1. Challenge

I work for a small management consulting company in Cologne Germany, that specializes in process  optimization. In one of the first projects that I took part in after joining the company several years  ago, we were asked for support by an old university classmate of my boss, Mr. Muller.  Mr. Muller was working at Deutsche Telekom, Germanys largest telecommunications company, a  behemoth with a wide range of services for consumers and businesses (like landline and cellphone  communication, internet access and IP TV, as well as various business services), several ten thousand  employees, dozens of European subsidiaries and hundreds of locations in Germany alone.    Mr. Muller had just been promoted to be head of the “IT Service Management” department, which  was responsible for managing the IT operating budget and the associated hardware ordering process,  that was required to operate, replace and develop the IT hardware (RAM, CPUs, Harddrives, Servers,  etc.) that was used by any of Deutsche Telekom´s IT systems (not including Desktop PCs).    Mr. Muller was struggling with his main objective, that had also cost his predecessor´s job, which was  to achieve significant cost savings of 25% compared to the as-is numbers from the previous year.  It needs to mentioned that this was not the first round of cost cutting measures at Deutsche  Telekom, but that they were rather doing this exercise every few years and so the easy wins had  already been achieved.    To make matters even more complicated, the IT Service Management department was not the only  department at Deutsche Telekom charged with handling the IT operating budget. Other major  players included the IT Governance department that provided general oversight and guidance, as  well as the “Solution” departments which operated the applications, that were running on the  hardware, purchased and maintained by the IT operating budget.    These were the circumstances when Mr. Muller provided a mandate to my employer, which basically  made his challenge to our/my challenge: Achieving cost savings of 25% in the IT operations budget,  compared to the preceding years numbers.

2. Selection

The management consultants team consisted of three consultants, including me, that had been  tasked with supporting the 60 employees of the IT Service Management department.   Our main skill was not that we had any expert knowledge of budget management in general or the  processes at Deutsche Telekom in particular. Rather we brought an impartial outside view and free  resources that where not busy with day-to-day activities to the table.    Because of this lack of detailed knowledge, we firstly needed to gather as much information as we  possibly could. We therefore decided to follow an approach that was regularly applied by my  employer at the beginning of a project, which was to conduct interviews with key individuals.   I think that this decision to conduct interviews was absolutely a conscious one, but because it was  supported by very positive experiences from the past it was also sort of the “logical choice” and did  not require very much contemplation.

Right after receiving the mandate, our management consultant team therefore went straight to  work, assembled a short list of questions, coordinated appointments and conducted twenty-seven  one-2-one interviews with selected individuals from the IT Service Management, IT Governance and  Solution departments.  After completing the interviews, the next phase of the project was to analyze and assess the  collected data. Since these interviews used open (rather than closed yes/no) questions, they  produced large amounts of information, which was not simply numerical. Therefore a pure data  analysis tool like Excel would not do the job.    Contrary to the intuitive selection of the interview method, the decision for the Mind Mapping  technique was a deliberate one, whose reasoning is very accurately summarized in the courser.org  week 3 episode on the Mind Mapping Tool, which reads as follows (quote):

“Mind mapping is looking for patterns and insights in a large quantity of data you collected during  your exploration of what is the current reality. … Mind mapping is an engaging alternative to that  giant report we might otherwise have written to sum up and communicate in prose and charts and

spreadsheets.”

This short paragraph from the course lecture summarizes perfectly what we were trying to achieve  with the application of the Mind Mapping technique. We were not sure whether the technique  would resolve all our questions, but we agreed that it was a promising starting point.

3. Application

We decided to implement the Mind Mapping technique by conducting a workshop with key  stakeholders from all departments involved.   To prepare for this workshop, the management consulting team went through the interview results  from the first phase, reviewed these results, grouped them by theme and finally created graphic  images that summarized these results in an easy to understand way. We then printed those graphics  and pinned them to the walls of a large corporate conference room.    The seven key stakeholders that we invited to attend the full day workshop were Mr. Muller as well  as the heads of the IT Governance and five Solution departments. (All of them had also participated  in the interviews). The workshop was guided by our team.

We started the workshop by summarizing the preliminary summaries that we had pinned to

the walls and highlighted our shared objective of achieving cost savings of 25% in the IT operations  budget.

Next came a two hour period were the participants had time to walk through the conference

room, review the printouts and take personal notes. At several points in this two hour period we  needed to remind the participants to review all the graphics, because intense debates had occurred  that stopped the participants from continuing their journey through the conference room.

As a third step, we asked every participant to write his key insights on a notecard and after

this followed the process as described in the week 3 lecture video, which is one participant sticks one  of his cards on the wall and all the other participants one by one add one of their cards that fits the  theme. Then the next participant does the same, until all notecards are on the wall. This step took  approximately two hours as well.

After a lunch break, we started to rearrange the status quo into more appropriate groups or

clusters and finally started to identify and draw the connections between those clusters (to draw the  connections we used cord thas was held in place by needles).

At the end of the day we came up with a surprising result, that I am describing in the

following chapter.    In retrospect I think that this Mind Mapping workshop was very successful. However, having seen the  lecture video I can think of several factors we probably did not execute perfectly and that I would  improvements the next time:

-  We only invited the department heads to the workshop. The intention behind this decision  was to limit the number of participants to a manageable number. Alternatively I think we  could have invited a much bigger number of participants (e.g. all interviewees) and split them  up into subgroups. This might have enabled additional insights.

-  We did not follow the final Mind Mapping step as described in the lecture video, which is to  define “design criteria”. The reason for this was that we did not follow the Mind Mapping  technique (the technique was unknown to us), so we did not prepare for the “What if?”  phase. Furthermore, we were absolutely satisfied with the insights we gained without those  “design criteria”. However, defining these criteria might also have yielded additional insights.

Overall I think we did well and the Mind Mapping workshop was a success, but it could have been  even better.

4. Insight & Approach

One result of the Mind Mapping workshop were specific cost cutting measures/ suggestions, that  further refined the ones that had already been mentioned during the interview phase.  However much more significantly, we discovered that the past inability of all involved departments  to achieve the budget objective in terms of cost cutting, was NOT at the proverbial center of the  problem!   Instead this inability was merely a symptom/ consequence of the much larger underlying problem,  that was depicted at the center of the Mind Map, and read “IT operating budget management  process deficiencies”.  The major factors from the key branches of the Mind Map read:

a) The IT operating budget management process had not been defined with a sufficient level of

detail and therefore left many gray areas, so that either no department felt responsible or all  departments did simultaneously.   The IT Service Management, IT Governance and Solutions departments had not

established an effective and working distribution of tasks.

b) The same IT operating budget management process had not been communicated adequately

and was therefore unknown to parts of the organization.

c) The IT operating budget management process was slow and non-transparent in view of the

status of any particular hardware order.

d) There were actually two separate and distinct IT operating budget management processes:

One for the cellphone/ mobile division of Deutsche Telekom and one for the landline  division.

These insights were subsequently used to develop specific action plans.  The project ended up not achieving the target of 25% operating budget reduction, because this  objective was set by the executive board as a blanket target for all departments/ divisions, with little  regard for the realities on the ground. However we managed to significantly improve the day-to-day  operative cooperation of all departments involved, which yielded financial as well as considerable  non-financial benefits.

At the time I took part in this project, neither I nor anybody from the team knew about the concept  of Design Thinking. However now that I think about this project retrospectively, I understand that we  used Design Thinking inadvertently and discovered two of the Design Thinking´s key benefits.

First: Conducting a “What is?” phase at the beginning of a project allows for sufficient time to

understand the current status quo. This enabled us to understand, that what we originally  considered the key problem was merely a consequence of a much larger issue. A “What is?” phase  simultaneously prevents the common dilemma of “jumping to a conclusion”.

Second: The project team members don´t need to know the answer to the given problem

right from the start of the project (which would mean that they would simply need to find the best  way for implementing their already conceptualized solution)!   Instead, the project team simply needs to engage with all stakeholders in an iterative process, to  harness their existing knowledge and develop a solution to the problem.    I will therefore always conduct a “What is?” phase at the beginning of my projects, even if not using  the Design Thinking approach, and I will try to always actively engage with stakeholders to harness  their knowledge and valuable insights.

