Design Thinking: Assignment

Design Thinking has helped me develop perspectives that might have not occurred otherwise. I look  forward to apply it in my everyday life - both personal and professional. My selection of tool is Learning  Launch.

Learning Launch:  Accomplish – While you test your ideas!

Challenge

In our organization, we are part of a new project group of 12 members formed to accomplish a data  insight end-to-end module; we have to take every stakeholder into confidence right from the financing  team, to business analysts to developers while developing the module. To keep the team motivated about  the value that the project would generate once accomplished and encourage everyone to feed in their  ideas and experience  and most importantly for the time bound project it is, we could risk less in terms of  time experimenting. Our team is spread across two different regions with different time zones. We are to  coordinate to get the work done and deliver the project on time. We face two challenges here, one is  coordination between members spread across region and another being clear definition of the tasks and  activities to complete the project. Also we have to take into account the stakeholders involved, their  expectation of the team and roadmap of the project

Selection

To accomplish coordination and for effective utilization of the resources during the entire cycle of the  project, we prefer to use learning launch as the tool to experiment, test our ideas and prototypes as we  go ahead getting the actual work done. As we are allowed to experiment a bit, we prefer learning launch  as a tool, as it allows one to make corrections (at the early stage in case of our project) and proceed.

Application

Our first process - in order to not keep any resource idle or less occupied we have broken down the tasks  to be parallely started. The tasks are built to be time bound, tried to keep them independent with reduced  dependency during the initial stage. While doing so we are also keeping an eye on unnecessary drag of  the tasks, doing unintended work etc. This also helps to see that as we reach project deadlines, no one  task becomes a bottleneck or impedes other tasks.

The second launch being - splitting the team into two smaller teams due to different time zones. The  smaller teams are such that there is reduced dependency in the tasks between these two teams. One or  two members coordinate between the teams to clarify the tasks or discuss impediments, and the entire  team meets up only when required.

Insight & Approach

We have time framed to deliver the project part by part. This will help in seeing tasks accomplished in bits  and make any corrections without waiting until the end of the project. By time framing, we demo the  tasks after 2 or 3 weeks of sprint to the stakeholders and collect feedback, incorporate it during the next  sprint.

Our approach to split tasks and start parallel has helped us to keep all the resources engaged and  productive. For some teammates, the tasks are minimal, for some it sounds irrelevant, but when we sit  for an overall discussion - many do involve and is helping in clarifying things in this initial stage so that  going further work would flow easily. There is enough time for corrections and redesigning certain part of  the project, while few tasks cannot be touched again.

Along with the main ongoing project, we have adhoc requests coming in; handling these adhoc requests  is another challenge to be considered amidst the ongoing project. As the project task is time framed,  inclusion of adhoc requests is posing a challenge. We are working to have buffer times to handle adhoc  requests in the middle of the sprints.

Our second launch of splitting the team and coordinating work has burdened those coordinating between  teams. Sometimes it is leading to confusions for the coordinator and dragging. It is also leading to  increased meetings and discussions. We will have to reconsider if this does not work as expected.

Let Design Thinking help people to innovate and develop better ideas to serve their organizations and the  society.

