Example Reflection – Visualization

Challenge

Currently I am working for a middle size company, which is marketing already for a long time period components in the B2B business. The company has given me the responsibility to grow a new business pillar in the area of information and digitalization technology in order to generate new business opportunities. IT-solutions requiring a complete new skill set, which were based on the major business not necessary. Digitalization innovation requires a lot process analyses of the AS IS situation and the TO BE situation in terms of innovation.

The challenge is, how to work on process innovation in an efficient way. In my case I had a customer who had real pain in the area of claim management and he was looking for idea which should saves dramatically costs. On the other hands, my company was highly interested in a holistic solution, which can be scaled over several customer. Now the challenge was how to tackle the innovation task in most efficient way and a good understanding of all participants.

Selection

In the case above, I have chosen the tool of visualization in order to visualize the customer pain and the current process. With a visualized process, is it much easier to interact with customer and to challenge the as is situation. Furthermore the visualization showing easily the dependencies between all process steps and creating continues discussion between all stakeholders.  The process diagram creates a deep understanding of the actual situation (“what is”) and the customer pain. In the second step the visualization is supporting a lot in defining a “what if” scenario with all stakeholders. For the visualization we have mainly used white boards which providing a high flexibility on changes and it support collaborative interaction. Moreover the visualization creating an easy platform to show the added value and benefits between “what is” and “what if”.

Application

In the first step we have created a group of 5 people which had a very good experience in the customer business in order depict a generic AS IS claim process of our customers. We have used white boards to draw down together in the team the process steps which we are assuming which are might applicable for our customer. The ideas was, at first to confront the customer with our business process analyses in order start a deeper discussion in the TO BE or “what if” process. During this exercise, all participants had to contribute to the diagram, by inputs and by creating drawings on the board. As we were believing to got a good understanding of the situation, we have started to think about a holistic idea which improves and innovate the process. Also here we have used the method of process diagrams to get a full picture and deep understanding about the inputs and dependencies. And the end we have spread out all the business benefits which might generate with his idea and we have started to challenges the concept with one of our customer.

Insight

In general the tool was helping me and my team mates to work on the task in collaborate way, supported the alignment and provided a deeper understanding of the problem. Before everyone was just talking about the customer problem but everyone has his own perspective to the situation. Base on the visualization we were able to get a great internal alignment on the “what is” and we were able to tune the process drawing in a continues iterative way. Moreover the tool was providing a better

understanding about the business idea to all internal and external stakeholders as well was enabling a deeper discussion on the solution. Without this tool we weren’t be able to get a buy in by our stakeholder and the customer. Visualization enables always a better underrating and creates interaction which leads in better results.

Approach

The tools was providing fantastic results within the team and creates a buy in of our management. I am very convinced, that we would not have got this result without visualization, Next time would take the same tool again but then in combination with other tools like mind maps. I guess, the combination of right toolset based on the problem statement, could leverage additional positive result.

The mind mapping provides created great result to bring ideas or problem in more structured and clustered way. It helps to identify pattern in information chaos which may provide better foundation for the described process visualization. In my case this would might generates even a better understanding about the “what is”.

