Reflection - Learning Launch

Challenge

I am working in a finance operations lead position at a software company. My team has covered

Japan, Korea and China however, Taiwan and Hong Kong are also added to our target area. My

challenge is to increase booking process efficiency in order to expand region to be covered by

the same resource pool. This project includes our North Asia finance operations team composed

of 5 employees, as well as the commercial finance department and operations support team. The

time line for this project should run at 2 months considering the volume increase at the end of the

month. We will focus on uncovering the best resource allocation within the team. The

commercial finance department and operations support team will also help to provide their

feedback.

Selection

We have decided to use the learning launch tool, since it is a learning experiment conducted

quickly and inexpensively to collect feedback from staff and stakeholders. We believe this will

help us learn valuable information by working with the prototype, and an iterating activity will

improve on our solution.

Application

For our first learning launch, we focused on the staff knowledge and skills, identifying gaps to

effectively apply them to work assignments. We have 1 team lead (Japanese), 2 senior staff

(Korean and Japanese) and 2 junior staff (Chinese and Japanese) within the team, and we tested

our assumption that Chinese junior staff who can speak both Cantonese and Taiwanese Hokkien

could cover newly added region of Taiwan and Hong Kong, and China which is now covered by

her could be covered by 1 Korean senior staff who can speak fluent English and easily

communicate with this multilingual junior staff. We wanted to see how staff language skills

interact with operations process execution. We went through 20 days and collect feedback from

our booking team, the commercial finance department and operation support team. The surveys

included questions about the process speed, operations errors and any difficulty in the new

approach. As a result, we found that the junior staff could technically cover both Taiwan and

Hong Kong, but Chinese contract for China was too technical for Korean senior staff who cannot

read Chinese. We tried the new approach in the next 10 days that Chinese staff translated all

contracts for China, Taiwan & Hong Kong and Korean staff book the deal, trying to boost up the

process speed.

For our second learning launch, we focused on the workload efficiency with response to the new

assignment arrangement. This tested our assumption that the volume of Korea booking orders

was quite high and the process speed would appear slow without full support of Korean senior

staff, especially at the monthly closing. The surveys included the matrix structure in the region in

addition to the same questions which were conducted in the first surveys. Our priority was to

ensure that the new assignment arrangement could work in the most efficient way.

Insight

By applying the learning launch tool, we tested our assumptions and improved the resource

allocation within the team to support additional areas. It turned out that our assumptions were not

always true, and we went back and took the new approach to improve hypothesis of our new

resource assignment to deal with additional areas to be covered. Moving forward, we will review

this insight and continue to pursue the challenge.

Approach

The learning launch approach is the most appropriate tool for our team. As mentioned in the

above, we need to review the insight from our first two launches to continue to pursue the

challenge since this is the most effective tool to test ideas and determine which qualify as

solutions. It is an iterative process and learning each time should develop a better hypothesis for

the solutions.

