Example Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge & Selection

As a member of my organization’s quality department, our challenge is to improve the delivery process of  our products & services in order to increase customer satisfaction and minimize waste of energy and time.  The project includes stakeholders from the production department as well as IT department. We will focus  on key problems within the existent process and possible improvements.

Mind mapping is a powerful tool to find criteria on which our design should be based. It's used to look for  patterns and insights, that lead to more creative solutions. It shows which concept are more important,  which ones are related to each other in a visual way. It’s a representation of customers minds.

Application

By the start of the year. We have introduced a new quality process which suggest to our clients to make  a visit to us by the end of each project or product release, in order to discus and share ideas about any  possible improvements or problems encountered during the production phase and collect positive  feedback and good points to retain about work done.

During the first year we had around twenty projects done and sixteen client visits. Each visit took half a  day on a conference room, we start by a presentation of the project to the client stakeholders and other  teams, describing all parts of work within a timeline. After that, we distribute pens and sticky notes to all  participants including client representatives and members of other teams. We make each one of them  write down the best element in his point of view about the work and in other hand the worst.

Before we start sharing, we give them about ten minutes to review their own sticky notes.

After a coffee break, we collect all sticky notes for reviews and group them into themed clusters on the  board. We start by clustering the good point then the worst. As a result, we have two types of clusters  (the good things and the bad things).

Now comes the big payoff. Identifying the insights that each cluster reveals. After doing so, we make a  summary of our insights including good and bad points. At the end of the meeting we took a photo  together and share summary as a document.

By the end of the year, we collect all documents and group them to merge all results gathered during the  workshops of the year.

After merging clusters, we draw relations between them in a visual way which make understanding links  more easy.

Insight & Approach

By applying mind mapping tool, our team identified two types of criteria for our design choice, the first  type is things that must be taken to improve the process and the second is things to avoid as most as  possible on the next projects. The more important criteria gathered are the agility, transparency and  adaptability of the process.

Applying those conclusions to our design thinking process helped us to rethink our workflow in a  innovative way.

