Assignment Rubric – Visualization

Challenge and Selection

Being a Technical Specialist, I always prefer visualization to better explain and understand any given  problem and its solution. It helps to get into the details and to stay focused within the scope. I do practice  visualizing the problem a bit and then the solution to the product owners and business analysts of a Travel  Company, where in it helps to identify the riskiest assumptions and taking up any futuristic topics to a  whiteboard parking lot. In addition, it helps to identify the pain points, opens up new opportunities in  extending the solutions to make the best out of it. Visualizing also helps while explaining the technical  design to the team of software developers, working on implementing the solutions.

Application

During the development and maintenance cycle for a year, there were multiple issues with the project  and redundant tasks carried out by few teams. The customer came up with an issue “Delivered artifacts  does not meet the agreed scope as per contract”. We had multiple level of internal discussions, technical  and managerial team came up with huge estimates over months to deliver the solution. Since, there was  not enough surplus budget to deliver the solution and they end up being hypnosis.

To resolve the issue, I thought have more insight to the problem. 1) Took few meeting with the customer  manager regarding their delivery schedules to buy time. 2) Had more discussions to deep dive into the  problem that they were facing. Everyone has the same thought and to get a solution from us being the  service provider. Based on the discussion, prepared a spreadsheet and shared it with customer tech leads  to answer a questionnaire with few yes / no questions, it was quick response. With all their feedback, 3)  prepared a technical presentation with a strategic solution to address their exact issue and a value add in  the same presentation that could ease out few more issues. They had very comments with add-ons, this  made me to revisit and share the final approach incorporating all their requests.

Later, with the feedback from the technical team. I prepared a separate presentation from managerial,  which had more details about the results on the strategic solution, also projecting the value add with  statistics. In addition, the timeline for the strategic solution with value add features were 10 days, which  played a major part in getting all approvals from the customer and internally organization. It has also fit  in the left budget and still profitable to the organization compared with previous huge estimates.

With the success from the lateral approach, took another change to present a solution, which would  reduce monthly budget spent on database resource for the customer on monthly basis in BAU Tracks by  approaching to the problem with a solution. Initially I just had a thought and sent an email to know the  interest area of the customer’s technical project managers. In reply, he was very much impressed with  the solution enabling team being self-serving for their configuration updates without outages in live  environments.

1) Prepared the categorization of sensitive and non-sensitive data, simple workflow for the user

request approvals.

2) Presented the design with the technical presentation for technical and functional group with

number and potential increase in efficiency.

3) Finally! The cost involved and the results in reduced monthly spends!

The customer approved design, but there was a catch with the strict timeline and resource. This time as a  team, we prepared a k-map to resolve the issue by restructuring the approach with horizontal loading of  resource and vertical timeline with interval. The execution plan as well structured as custom k-map and a  state diagram to share with customer and they were happy!. Quarterly results increased the revenue and  our company received the award as the best service provider amongst the competitors.

Insight and Approach

All these expertize has increased the interests over design thinking and made our team to apply in all  basis. Visualizing the thought to the audience helped acting as a catalyst in thought processing of the  participants among various group either from technical or functional background. This build a stage from  them to come up and share their thoughts, collaboratively it resulted in agreeing on a high value  deliverable and riskiest assumption on every move leading to success. The visuals and designs been  circulated easily and it helped in articulating various solutions reach the stakeholder quickly. Building  stage maps, helped in gaining more confidence with the senior stakeholders by visualizing the results with  timeline.

Many other projects in our accounts started presenting state diagrams with their bids and solutions  receiving more attraction towards our company. This helps the audience to decide on next big moves  based on the current needs. In addition, it helped build strong relationships with customer on a longer  run.

