Reflection – Storytelling Tool

Challenge

I was working as part of the IT project team in an enterprise. The working mode that was set on the  department was to receive requirements from other areas (our clients) to implement or develop IT  tools.  One day we received this requirement, which was not so clear, this area say that they needed  a forecast that they have to deliver to the financial team and they needed a tool to create it in a  faster way as current.  However, so many questions were on the table that were not clear both for  the customers and for us: Do they really need an application? Do they really need to create it faster?  Was they delivering to the financial team all the relevant information? What this tool needed to  have to add value to their final users? Nothing was clear, they known that this forecast was needed  and it wasn’t being so efficient for the final users, but how to know what was needed to be improve  and how it can be solved by an application, what this application needed to considerate in order to  add value?

Selection

We had never used Design thinking to tray to set down the customer’s needs, so it was new for us.  In this occasion, we received some help from one of our suppliers to use design thinking for this  project, and he said that he wanted to start to hear the whole story from the responsible person to  create the forecast about all the things that she needed to do to get the forecast. At this moment, I  did not know it was the “Storytelling tool” but now I can identify clearly. The goal was to understand  to all the people involved in the creation of the forecast, what implied for each participant and what  was really the necessity of the customer area in order to define if we can create or not an IT tool  and how can we create an IT tool with value added.

The Storytelling tool helps to create emotion, energy and passion for all the involved team, it creates  a cause and a logic message. For the Storytelling it is needed a protagonist= challenge, questions  through the story to create suspense and at the end we will have possible solution ideas.  Therefore,  we had our protagonist, some questions for our participants and we wanted to hear all this solutions  ideas at the end of the story.

Application

We started to get all the stakeholders together: the ones that deliver information, the ones to help  to create the forecast and the final users of the forecast. All the stakeholders came from different  areas. The consultant started to create this story of how the forecast was created so all the  participants was deeply involved on the story, this also happened because all of them was part of  the story.

The story begins presenting our protagonist (the challenge): the forecast and then we identify the  characters of the story, all the coworkers of the different areas involve. To start the narrative the  area that deliver the important data for the forecast, begins telling their part of the story to the rest  of the stakeholders, what they needed to do to get this data, how they feeling while preparing and

when delivering, and all the steps they needed to do to deliver their part. After that the main  requester continue with the story, she was the responsible of the biggest part of the history, so she  told all the steps she had to follow, the variables she was considering, how she felt, how it worried  her and how long I took her to have the forecast, always in this storytelling mode. The last characters  to continue whit the narrative of the story were the final users, they told why it was important to  them to deliver the information on time, how they felt during the process, and exactly what it was  important to them from the forecast.

While all of them were telling their part of the history, the consultant was making questions as, how  do they feel? Why they think it was important? And how it was affecting them emotionally and with  their work; this was creating this suspense during the Storytelling

Insight

After hearing this Story all the stakeholders were more empathetic with their coworkers in the other  areas, it was clearer why this IT tool was being need and what we could consider to include in order  to have a tool with valued added. With the reflection of the story, they identified all the real needs  from the final users that might not were the ones that were set on the firs requirement. We get  ideas of how this forecast can add value to the company identifying different variables to consider,  generating ideas as predicting different scenarios of the forecast, considering new variables and  identifying new reports for the final users of the forecast. With this, we was starting from something  clearer and understandable with the plus of the real involvement of the stakeholders in the project.

Approach

In this occasion, the Storytelling tool was very useful for us. As we started from nothing, after  applying this tool we get a clearer necessity and different ideas of how to solve this necessity. I  believe that as we had in the room to all the stakeholders we also could use the Mind Mapping tool  to stablish criteria for the ideas generation so we can continue with better bases for the “What if?”  phase.

