Reflection – Visualization

Challenge

Working as part of a consulting team for a client looking to digitize their processes to better serve their  customers, we were facing a challenge to align different stakeholders (eg. product, strategy, IT teams  etc.) to arrive at a common understanding of the problem statement. Due to the lack of a shared vision,  there were hurdles in progressing with the project further and needed to be resolved soon.

Selection

Visualization as a tool, we realized, would allow these teams to see the problem statement from each  other’s lens making them more understanding of the scope, the customers’ needs and the challenges  each functional team was facing in execution.

Application

On our end, we conducted a journey mapping exercise for different stakeholders (customers,  middlemen etc.) to identify the current process (we called it “as-is”), their pain points, our proposed  solutions to address these pain points leading to a creation of a desired digital process (we named it “to- be”). These “to-be” processes needed support from multiple teams like product development, IT  support etc.

For our workshop with the client, in a conference room, we invited all the teams and placed the posters  of the stakeholders’ journeys on the walls. We arranged them as per the story we wanted to tell the  teams. We gave them a guided tour of the journeys and pain points, requested feedback, and  encouraged cross-team discussions for arriving at a common ground.

Insight

We had earlier interacted with these teams individually but there were always some reservations, from  their side, on the need for a solution or the resources available for developing them. Also, the teams  were focused on their part of problem statement and thus, were unable to approach it holistically.

This exercise of alignment through visualization and storytelling led to the resolution of some  differences amongst these teams and, laid bare the constraints they were facing. In addition, there were  some unique solutions and approaches that came to the fore which were better than what we were  suggesting as they were able to view the customers’ needs from a the viewpoint of a cross-functional  team.

Approach

This exercise was a breakthrough for our team to progress further with the project, but I felt that we  could have done such an exercise of visualization earlier and more frequently. During the process of  developing the journeys for stakeholders, we could have conducted workshops at intermittent stages to  build alignment earlier and the output would have been much better with the expertise of these cross- functional teams.

