Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

I work as an International Trade Service Specialist in one of the largest financial institutions  in Thailand. My responsibility involves advising on international trade services for corporate  business clients and trade finance operation staffs as well as coordinating with relationship  managers and cash management team to track and boost the use of credit utilization and  international trade transactions. This role requires knowledge of international trade and  products in order to give customers and staffs the right information, and to increase trade  turnover. My/our challenge is that not everyone in the department has the same level of  knowledge.  Previously, when any of my coworkers needs to seek help with detail of a  product, he/she will go and ask another coworker who is believed to be the master of that  certain product. We had a few meetings and came up with the idea of a “Products on Shelf”  project.

Selection

In order to overcome the challenge, I decided to do an experiment by creating a web portal  where everyone can share their knowledge and resources (put “Products on Shelf”) and to  test whether it will help to increase our abilities to help customers when needed by having  the same level of knowledge. The tool "Learning Launch" is used for this case. I created a  very simple web portal and asked everyone to go on that web portal and share their  knowledge with others.

Application

After brainstorming with my coworkers, I created the portal using an existing platform— Microsoft Teams— which only took me 30 minutes to set up and send e-mail to everyone  about this portal. I wanted to see if my coworkers would gain more knowledge from one  another through this portal and could eventually have the same level of knowledge with a  hope that everyone would be happy to use this web portal instead of just asking one person  with particular expertise, got the answer, and then the rest still have no idea. With a  “Product on Shelf” portal, everyone all have an equal access to the information.

Insight

After launching the “Product on Shelf” portal on Microsoft Teams, I found an obstacle of  different generations of my coworkers who are not familiarized with technology. So, there  were fewer corporations than I expected. I also received some feedback that the old  traditional way of sharing knowledge is good enough and the portal does not seems suitable  for older generations. Therefore, I will soon review this learning launch and plan to find a  better way for the team to overcome the issue of unequal level of knowledge within the  department

Approach

Having a challenge that the older generations have a hard time with technology, I think I  might have to use visualization as the next tool. When I sent an e-mail to my coworkers to  introduce the portal, maybe I did not use a diagram to explain how to use the portal. For

future approach, apart from using words alone I will use image and diagram to make a  manual guide to make it easier for my coworkers to understand how to use the portal.

