Mind Map

Challenge

In my organization, which is a company of technological services, we mainly work in software  development for companies in the financial sector, where a big part of the work consists in  documenting the solutions that we implement for our clients.

We work according to the CMMI norm and we are certified in level 3, which means that our  processes are mostly aligned under said norm. However, we currently have difficulties with our  team documenting their work according to the definition in the norm, we have tried to improve  this process, but our efforts have been unfruitful, maybe because we have not targeted the source  of the problem.

Because of this, we have decided to use the Mind Map tool to understand from the consumer  point of view (our workers) the difficulties and strengths that our documenting process has and to  be able to take measures according to the analysis made and not to our personal appreciation.

Selection

We decided to use the Mind Map tool to describe the experience of our teams during the  documentation process of a Project, because we believe that it is the best tool to describe the  current situation and would help us to determine the points to improve in the user experience.

However, we made a revision of the rest of the tools, but in our particular case we urgently  needed to determine the real source of our problem.

Application

The first thing we did was to request authorization to our superiors to make the Mind Map, we  had to explain that it was a technic that belongs to the Design Thinking and that it was focused to  determine the current situation of our consumers, in this case, the software development teams.  At the beginning there was a bit of resistance since they did not know the concepts, but when the  methodology was explained, our chiefs thought it was interested and gave us their authorization.

After obtaining the authorization, we created the Mind Map of the documentation process under  CMMI with the help of some members of the chiefs’ board. On this phase something interesting  happened, while describing the actual process, not even us were agreeing with the phases of the  process, to each one of us there were different phases and even some of us did not know the  mentioned phases. But after an enriching meeting we were all aligned with the definition of the  process.

We finally chose 15 members of the software development team of different charges to complete  the Mind Map. Position from position we were interviewing people obtaining very interesting  results.

Insight

While applying the Mind Map we were able to determine the points with more discontent and  probably the main sources of the problems of our documenting process. It is worth noting that we  did not expect the type of response we got, moreover, we did not even have the slightest idea that  there were such weak points in our process and that there were phases that we thought to be well  addressed by our people, turned out to have the most negative experience.

On the other hand, the comments of our interviewees were unexpected, none of the documenting  process responsible were aware of the problems reported, because of this the Mind Map was  more than enriching, it was cathartic.

Approach

Applying the Mind Map was impactful; we have tried to improve the experience of our people  with the process before, but never focused to the weak points discovered with the use of the tool,  which could be the reason why our efforts yielded no results.

With the entry obtained with the Mind Map, we have sufficient material to work in the next  improvement phases, focusing on the weak points and in the real need of our consumers (the  software development team).

Knowing the Mind Map and the rest of the techniques of Design Thinking was a change of  paradigm in terms of problem solving, our approach from now on will certainly be different, and  we will continue using these techniques on every opportunity we get.

