Design Thinking Reflection – Learning Launch Tool

Challenge    I am a manager responsible for the program and project management practice at a  consulting company that sells professional services around the globe.    In the last few months, I have been facing a challenge to improve and reshape our current  offerings in order to increase business sales and to create a distinctive position in the  global consulting marketplace. The scope of these offerings includes mainly business  transformational programs through tech-solutions. For example, the end-to-end enterprise  software implementation.    Our team of expert tech-consultants are focus on test new ideas to confirm the key  assumptions that our consulting leaders previously recommended to our line-of-service.    Selection    In order to attend completely our challenge and to become more agile, we are ready to  use the learning launch tool of design thinking framework. In general, the learning launch  tool is a kind of experiment that tests new ideas in real business environments. The main  purpose is to get the truth to confirm or dis-confirm our key business assumptions.    Application    At the beginning, we focused on the organization of our new ideas. The consultants did a  small benchmarking to meet the solutions already offered in the market and to check the  fit-level of innovation from each ones. This tested our assumption that our competitors  are offering similar services to cover the program and project management demands.    Then, we went through workshop sessions with consultants from other areas to get new  thoughts about our traditional offerings and to understand the lessons that our  organization learned on the previous assignments. This tested our assumption that other  consulting practices at the same organization also want to continuous improve their way  to provide professional services.     Finally, we focused on the execution of different tests in some on-going programs and  projects. In this case, we encouraged the team to work in an agile management approach  to measure the impact on the performance of their routine activities. This tested our  assumption that its possible improve our work with small changes of the team’s mind-set.    Insight    By applying the learning launch tool, we confirmed some key assumptions and dis- confirmed other ones. For us this new experiment was very rich in several aspects.

Normally in this type of challenge, we need to create a business plan to set the  assumptions and to define the return of investments. The possibility to discuss many  hypothesis going through the unknown breaks down some business paradigms, resulting  in a new path to test the business ideas effectively.    Until this moment, the results exceeds our initial expectations. On the other hand, we  need to know that the design-thinking framework is much more than a learning launch  application, actually is a wide universe of concepts and tools to explore and get  agreement.    Approach    I believe there are excellent tools in the design thinking that should improve and help  even more the solution of our business challenges.   One example might be a mind mapping to help an organization to looking for patterns  during a data collect and analytics.    However, for that challenge we worked on, the learning launch tool seems to be the  appropriate tool to address our goals.

