Learning Launch

Challenge

I am a Project Engineer working in the construction department of a leading property  development in Hong Kong and the challenges which I regularly encounter are to attempt to  increase the motivation of self-ownership of allocated tasks/projects of each of my team  members and to improve on identifying, then prioritizing the allocated tasks to improve the  overall efficiency of the team. In the industry I am currently working in, it is a common and  difficult item to overcome simply because there are always emergency issues which we have  to deal with on a daily basis (besides what we are given and planned to do). Due to this  nature of my industry, the team’s work capacity can sometimes be overloaded and  therefore adversely impacting the overall efficiency of the team if prioritization is not  implemented.

Selection

I selected “Learning Launch” as the design thinking tool which I attempted to implement to  my challenges as mentioned above. Our team has previously had several internal progress  meetings, identifying what we were encountering, the issues ahead, possible plan of attack  and has had chances to voice out the feelings felt under extreme work pressure and  circumstances.

With the design thinking tool, Learning Launch, I was confident to setting new directions  (design launches) and putting the directions into prototype for testing which would benefit  my team one way or another.

Application

As a starting point, my team and I focused mainly on increasing our self-initiatives and in  particular to report progress and providing follow up action plans. We followed closely on  the company structure and were aware of who the direct line of report was for each team  member. This learning launch approach examined the assumption of which the lack of  ownership and initiatives was due to the insufficiency of clear direction from superior  management and lack of overlooking, communication and guidance. With this approach put  in place, we anticipated that by encouraging as well as enforcing regular progress updates,  each team member would be committed to the tasks/projects they were involved in and  increased their attention to the details on what they were working on.

For the second learning launch approach, we focused on creating a regularly updated  master work plan to record the known and planned tasks as well as the unknown daily  emergencies which we anticipated to encounter every day. This learning launch approach  examined our assumption on which the key cause to our challenge was the disruption of our  planned tasks by sudden happenings and daily emergency issues. Our team first created a

master work plan, recorded all the tasks/projects and the owner of each onto a whiteboard.  We then listed the deadlines of each item, where the same deadlines appeared we then  measured and attempted to agree on the priority for sorting. When an emergency issue  arrived, we also recorded it in the same way as the planned tasks so it was clearly presented  to every member of the team. The approach had been given a timeframe of one week test  period.

Insight and Approach

My team and I followed the design launches for the set timeframe and the result reflected  that our initial assumptions were mostly accurate, except for the second launch. The second  design launch helped and improved on the situation when daily emergency issues arise. It is  however, due to the nature of the construction industry, the number of spontaneous issues  can be quite extreme and therefore the “master work plan” design had felt its pressure.  Following the mechanism of design thinking tool, we will amend our second design launch  and build another prototype for trial.

We felt that we have selected the correct design thinking tool to solve the main challenges  which have adversely impacted our team’s overall efficiency and internal task ownership. It  is by far the most effective tool we have attempted to implement within our team.  Personally, the design thinking tool has benefited me with micro-management and it would  be just as benefit for macro-management which I would recommend to my superior for  their implementation.

