Challenge  I work in a private hospital system development department. My new job was to develop new  patient booking module in one month (old booking module does not supported new server  software). The new tasks was not only new software supporting, but also it was a functionality  optimisation and user interface development.    Selection  My partner departments were a clinicians and hospital quality department - people who a far away  from software developing. I decided to choose visualisation tool to explain old booking system  problems and show advantages of a new system. I used diagram.net software because hospital IT  department recommendation. All hospital users had an access to this software and could  operationally do changes to diagrams.    Application  I draw a simple diagram of an old booking system so that clinicians could understand how the data  flows between components. I knew the problem components but I also wanted that clinicians and  quality department also understand the same problems. So I asked them to analyse the flow. I made  two different appointments – one with clinicians and another with quality department. I decided to  do so because clinicians feels more comfortable and are more brave when only doctors and nurses  are around table. So I discussed same diagram in two groups. Both groups find same problems. Next  step was to discuss a new diagram. I made some new diagrams with alternative flows. Before  showing those diagrams to groups, we made a brainstorm session for 30 min to hear all ideas that  non-IT people could generate. This activity aroused interest to my new diagrams – do we find those  ideas or not. Most of non-utopian ideas was already on diagrams. Visualisation helped clinicians an  quality department employees to understand the technical meaning of their ideas. Each group  chooses one new diagram that satisfies them more. Groups chooses two different diagrams. I also  asked to find two main persons from each group who are going to take a part in future discussions in  corporate group.

Because of choosing different flow diagrams, I decided to visualise both diagrams on one sheet. So  we saw combined and different flows. After we made a discussion only on different flows.

Insight

In this discussion we reached to another problem (that helps me to understand why the difference is  in) – clinicians want to put the most of responsibility on booking module end users. However, quality  department thinks that clinician could be more involved in booking process (they must communicate  more details that booking process was easy and intuitive for end users). Trough discussion we draw  different process flows to reach the goal, that satisfies both – clinician and non-clinician personal.  Visualisation accelerated decision-making process.

Approach

This course helped me in hospital discussions. I used all the questions – what is; what if; what wow;  what works. These simple questions helped to stay in focus. I am more convinced that visualisation  help to accelerate decision making process; one draw is much clearer than 1000 words. In future I  still using a different methods of visualisation.

