Design Thinking – Visualization

Kenichi Watanabe

Challenge & Selection:

The challenge I have in my organization is that we need to better manage our resources  time and allocation in the projects that the company has during the year and coming  years… The tool I used for this is Visualization or Visual Thinking to better understand  the problem between all IT team members in my department. The approach I used was  to first identity a way to how we could “predict” how much time each resource would be  working on specific projects during the next weeks. I started the brainstorming with an  empty excel spreadsheet where we “IT team members” would have to come up with  possible screens/fields that are needed in order to enter the work allocation for each  resource during the next weeks. This way we were able to create a “draft” template for  what a possible solution could look like to resolve our resource allocation in the projects.  The whole idea is to avoid that people are over-allocated and if they are working too  much, that creates other problems such as stress, quality issues, overtime costs, etc…

Application:

Once we had the initial “draft” excel spreadsheet created, we started the discussion  about how a possible solution could look like based on this template… We all got  together and started to think/imagine how the application should work, the possible  sequence, screens, fields, etc… and then we used a tool called “Bootstrap Studio” to  design the first prototype. This is one of the best ways to better visualize how the  solution could be created/developed, the steps, the screens, fields, behavior, user  interaction, etc…

We hard-coded all values for each step, screens, fields to better understand/visualize  what else could be missing, and finally we had the initial prototype created (without any  database integration)…

Insight & Approach:

When the initial prototype was complete, I learned that with this exercise with the team  members we could better understand the problem and we even came up with an initial  prototype of how the possible solution should be… We started to evaluate the options  about if we should develop our own software/solution for resource management or if we  should go with an existing option available in the market… After some weeks of  research, comparisons, discussions, a few trials, project costs vs benefits, etc… We  finally decided that an online solution which is pretty similar to the initial prototype would  fit the needs of our organization. We decided to go with a saas solution called “10000ft”  for resource management, and it fits pretty well our problem, and we are definitely  happy with the decision… 😊

