Challenge

We have a team of engineers in our IT company that work on projects for mainly government  customers. The government agencies that we provide services to are mainly responsible for ensuring  that they can provide high quality services to the impoverished communities that they operate in.

Our main challenge is that we often face challenges motivating the team to ensure that when they spec  their project they do not miss requirement or look at the problem from multiple angles since most of  them are usually distanced from the end users of our products.

As such our main challenge is the inability of our engineering team to empathise with our end user and  as such sometimes creates solutions that do not talk to our customer and as such lowers our customer  satisfaction ratings.

Selection

The tool that I have decided to use to remedy the challenge that we had was Storytelling. It is a  technique that I had seen producing greqt results before when used in similar situations to try and get  the team to connect with the value that they are providing and to attach meaning to the work that we  do. Many of the people that our agencies service usually dont have the resources to fill in online surveys  or go into service centres to lay formal complaints and give feedback on improvements to the services  that they need and as such their point of view is seldom heard. Allowing these people a chance to tell  their stories through either recorded interviews or face to face engagements allowed us some insights  into thier daily lives and situations.

Insights & Approach

An amazing example of were we saw storytelling providing us with immerse value was in 1 example  were we had a single mother come explain/tell us about her experience around what it takes her to  bring her child in for a regular visit at a clinic. She explained how on days when she has to visit the clinic  she would have to wake her and her 2 children up at 3:30am to go heat up water for bathing and food,  how since her husband is usually away on work for weeks at sometimes there is no one to assist. That  she would then have to walk both children up to 10km to school before walking another 4km to gett to  the clinic. All of this effort only to find a queue at the clinic with people who had been there for hours  already. Then by the time she gets her opportunity sometimes the nurses have run out of medication  or  they end up miss treating them cause they would have been working non stop for many hours  sometimes without any lunch.

A new element that this approach have uncovered for us was that it was not only the end users that we  had to solution for but that in other for us to make any meaningful impact, but that we also had to find  innovative ways to solution for the entire value stream.

With this input we found that when given free reign to come up with innovative solutions the  engineering team was able to fully grasp the scale and importance of the solution and come up with  solutions that were both cost conscious and time sensitive.

They built scheduling systems that allow the clinic to set a schedule for which people should come  when, they also built the ability to base this schedule based on the inventory of medicines that were  available for various procedures.

The process and examples and tools that were provided in this course made gave the me the ability to  see different ways to tackling the problem, and making a positive change in our communities.

