Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

I am working with a global manufacturing company and I am member of a team responsible for  implementing enterprise product development software. Our challenge is to rollout standard product  development process across all regional within the organization which has variation is culture, beliefs  and working habits. The purpose of having standard product development process is to improve “Time  to Market” and support “Distributed Manufacturing” in the organization. The project team includes  members from design, manufacturing, procurement and IT departments. Total project duration is 120  days to study ‘What Is’ process across all regional facilities and provide working solution acceptable by  all regions in organization. We will focus on trying to uncover what are common steps across  departments, which can be mapped straight forward and for remaining we will identify the patterns  which can be communized.

Selection

In the situation we are in, it is very essential to gain quick confidence of our customers which in this case  are the internal engineering departments located in different geography. Learning launch will help us  perform quick experiments, test and do prototyping.

Application

For our first learning launch, we focused on the common tasks performed by design departments across  regions. We conducted two days of workshop with representatives from different regions participating.  Aligning on common steps was comparatively straightforward, this helped us to gain confidence and put  forward the bigger picture. Next we went through five day workshop on experimenting solution which  has common patterns but different behaviors of doing the tasks. In second workshop we focused on  best practices in product design and lean working. Additionally we bought in manufacturing directors in  discussion to have hands on experience on the tests process. However as expected we could not have  alignment from procurement as they need to get involved before manufacturing.

In our third workshop we focused on improvising on the benefits of common process by ideating the  complete process that would work for all teams. The complete process brought more clarity to  departments and regional members.

Insight

Using learning launch tool we tested our assumptions and experimented different solutions. This helped  our team to apply their thoughts on expected outcome and focus on organizational common goals. We  failed to get alignment with our assumption that non-engineering department is trivial in this process.  Team quickly got their act together in fixing the things and reprioritizing of tasks in process helped us get  through in next attempt. Moving forward team reviewed the learning and incorporates it into next  launch designs. The ongoing incorporation of insight is particularly important at this stage, as launches  come before a full rollout in the design thinking timeline.

Approach

The lesson we learned from this exercise is that – it is very important to conduct small experiments,  which helps to connect well with the customers and understand their needs. Small test drives better  solutions for long term and brings regional/ departmental communalities in front of all. Learning launch  also forced us to adopt lean practices to drive real value. With the given scenarios and organization  construct we have gone through multiple design thinking sessions and learning launch has helped our  team make good progress which earlier was a challenge. We will continue to learn and experiment to  move closer our bigger target of distributed manufacturing and reduce time to market.

