COURSERA - Design Thinking for Innovation       June 2014

1 | P a g e   A s s i g n m e n t   Ismael Garcia

Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge    I had to champion and it was a team of five members who joined from the Administration,  Sales, Research, Finance and Documentation Departments of our company.  We had to  improve and upgrade our corporate web site by automating all manual operations what we  used to do.  We had to keep in mind and had to make sure that it will very well suite our  client tale largely Foreign, Institutional and High Net Worth.  Focus to the retail segment is  very minimum, but they too will go through our web site for their requirements.  Being the  leader in our Industry we had to well describe the company, Business and the Products as  we as the Procedures of the Regulators that we follow.  We were given a rough idea of the  budget and the time lines to complete the task.  Team members had to come out with their  own ideas and had few discussions on same and decided with some concepts and details.    Selection    Since we are in the Financial Services Sectors category we were decided to go through the  web sites of the well-known reputed foreign Fund Managers, Stock Brokers and Banks and  some local competitors and the regulators in our industry to know how we should align our  page to suite to our clients.  While we were looking at our Service Sector, we thought of  glanced through other Service Sectors sites such as Hospitality since it a fast-growing  category at that time.  This became a leaning tool and eye opener for all of us and to see a  broader picture than we initially thought.    Team decided to have meetings with few shortlisted Web Site Developers.  All the meetings  were schedule to have in one week.    Application    First round of discussions and our requirements were tabled to vendors and wanted them to  come out with few concepts within ten days.  We shared our ideas and the web sites that  we found exciting.  We wanted almost everything to automate where ever human  intervention is required.    All the vendors submitted their proposal as mentioned to them.  They showed us various  concepts with various types of information related to the Financial Services.  We requested  for few amendments and wanted them to come for the second and third rounds for review  discussions.    We did review all the vendor presentations.  Looked at the product which vendors  presented to us, their past developments to various other customers, the company  background, their prominence in the software industry.  We also looked at their staff  strength, the owners and the interest to be in the web development industry.    These are the statistics that we took to rate the vendors.

COURSERA - Design Thinking for Innovation       June 2014

2 | P a g e   A s s i g n m e n t   Ismael Garcia

Insight    Upon selecting one vendor, we went in to brief discussions in office and over telephone  conversations.  We decided to develop this on the latest software and wanted to build this  to be a Highly Responsive site where clients can see the same site layout on their Mobiles,  Tabs or Personal Computers from anywhere.    Vendor opened the test site in one of their internal servers and wanted to us view this web  site as and when there is an update.  We asked our internal staff to view the site and  provide us some feedback before it was launched.  We used different front end’s like  mobiles running android, windows and iPhones and Tabs and Computers.  We were open to  get criticized and took them as some positive comments to upgrade.    At last we thought our corporate site was the best designed at the time we launched.  We  automated market report uploads.  It is just a matter of email of the report to a specific  email address.    This is a team work and I understand that all who worked hard in this team were real design  thinking inside them and this became a success.      Approach    Given this task to our six-member team, I realized that we were on many design thinking  initiatives, used many tools and on timelines.  Our initial discussions, browse through the  internet to look for the best and meeting vendors and listening to them was became our  tool to success.     As said from the beginning, by learning, reviewing, listening and looking at the designs and  ideas took us to a fully-fledged solution which became ready to launch.

