1) Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.

I work as a supply chain manager in a pharma laboratory. We were challenged to re  defined production planner job, such as responsibilities, tasks to be made, reporting,  etc. This should be aligned with a new strategy of the company. So, as part of the  design of the solution, we need to know "what is?" what we were doing now. The  target was to facilitate the analysts the knowledge of their actual responsibilities, just to  make the transition easier and to have them on board in the process.

In this way, I used Mind mapping. I've understood that the supply planner position has  a variety of responsibilities that are quite different in its daily work but, in the end, they  are hugely interconnected.

2) Selection & Application:

I have started writing team members names in the middle of a white board. The main  idea was to identify all activities and start connecting them. There was and underlying  objective. Some of the tasks we were asking the people to do we were boring and they  may not like them. Through mind mapping I was expecting them to understand how  this "boring" activities were useful to them. An example would be a weekly report of  actual output vs planned output; no one wants to be measured or followed up on their  activities, but through mind mapping they were able to realised that this weekly report  would help them to better plan the following weeks. The ability of Mind mapping to  show this connection make this kind of foot stones to disappear quickly.

Choosing mind mapping would also help to visualize all this abstract concepts of  reporting/planning/programming/etc. Is not the intention to describe how visualising  works, but it has been very helpful in this challenge.

Through different rounds, we draw in this white board all their responsibilities and seek  for their pattern and connection. We start by mentioning one of their responsibilities,  such as production planning and then, start writing the activities that depend on these,  such as "check materials availability", "seek demand plans", "write down capacity  utilization", "preparing associated reports"..., and so on trying to cover all actual jobs to  be done. We implemented short and periodical meetings in order to have time to think  in all tasks. Once we finished all branches, we asked them to seek if there were any  patters or connection between all the words written in that blackboard.

3) Insight & approach:

What we learned of this work is that having all your thoughts of a process written down  is very helpful to understand the size of it. It does help visualising them and looking  into these connection that will then help to come with and creative and very efficient  solution.

One of the challenges we have when doing this work was that we were all the time  getting to comments about possible solution, such as combining to reports that shown  very similar information, deleting or adding activities. But, I acknowledge that Mind  mapping i a tool to have deeply knowledge of what is. That is something that I will  have on mind when using this tool again.

However, having the mind map as clear as possible it will help to use it on the solution  design step. It will definitely serve as a starting point for finding efficiency. It is also a  very easy and entertaining to have people writing down their ideas instead of throwing  thoughts without any coherence. I definitely encourage people to use this in their daily  jobs.

