Reflection-Visualization

Challenge

I was asked to structure a manual of procedures for a company providing event planning  services. The services of the company required the engagement of many people from inside  and outside of the company. This requires a satisfactory cooperation of all the parties and  the clear understanding of each one who is in charge for each task and with whom has to  communicate to solve or clarify any problems or concerns, accordingly. The drafting of a  manual of procedures is assumed to save time and energy for the employees of the  company and the partners who collaborate with them. The total of people who need to  access the manual of procedures is 22. The time in which the manual should be delivered is  2 months.

Selection

The tool I chose to implement, in order to gather the information I needed, is Visualization.  The reason this tool seems to be suitable, for this project, is that the potential users of the  manual come from different working environments and the jargon of each one differs.  Amongst the 22 persons were marketers, financial assistants, technicians, artists and other  operational officers. Visualization provides the depicting of the reality in a way that it  doesn’t need any more explanation in words. The images and the sketches used in  describing the situation help find patterns and explore how the parties feel and experience  the situation that they describe. The decoding of the images will be done in a common  language and the manual will include mainly images and visual presentations.

Application

First, the 22 people formed 3 teams. The first separation of the people occurred on the basis  of the criteria if they were internal or external users of the manual. The 8 internal  stakeholders– staff of the company formed the one team and the other 14 persons formed  the other team, which was separated in two sub-teams of 7 persons each. The task of each  person was to depict the daily routine of his/her colleague who was appointed for each one.  To facilitate the process I gave them some predesigned common characters, items,  furniture, equipment, activities and some plain papers if something was not included in the  predesigned. They had to combine in the draft board, all these parts, based on their  observation of what is the routine of their colleague.

In the second phase the 22 people formed 3 teams on the basis of the work flow, as it  emerged by the first phase. The application was the same as described in the first phase, and  the predesigned sketches were amended and enriched according to the ones came from the  first phase.

The first reaction of making “handicrafts” and spend precious working time was an obstacle  that we had to overpass. The predesigned sketches may bias the participants but in the  second phase the parties were more familiar to the process and made their best to depict  the situation on a broader scope and not limited only to the sketches given. Also, they were  given the choice to use their own photos or sketches to facilitate the visualization of their

routine. One more difficulty was in the following stage when I had to use a common  language to present the manual. Also, they were given the choice to use their own photos or  sketches to facilitate the visualization of their routine.

Insight

In the end, the parties seemed that enjoyed the procedure and there were times they felt  more like a team and had fun. In addition, some of them expressed empathy for the  colleague they had to observe. Regarding the difficulty of presenting the outcome of this  process, in order to be sure that the procedures will be clear to everyone, the manual was  visualized by the most common sketches and the graphic designer of the team managed to  depict the greatest part of the manual.

What I learned from the Visualization Tool is that it is worth to try to implement it and insist  on challenging people to contribute in the scale they feel comfort. During the process, most  of them will enjoy it and the more they practice it the more they enjoy it. Also, it was very  interesting that they had to collaborate and put themselves in their colleagues’ shoes. This  experience made them more tolerant of their colleagues.

Approach

If there is any case I could implement the same tool, I will choose again the visualization  tool.  This time I could add more visual features such as video, more photos, more comics  and any other mean that may make this process more enjoyable for the participants.

