Reflection

Challenge

I am in the middle of a significant business transformation at a major retailer in the way

they make the key decisions of what products are stocked in which locations (assortment)

and how many of those products should be stocked at each location (inventory depth).

The current tools are antiquated and the current process is manual and silo-ed.  The

retailer struggles with both detecting changes in the market demand and also the time it

takes to react to a change through their systems and processes.  It takes too long to action

a decision.  There is uncertainty whether the decision is successfully reflected in all systems

and by the time all required steps are complete that someone else did not make a

different decision in the system overriding the decision being implemented.

We went through the process similar to What-is, What-if and What-Wows and now have a

vision for the future state process and the required tools.  This new approach will use latest

advances in technology and tools to build a custom tailored solution that addresses the

current problems, automates routine decisions and establishes a platform for the company

to evolve quickly to face new challenges.

There is a clear vision of the solution and what it will deliver.  Now, the details have to be

developed and validated.

Top management wants to move fast and deliver value as quickly as possible.   At the

same time, the business process change is significant, the technology is new to the retailer

and while it can make a tremendous impact, it has not been proven it can work in the

conditions at this specific retailer.  Management wants an early indication of value and

quantify the change impact to the organization before continuing to make capital

investments in the change.

Selection

While there is strong belief that the solution proposed is right for the company, there are a

number of questions what can only be answered through experimentation.  I believe

Learning Launch would be the ideal way to approach this problem.

To validate the approach as quickly as possible and get useful information for the future, I

need to do two things

1.  Define reasonable depth of capabilities that need to be built that will be sufficient to

validate the proposed approach

2.  Using the capabilities built, run the business with the new set of tools and processes for a

sufficiently long period of time to generate meaningful learnings

I want to test the tools and approach in the real world by running the business for two

product categories for two months.

The core idea is to launch a new way of doing things and learn from it, adapt and rapidly

expand - i.e. Learning Launch!

Application

To achieve the two objectives, I believe there is a need to bring together the principles of

agile methodology and learning launch.

The transformation journey is going to be a long one and we want to use this opportunity

to seed a way of incrementally developing and deploying capabilities (agile) that can be

sustained over long periods and also weave the learning launch - test and learn approach

into the corporate DNA.

Five small cross functional teams were created, each focussed on a part of the overall

solution.  These teams will first define the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)  for each

component that will help everyone validate the end to end vision and also provide useful

insights into changes required and the impact those changes will have on the

organization.

It will take too much time and will be risky to build out the full set of  capabilities to deliver

the vision.  The MVP approach will help identify core capabilities, if proven, will validate the

complete vision and generate significant benefits for the company.  The MVP will deliver

enough capability to get started on the journey,  recognizing immediate benefits while

new capabilities are incrementally added.  This will meet the objective of the management

to see benefits early while also managing risk and uncertainty.

The agile team will continue to remain in place and will eventually build out the entire

solution - each time using Learning Launch to quickly test and learn while building the

muscles required to take on current (known) and future (unknown) business challenges.

The initial learning launch will also teach us about the process of using learning launches

to incrementally and rapidly add value with the ability to make quick course corrections

based on the learnings.

Insight and Approach

I was well into the What Wows stage when I started to take this course.  This course

clarified a number of things for me and the timing was just right as I was contemplating

the approach to take to bring the vision to fruition.

My initial thoughts were to use approaches like prototyping,  business pilot or a proof of

concept. Based on my previous experiences, these approaches did not always produce

satisfactory results.  They were good to sell software or an idea but did not necessarily

deliver the promise when implemented.

For example, results from a previous proof of concept (POC) at this company did not

translate into realized benefits because during POC, the focus was narrow and the test was

conducted under controlled and mostly laboratory conditions.  When the initiative was

finally implemented, real business challenges made it impossible to move ahead.

Learning launch takes on the real challenge.  The full business impact (people, process,

tools) cannot be evaluated using narrow point tests of a solution. You need a broad real

world test that touches everything end to end.  Learning Launch is the perfect approach.

The learning launch approach proposed will use real components (people, process and

tools) in the real running of the business and will help not only in validating the vision and

the tools, but in changing the mindset of the people who are wary and jaded from the

initiative overloads over the past many years.   The idea was well received and now is

ready to launch.

The greatest benefit to the company will be people trained to be design thinkers as they

grow this initiative and begin others.

This course brought together and crystalized in my mind a streamlined way of thinking.  In

my own way, I have walked through the four step journey many times but for the first time,

thanks to this course, I am not only able to articulate the approach but can execute it more

effectively.

