Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge & Selection

I am an intern in my organization (an IT services company) in the consulting area. I am a member  of a Design Thinking team created to improve our ways of working and create value to our clients.  We are not Design Thinking experts, so we are taking courses and trying to learn more about this  interesting subject.

This is a big company, therefore there are a lot of employees and we don’t know each other in  many times, so what If I need something related to another department? or the opposite side,  what if a salesman, for example, needs a consultant to ask them something? I think this is the  main problem of these huge companies. Therefore, I started to think a solution for this problem  and asked myself how I could fix it. After days of research and benchmarking other companies I  found a solution. WHAT IF I create an online platform, divided by departments, where I’m able to  find each of my colleagues, to post anything in forums. We would only have to put our credentials  to enter the platform.

I introduced this idea to my boss, and he was delighted! We thought that the best option was to  launch a prototype and see how it worked.

Application

For our first Learning Launch, my team and I created a web application but in beta version. We  thought in our needs as employees, If I had this application what would I add? We made a list of  everything we need: employees chat, members of each departments, people hired, holidays  calendar, forums…

After a month of hard working and with the help of the coding team, we made the beta version  and we launched it. It was completely a success! Our colleagues were delighted too, we knew each  other more, we found things about our colleagues that we didn’t know, for example, one member  of the marketing department had his own business of heating jackets. Everybody was very happy  with this platform, so the board accepted to make the final version with some added details.

Insight and Approach

By applying this Learning Launch, our team has learnt a lot about Design Thinking. I made all the  research, but we identified all the employees needs. We learnt how to create prototypes, we  thought that this was the best MVP and the best way to prove that this could work. I don’t know  what would have happened if we had made surveys or interviews, what I know is that everybody  was in love with our proposal including the Board. This has been a good experiment for the Design  Thinking team and for the Board, because now they will be able to see their employees needs,  hobbies, requests, etc. We made it with one Launch, but there would had not been any problem if  we would have to make two or three. In this case, we’ve been very lucky.

I think this case have opened the eyes of my team and the Board, because we have another  perspective of how to do this kind of projects in future cases. Design Thinking tools are very useful  if you know how to use them, and I hope to be an expert very soon!

