Challenge & Selection:    I am working for an International Organization that help alleviate poverty and provide financial  lifeline to private sector companies in developing world that has limited access to  finance/capital.    Our investment colleagues spent lot of time in due diligence like environment standards, impact  on development, job impact and many more, before a final decision to invest on the behalf of  organization is made. Process of arriving to final “yes” or “no” requires lot of research on  Investment staff side. Till recently this process was manual and cumbersome, and, in some  cases, they spent lot of time to go through paper trail to research about an area such as  sector/country or even previous history of similar investment with similar attributes to create a  risk profile of the intended investment.    As Technical Program Manager, I was assigned to provide a solution for this business process  improvement project with aim to reduce time spent in the initial phase of the investment cycle.  Since I was doing this course I thought to apply some of the design thinking principles to  implement this new tool called “Knowledge Packages”. Aim of this new tool was to make life  easier for the investment staff during the research phase of the investment. My intention was to  create a centralized portal so that it makes the research process efficient and help team to  make accurate and quick decisions that are well connected with data points.    New tool will serve as one stop shop for research and knowledge base that will be accessible  anywhere/anytime, we called this tool as “Knowledge Packages”.    As saying goes “Picture is worth thousand words”, I choose Visualization tool and apply design  thinking approach to create this new tool. I do agree with Angle Myer’s observation that “getting  in the habit of doing visualization is actually a way of cultivating that side of our brain work.  Visualization is important. For the process of design because it's actually a way of unlocking a  different part of brain”    Application:  I collected material such different color sticky notes, whiteboard, markers, drawing papers,  projector and then I invited stakeholders from each team that were core to investment team’s  decision making and members from supporting departments (Operational, IT and Portfolio), and  as a first step, asked them to draw a picture of themselves doing the favorite activity on sticky  notes. Then I asked them to show that picture to rest of the group and share the description of  their picture as break the ice session. This activity helped group members to understand and  remember about their peers and their roles. Also, this activity was enough to convince the  power of visualization. We put those yellow stickies on the board so that everyone can see and  identify. Then, all stakeholders were asked to visualize business process flow that being used  during the investment discovery process and corresponding actors. It includes number of  activities at each step. Once the complete picture was assembled on whiteboard, I could clearly  see few gaps in visualization technique, but storytelling can be a good complimentary in few  instances.    Above two steps helped us to complete the visualization process, next step was ideation and  ranking of the ideas and linking these outcomes to the business flow diagram.    Once all ideas were collected both in terms of pictures and story, our team used “UserVoice” (*a  tools to vote and analyses feedback) and we asked all participants to vote on the collected

ideas. These smaller ideation feedback initially analyzed internally before we shared it with  larger group in the organization to get their feedback and compared it with the internal feedback  that we got from the core group. UserVoice helped us to analyze the effectiveness of the  suggestions.    Last steps in the application was to find intersection of desirability, feasibility and viability that  was the final collection of ideas that were chosen for the implementation.    Collected artifacts (Visual, Stories and Ideas) were later visualized by a clickable prototype  using Axure** tool so that stake holder can experience the final KP product without investing  money and waiting for long time to see the outcome.

Insight and Approach

KP project helped me to understand the power of Design Thinking and how it can help  organizations to improve inventions, efficiencies and learned a lesson that you must be flexible  to mix and match the approach rather sticking to one approach over the other. I learned that you  should use any tools that can help you to collect ideas that can help stakeholder to visualizes.

Last not the least, lesson learned was to make mistakes faster to adjust the expected direction  quickly so that team is not heavily invested in fixed approach that might not work if we try to wait  for the perfection.

•  *Refer this link to “UserVoice” https://www.uservoice.com/

•  ** https://www.axure.com/

