Reflection: the power of Visualization

Challenges and Selction  After have reviewed this course, I would like to bring my reflection over the power of  Visualization. I am employed for a global logistic provider for fresh material. In particular  my  company provides goods for the major restaurant chains all over the word. I work as a team leader  into the IT Business Relationship manager dept., and one of my main activities is to analyse  business and/or customer needs and guide them in through a set of possible solutions.  Sometimes the hardest part is to really guess what is behind users requests; the majority of the  time they come to our department asking for solution to problem not well known.  Another  particular case I often experience is when a project is committed by different departments, with  needs that could be maybe related but with no common view about the problem behind their  needs and, consequently, no clear idea about a possible solution.    Application  Some months ago I was involved in a workgroup in order to solve a critical issue for our logistics:  an increasing number of suppliers delivered goods with a wrong SSCC Labels(bar code labels that  could ensure the traceability of the foods during all the supply chain) format. This fact generated 2  main issues: the loose of the goods traceability, that is a critical factor into the food industry and  an important waste of time from the blue collars that have to re generate manually all the labels.

Company board asked for an immediate solution in order to preserve our great quality standards  and to save money. This is the point in which I have been named as a Project Manager.

At the very beginning, was very hard to find out from the other project stakeholders the  requirements really needs: every one kept talking about the particular problem belonging to their  single department, without trying to focus con the main cause that was creating problem to the  company; at this point I used my first visualization tool.

In order to bring all the people involved I push to organize a meeting in a in front of a  a  Whiteboard and I asked to everyone to draw the goods reception process. In this case every one  start immediately to collaborate to walk on the same way and everyone's problem started to be  connected each other and understandable from all. Suddenly people started to collaborate and  the problem of different department became part of a clear common company challenge/issue.

Once the process was know by everyone (AS-IS situation) we could have move our focus in finding  a possible solution. After some brainstorming round we agreed that we must involve the suppliers  into the resolution in order to permanently solve the issue. This is the reason why we started to  explore the possibility of a web portal where the suppliers could check the orders coming from our  company and, with a few click, print the related label in order to complete the food delivery in a  proper way.

The idea was really nice but even at this point, people started to wondering about the different  functionalities and the process itself. The same people, in the same room that some hours before  was really agreeing about the common problem, now was crashing again into a confusions phase.

This is the reason why I decided to bring another important visualization tool: a mock-up. I took  some days in order to analyse all the requirements collected from the previous meeting attendees  and I tried to realize a very simple mock-up of the possible web portal. Honestly was a very simple  stuff: a sort of dynamic power point that people could explore simulating the basic processes.

When I showed this to the next meeting, everybody was very happy, because at the least they  started to visualize, even in a simple way, the idea that they have only discussed before. People  was so involved into this that I asked to them to contribute to the mock-up, starting to draw  possible changes they could have directly on the mock-up, as they could better explaining their  ideas.

Insights and Approach  This course assignment forced me to look back in a critical way to my previous design experiences  according to what I learned. In particular I found how powerful could be the visualization in all the  project phases:

• "What is": by helping people, coming from different departments, companies, backgrounds

to create a common understanding about the current scenario

• "What if": by helping people to figure out the solution proposed.

Visualization in general turns words and thoughts to something concrete and understandable, a  sort of common language that brings awareness.

The problem is that in some context could be seen just as a waste of time, but in my opinion is  critical, in particular at the very beginning of a project, during the problem identification phase.

According to my experiences, often people look for solution to problems that they haven't really  understood. This could turn to requirements changes in the middle of the solution development  process and this happenings are very hard and expensive to manage.

Considering this experience I could be very satisfied about the use of this tool, anyway, I cannot  ignore that sometimes, in other context I didn't find the right time to use them and in some case I  really paid for this error. In the next future it will be my care to try to bring this tools to all the  people I am going to work with.

