Visualization

Challenge  As a network engineer, during my career I have designed hundreds of networking solution for internal  and external customers. Most of these solutions weren’t really innovative – customer requirements  were usually similar and when doing things in a big scale, one tries to keep them simple. However, from  time to time, usually due to a big technology change, there was an opportunity to create something  really innovative that could provide a competitive advantage.

Several years ago, I had worked for a global company that planned a technology replacement and at the  same time, a transition to managed network services. There were three internal customers acting as  stakeholders; while their basic requirements were similar, they required important but incompatible  details that would have had a big impact on a usability of a final solution. We formed a small, compact  team to work on the project, including people from all three customers’ IT departments. Although  unaware of design thinking, many of approaches we used were actually identical with design thinking  tools; journey mapping, brainstorming, concept development, customer co-creation to name few. Our  proposed solution was very service-oriented which raised concerns within our team – network  engineers but also IT managers are usually focused on components and introducing a very different  concept without relevant content might have led to misunderstanding and rejection of months of our  work.

Selection and Application  To overcome this gap, we used an approach which now I would call visualization. We felt that a  straightforward presentation might not work but by introducing right analogies the chances that the  concept was approved would have increased. We got a lot of inspirations from traditional industries –  for example we compared network devices or infrastructure components to pipes or water dams, we  mapped various user actions on the network to their equivalents. To break out the focus on individual  components or vendor dependency, we asked our users if they knew which power plant produced an  energy we used for lights in a conference room; for redundancy, we used pictures of backup water  resources for our city.

Insight  The outcomes of our approach were excellent. Our carefully selected analogies were well understood  and customer representatives accepted our view. After getting their approval, we continued with the  project until it was fully implemented. Despite various challenges, we were able to continue with a clear  goal in mind - we repeatedly used analogies from our presentations and many more to reconfirm our  vision. It clearly became an important and widely accepted part of our presentations and discussions.

Approach  Other team working on a similar challenge used a more traditional approach to present the information:  detailed presentations often shared via e-mail, spreadsheet analysis etc. Although they succeeded with  their project, too, they didn’t manage to break a component orientation at customer side and spent  endless hours discussing details that we found (and proved) not to be critical for a successful project  delivery. I would consider our experience much more enjoyable and rate it higher.

