Assignment

Challenge    Heading IT in an Automobile manufacturing company, my challenge is to make digital  processes easily understandable to business users. Most of my colleagues deal with objects  in the physical world, and easily understand “visual” things. Digital processes and systems  are not “visually seen” in that sense, and therefore, it becomes difficult for them to  understand what is being discussed.    We are in the midst of relooking at our core business processes, and it is imperative that all  stakeholders have the same understanding of what is being discussed. We intend to use  Digital Technologies to the maximum, and ensure that we are able to derive value out of our  Digital initiatives.    Selection    We use the Visualization and mind-mapping techniques extensively. For the purpose of this  assignment, I will focus on Visualization technique that we use to identify weaknesses and  problems in the current way of doing things (current processes), and also drive discussions  and agreements on the problem itself – a common understanding of the “real” issue that  needs to be addressed.    All processes and working procedures are extensively documented in the organization, but  are in written form. This makes it very difficult for anyone to get a complete picture of the  process, and is also subject to different interpretations due to limitations of the written  language. We then started depicting all the processes in visual form, which made it easier  for anyone to get a good sense of the entire processes.     Initially, we were using freehand and powerpoint tools to draw them, but we soon realized  that these tools were not useful beyond a point. We then moved to Visio, which served well  for sometime and we were able to communicate effectively. Currently, we are  experimenting with some process modelling tools that allow us to quickly depict processes  in an easy-to-understand, visual format complete with process flows, actors, business logic  and desired outputs.    Application  I still remember the early days when together with folks from the production shop floor, we  were discussing on how to reduce defects on the shop floor, and there was a lot of  discussion going on about how things were functioning on the floor. One of my team  members then stood up and started drawing the processes from beginning to end. It was  fascinating to see how it started with only 4-5 big blocks, but soon, as people started  relating to each “block”, more and more details emerged, and at the end of the 4-hour  session, the entire board was filled up! It also turned out that nobody from amongst the  participants actually knew the full process. At the end of it, everybody appreciated the  process and adopted the methodology willingly.

It is now being accepted as the “standard” way of designing processes in our organization ,  and we are continuing to improve our ability to make processes simple, easy to understand,  and more importantly, depict accurately what is happening in real life.    We are also looking at standardizing the tools we use to draw and depict processes.    Insight    This course has helped me to sharpen the way we ask questions and gather data that we  need to draw the “what-is” and “what-if” scenarios. The story of George and Geoff helped  me use this understanding and become better at eliciting information and understanding  the unmet needs of the customers.     What we also lacked was a method to evaluate options in the “what works” and “what  wows” steps. This was because we could not get around to defining the criteria on which to  evaluate them. This course has helped me to understand better the “what-if” stage of the  design process, and has helped me to come up with an idea to better specify the “design  criteria” that would need to be met for it to be considered the best option (what wows and  what works!).      Approach    I tried out my new learnings about two weeks back, and I got some good results. In  customer-facing processes where most of the “value” is created in the digital medium, we  have been fairly successful. However, in core “manufacturing” or “logistics” processes,  where value is created more in the physical world, we have found limited success in  designing robust digitized processes. Maybe it is just a matter of time till we become better  at using all components of the Design thinking processes.

