Design Thinking Course from University of Virginia Assignment

Challenge  I am the founder and CEO of an organization into training and consulting. We work on some niche  areas like DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), which today is one of the most sought-after  skill-set in the IT industry world-wide. We started our operation from 2012 and by 2017, we realized  we need to start building our brand. To do this, one of the ways we chose was to have a DevOps  Summit.   In India, there is a lot of Agile, Cloud and some DevOps related tools conferences which happens  including the vendors like AWS and Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. However, even though there  is a lot of people doing some good work in these areas, there is no good DevOps conference. Even  world-wide the best is the DevOps Enterprise Summit.  To be able to reach to this large community of DevOps and SRE practitioners and provide them with  a world-class knowledge-sharing platform, wanted to start the DevOps India Summit.  However, as I had no experience of organizing any event, wanted to take the Learning Launch  approach in steps.  There was also an objective from the business point of view. As the Brand name is built, in longer  run it will generate more business for the training and consulting. This is a derived objective.    Selection  So, I went through the approach of creating an experiment. I organized a small event of around 35  senior management invitees and had one expert speaker from USA to conduct a session over  webinar and also conducted a experiential learning game on DevOps for the audience and ended  with a high-tea.  From this event, I got the feedback that it was very useful and they wanted a proper conference on  the topic as there is no such event in India. Everyone encouraged me that they want a good  conference where “Learning” was very important, sharing experience with peers and networking  was important.  I tried one more experiment. I again invited now a few experts and leaders in the area from various  organizations in India and organized an event in Pune where 135 people registered. This event gave  me the validation of my hypothesis that there is need for good learning platform for middle and  senior management in the area of DevOps, SRE and people are ready to pay for such conference if  the speakers are good and there is real knowledge sharing.   Then we went ahead to move to the main event of DevOps India Summit to be held for the first time  in 2018. We still needed various other aspects to be validated like the Sponsorship, bringing the  founders and stalwarts of the topic as speakers for the event physically, organizing the event and  promoting the event to get a sizeable number of participants and speakers.  This is what now I understand is what being told in the video of the Learning Launch for creating the  hypothesis and testing and also on the concept of the 4 questions – What Is step.     Application  Based on our learning from the two events, which was part of the What Is and defining the  Hypothesis for the test and then getting the data from the actual participants, we went forward to  collect further data. This is about getting the truth. We wanted to get more confirming and more  specifically disconfirming facts. As we want speakers from abroad, we needed to find out first of all if  they even want to come to India for my event, what it will take to bring them. I had someone I know  who has good connections and another expert speaker and author. I spoke to them and a couple of  senior leaders who also supported me in India. I got to know that I have to have at least 350  participants in the audience for these speakers to come, I need to do it in a good hotel and  auditorium, I need to have proper social media promotions and Press Release to get good speakers  who in turn will attract Sponsors. Even though as a first year, I could not pay the fees the speakers

generally charge, I need to pay for their business class to-and-fro travel and stay.  I had a small event  in 2017 and here the scale is suddenly much bigger. I also needed to get many more speakers and  have to have good topics and speakers.   I already had some idea and now with secondary research like that of IBM video, I interviewed quite  a few speakers and sponsors and senior management people.    Insight  Based on the above experience of the small events and the interviews, we got a lot of insight. We  got confirmation that organizations and individuals are eager to pay and attend a good conference  with good speakers and better still if they are the stalwarts of the area like John Willis, etc. We also  understood that we need to have it world-class quality and then only the speakers will come and  based on the speakers, the sponsors will come and the delegates will register.  With the help of my contacts, got the initial 4 to 5 speakers from USA, France, Brazil. We started a  Call for Speakers and based on the initial submission of 30 submissions, we had selected 20 to be the  selected speakers in the main conference. We went and spoke to many organization after creating a  brochure for sponsorship and got a few sponsorship, being the first year. We engaged an event  management team to manage the event from registration to setup, audio and video recording, etc.  My team kept learning from the various activities and kept delivering on the website, brochures,  agenda, etc. We also learnt that there will be situation where a speaker may not be able to come for  some reason and we had to be ready for it. We needed to get subscriptions for Flickr, Vimeo to  enable sharing of photos and videos with the participants. We had to book the hotels for stay and  during the event the food and other expenses like wifi for the speakers and booths. Even though we  plan with the knowledge gathered in the application stage, we still find certain challenges when it  actually works like some booths wanted to have theirs placed in a different location or there is some  technical glitch delaying the program by 10 mins, etc. These learnings was useful for the 2019 DOIS.  Due to our learning launch approach, we already knew what are the “Wows” like the speakers, the  setup required for the event, the post event production, the importance of good location and food,  having people option to interact with these global experts with no “Purple Tape” and also some fun  elements like gifts and games and photo booth.    Approach  As we were new and we started with the approach of Learning Launch. This gave us the desired  result and we did not need to have any alternate method. Looking at the goal, we had a great event  and in 2019 we already saw anyone who is into DevOps and SRE across the globe knows about the  event. This also is bringing new business for my organization. Many stalwarts are now requesting to  be a keynote speaker in my event and have delegates coming from various parts of the world.

