to a Proof  of Concept but without all the required internal alignments that these new solutions need. Especially  since these solutions are mostly aiming to deliver value to the Business areas of the organizations (i.e.  Operations, Sales, etc) and not only to the IT area, and therefore the traditional process is leading to  unsuccessful POCs of these very promising technologies, not because the final code/solution of the POC  does not work, but because the initial POC created  for the IT areas then needs an extra step of being  validated/sponsored by the Business areas that have incremental perspectives and requirements  making very lengthy, expensive and many times unsuccessful Proof of Concepts when the customer or  the vendor stop having capacity to invest in the POC.

Selection and Application:

The proposal is to include a formal phase in the process where the scope of the POC could be first be  designed and aligned from an initial recollection of the requirements from all the stakeholders (Business  and IT) -  and by leveraging the Visualization technique create a Visual Demonstrator of the solution,   made without code but with images and drawings showing how the solution would look like, what  screens and information would be shown, what personas and roles would be consuming/interacting  with each component of the solution and how does these roles would benefit in each step, and once  that this journey is shared and agreed then proceed to the coding of the validated solution.

The Visualization technique would be critical in this step – since most of the audience would not be  technical, and therefore the need to land common view of the solution in a format that could be easily  and universally understood.

The creation of these visualizations would also allow for a more collaborative approach between the  customers and the sales team and where the adjustments and changes could be done in a much faster  and less expensive way (vs changing code)

Insights and Approach:

Since the inclusion of this Design Thinking technique in the sales process will start after the buy-in of the  organization, there are no insights yet but we foresee that many new elements will be need to be  incorporated in order to make it work. For example, initially the implementation will require to include  in the organization a group of artists/graphic designers that will assist in the creation these visualizations  and storyboards since those skills are not present in the current sales/presales teams.

A formal process to contact and make the Business teams of the customer organization part of the  requirement gathering process will be critical and will require our sales force to expand their contact  network in their customers.

At the same time the Sales Process will be initially more extensive in time, while all the Visualizations are  done, shared and fine-tuned but these will lead to much more successful POCs and therefore a better  ROI on the pre-sales investments.

For next phases – all the other techniques of Design Thinking will definitely will be useful, supplementing  the Visualization one - and potentially a roadmap of progressive inclusion of Story Telling and Mind  Mapping will be required to incorporate them in an efficient way.

