Assignment – Design Thinking session 2016-10-02

1. Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.

The challenge is to understand what are the mains different topics touched during an innovation  project process. Because when we ask different projects managers to explain how they manage  their projects, they use many different words. These words may be related to the beginning of  an innovation project, or to the middle, or they are related to the prototype and the expected  final result.

2. Selection: In your own words, briefly describe the tool you selected (e.g., what it is and why

you selected it for your challenge -- including any appropriate video lecture references).

In order to find clusters of words used during a project management, I have gathered data from  several sources. I have chosen to use Mind Mapping tool in order to find a structure and  patterns in my bunch of data. The Mind Mapping tool lets us to synthesize our data, and to  structure it around a main topic. Here for me the main topic was “project management”. I have  chosen Mind Mapping for my challenge in order to help me to find if there are only several main  topics in the project management language, which will be helpful to present as a result in front  of my directors. In the same time Mind Mapping is an excellent tool to communicate the results.

3. Application: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., what you

did and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).

In my case, great amount of data have been provided by several others tools. First, I have  conducted an Ethnographic interview on the subject of “project management practices” with  around 20 project managers. So I have obtained a very impressive amount of data already.  Secondary, I have read a great bunch of research articles linked with the project management.  Thirdly, I have looked upon the existent software tools dedicated to project management.  Meanwhile, I started to create my Mind Mapping map with a Mind Mapping tool. In the beginning  all the word seems to be disconnected, but in time these disconnected topics, I managed to  cluster them in some 6 main topics.

4. Insight: Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your challenge

(e.g., how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and about design thinking  more broadly).

Here in order to exemplify the results I have obtained: project (length, contextual information,  business case, goals, human involved), manage the project (launch, management, conduct a  project with the help of a method, adjust the goals of a project, close a project), selection  (invest, value creation opportunity, risks), indicators (verify, survey, measure), means  (resources, machines, depreciation, data) …

5. Approach: Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same tool you

selected or a different one -- and the reason(s) why.  The next time it may be interesting to use Mind Mapping after say the lecture of articles, and  then construct the Ethnographic interview with the help of the already gathered data. In this  way I might be able to put many other interesting questions to my interviewee, and obtain a  broader amount of data.     Here you may see the result of my Mind Mapping obtained in French.

