Assignment 1

Assignment

Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all  relevant information.

From employees perspective, there is no central location where all tasks and  activities in my organization (a division within a big company) are properly  tracked and monitored. Frequently people in the organization do not know who is  doing what, what are tasks they are responsible for and what are the  expectorations. For a manager perspective, it is very difficult to get birds-eye  view of the status of tasks and projects in the organization and getting any  details about any particular task or project requires distracting employees by  asking them to stop their work and generate reports to inform management and  decision makers of simple and trivial information about their tasks. Also there is  no way to know how much of the organization activities are aligned with actual  objectives. For information confidentiality reasons, we cannot use any of the  cloud-based task/project management tools.

Selection: In your own words, briefly describe the tool  you selected (e.g., what it is and why you selected it  for your challenge -- including any appropriate video  lecture references).

Used the internal Microsoft SharePoint system to develop central location where  all the organization activities (projects, tasks, meeting minutes, knowledge items  ... etc) would be stored and interlinked together. SharePoint allows non-technical  people to develop a wide variety of information structures which means that the  solution can be quickly and changed and adopted to the needs of users without  long change cycles. Also the flexibility of the SharePoint platform would allow for  changes as the operating model of the organization changes as incremental  improvements are made along the way. The final benefit of using this platform is  that employees were already familiar with the platform as it is used as the internal

Assignment 2

website tool for many divisions within the company but none have used its  extended capabilities to address the challenge at hand.

Application: Describe how you applied the tool you  selected to your challenge (e.g., what you did and how  the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).

Whilst the MS SharePoint provides a high degree of flexibility for structuring and  linking data, it did not have these structures ready-for-use. Therefore a bit of  upfront analysis needed to be performed starting with the most important data  structures required and the minimal structures (e.g. tasks and projects with  minimal list of attributes/fields) using min mapping. Then a Learning Launch was  employed to add more data structures, fields/attributes and  interlinks/relationships between data structures based on users feedback.  Occasionally, data structures where revised to scale them down when certain  features proved not to be useful and hence rapid iterations from hypothesis to  testing to scaling were applied.  Chief among the gradually built structures, there  was finally a clear structures to view all activities and link them to the  organization objectives and get a online instant reporting of status of the  activities and how many are aligned with organization objectives and how many  are not. Also the solution allowed for a sort of a built-in status update since  individuals can updated the status of their tasks once and then anyone else can  pull the status without management or staff having to distract each other through  a reporting buracrecy.

Insight: Describe the insight you gained from applying  the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., how an  insight affected your thinking about the challenge and  about design thinking more broadly).

The initial mind mapping analysis turned to have exaggerated many of the actual  requirements from the users and only through the learning launch that the users  themselves actually discovered that certain features were not actually needed or  will not be used as often as expected and the added complexity did not warrant  introducing these features. The learning launch also resulted in the both the users  recognizing that many of the other technical features in the chosen solution (for

Assignment 3

example the Search feature in SharePoint) presented opportunities that  would  not requiring copying the exact manual practices that people used to use to track  their own tasks prior to using this solution. This resulted in the users revising their  initial design to leverage the new features and let go of old practices.

Approach: Describe what you might do differently  next time -- applying the same tool you selected or a  different one -- and the reason(s) why.

Next time I would probably have started the Learning Launch a little bit earlier  before spending too much time on mind mapping which resulted in complicated  mind map that turned out to be unrealistic. However, the mind map was actually  useful for capturing the major concepts, resources and stakeholders . Luckily, we  decided after some time working on the mind map to stop and selected a limited  number of branches to implement for the Learning Launch.  I think spending too  much time or attempting to be too detailed when doing mind mapping could be  problematic in driving people to over analyze problems.

