Final Assignment – LEARNING LAUNCH

1. Challenge

I am working in a multinational company as a financial auditor. In my department, we  are use to carry out several audits in a short period of time. Every audit last certain days  or weeks, depending on the client situation or type of audit: whether it’s the first year  auditing the client, whether it’s a big-size client or not, the client’s sector, the client’s  historical financial reports, etc. In most of those audits, we also take part of different  teams, as we readapt their length depending on the staff needed for each audit. That  means that we often need to deal with lots of different and sensitive information at the  same time, while performing the audits in the busy season, and also considering that a  fluency of the information provided by the client is essential to ensure our deadline  achievements.

So in one of the teams I was taking part, we realized that the information list that we  firstly provide to the client before physically starting our job, was often ignored by them  until we got there, and that we use to experience delays in the reception of the  documentation that we need to develop our auditing tasks, and that often made us end  up with refocusing some jobs with barely having margin for that. My team decided to  meet and design a sort of solution to reinforce the client implication.

We decided to ask for the IT department’s support, in order to launch a platform, where  we would upload the information list pattern with at least one month in advance, and  the client would need to upload all the information to the platform, instead of sending  us emails. That platform should be connected to our job planning, so it would know our  next assignments, sending us reminder emails to upload the information list on time,  and the same to the client’s side, pushing them to provide us more information on time,  having reminders for each little deadline that would be previously stablished regarding  to the different epigraphs where we are performing work in the annual accounts.

2. Selection

My department often introduces some changes that can lead us to an improvement in  some areas. However, that little actions are rarely related with the innovation design  thinking. This time though, our whole team, with the IT department support too,  decided to use one of the most powerful and effective tools of the design thinking, called  the Learning Launch.

So, to test how this new platform was working, we decided to use the Learning Launch  approach, as a design thinking strategy that is capable to easily and rapidly test an idea,  without implying much money, and to know if this works, before implementing it in the  whole structure.

3. Application

So, after the meeting with the IT department and all my team members, we decide to  test the efficiency of our idea through the Learning Launch tool, launching a platform  called “InfoGo”, that would be useful to easily connect our information needs with the  client, and improve the information flow, firstly trying it in a small amount of  assignments. We decided to test it in 4 teams in total (one was ours), in small audits  (maximum audits that lasted 2 weeks) that were running simultaneously.

In a period of 2 months, we could end up with some interesting insights, as the IT  department firstly needed from 2 to 3 weeks to set up the basic platform pattern, then  the 4 teams engaged uploaded the information list adjusting it to each client features,  and then, wait about one month to physically start the audit after having collected most  of the information we needed, and finally, having the 2 physical-time weeks to collect  some extra info that might have arose from the job.

4. Insight

By applying the Learning Launching tool, the teams implicated in the test, met again to  compare the advantages and downsides in our work, and all of us agreed in the success  of the new platform “InfoGo”, as an easy-to-use method that gave both us and the  client, a better opportunity to collaborate and feel engaged with each other. “InfoGo”  reminded us with margin enough (as it is connected with our planning), the need to  upload the information list, so we didn’t feel the pressure to worry about that.  Moreover, this was also easier to fill due to the pattern list that the platform provided  to us, so that we only needed to tick the desired information.

It also gave to the client, the sense of responsibility knowing that every information  epigraph shows its own deadlines and the client also receive reminder emails to ensure  that they won’t miss our need, and the grade of collaboration increased significantly, so  we could finish the work on time.

We both (audit team and the client) took advantage of the increase in safety regarding  to the information flow, as we all know that is a sensitive considered information, that  uploaded in the platform, both made sure to have and to check whenever we need,  avoiding to miss some emails or delete them, or lose some important information.

5. Approach

After having used this tool, we just realized that has been a really useful approach that  in this particular case has perfectly suited to our work, leading us to achieve a big  improvement based on a small and quick test of an idea, that after having proved its  success, we could start applying in all the upcoming audit works. So, in our future  meetings to assess an audit issue, we will consider to use this again to check the validity  of the future idea.

