Reflection – Mind Mapping

1. Challenge

I work with financial services implementation for banking, I am member of a multidisciplinary team which

includes people from: IT, Business, Marketing and Process areas. That diversity is excellent since we have several  points of view over the same scenario. Although, it is quite common we spend too much time trying to explain what  is the customer’s problem that we need to solve. Basically, we want to mitigate the misunderstanding over the  communication and to improve our focus on ‘’what is” section.

2. Selection

The Mind Mapping technique have showed as an excellent tool to assemble, in a visual way, what is the real

problem that needs to be solved and also it helps to show up if there are hidden problems (sometimes a hidden  problem is more important than a known one). As presented at Video 4th in Week 3, Mind Mapping process offers  several ways to analyse the data looking for patterns and insights that we might have missed.

3. Application

Our Mind Mapping section starts with the exposure of what problem was the trigger to the project initiative.

After that, we presented some statistical data of similar situations occurred with other customers, this data was  provided by the “Customer Experience area”, and then we began by linking all the known issues to their  stakeholders. Afterwards, each member received a stick note and we started writing our guess about what could be  the triggers of those problems. At the end we categorized the triggers and put them into groups of origins (people,  system and process) to become the analysis more effective when we initiate the Design Criteria phase.

4. Insight

By using the Mind Mapping technique, our “what is” section was more effective and all the team members had a

better understanding over the problems and what would be our challenge. The high impact came up during the  Design Criteria phase where we had more focused ideas. Turning the meetings more effectives.

Design Thinking gave me excellent tools to be more effective in problem solving, especially when the solution

demands more creativity and customer focus.

5. Approach

In spite our good results using almost the complete bulk of tools offered by the Mind Mapping technique we

forgot one of the most important tools, the ethnographic interview which could give us a really deeper  understanding about the customer needs. For the next initiatives, we are preparing some questions to be used in  face-to-face interviews with a group of customers.

