More Musings on Design Thinking

Warren Berger from the Harvard Business Review blogs posts a really good article:

http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/07/the-four-phases-of-design-thin/

He contrasts the lessons which we could learn from designers and I try to extrapolate that thinking into Business Analysis. Because, I feel, we as Business Analysts are facilitators for such discussions within our projects and programs.

The four lessons are:

1. Question
2. Care
3. Connect
4. Commit

These are great and I strongly recommend reading the post as a starting point to pursue in the direction of design thinking. Coming from Agile world of software development, we are all involved in product development day in and day out.

One key take away from the design thinking is shift focus from the product to creating new experiences and beyond to new organizational structures and environment. One of the key attributes of design thinking is ‘collaboration’. Hence, in our product development construct, the design thinking should be encouraged by Business Analysts. They should not only confirm the requirements from the end-users but also by all the relevant stakeholders committed in the initiative to change.

And while we do that the first two points should be embraced in its entirety. “Question and Care” I have tried in current assignment. Challenging aspirations. Questioning beliefs and ways of working for last 10 years. I realized in the process that we were trying to address a non-existent problem by way of product development. For some of the end-users the answer to all the pain-points is not a new product development, however, a simple process change! 

The care element is not new but is typically stated as "Trusted Advisor" for Business Analysts and project management consultants. Either way, I like that the empathy element is very important. It tells us that as Business Analysts, we should not just understand the issue but to empathize with the current pain points, what the customer is not receiving, or the history of events that led up to this point. Considering our closeness to users, we are well equipped for this job. We should be the front line for customer care. Empathy based requirements gathering should be core. Having requirements gathering has many other aspects, but the point is, this can be an important factor in consideration.

Connect is critical as well. If you delver a product that is unusable or is not as desired your customer will not use or will not get the right level of adoption you are looking for. As Business Analyst; we need to sniff these issues out. If product is unusable, we should present the analysis to stakeholders for taking a decision on the future course. Again think from user angle (Empathy). Commit equals credibility. This is all about agile delivery of frequent deliveries for rapid feedback. This is where Agile processes like Scrum fit well.

On a personal level, I feel what we can achieve using this way of thinking is phenomenal. The debate goes further into the differences between finance oriented thinking, where shareholder value is most important, and design oriented thinking is as the article suggests more people, solution, emotion oriented thinking. And as always, is there a middle ground?

Experience of Conducting Analysis workshop using Design Thinking

Last month, I was tasked to conduct a workshop for a trading operations team for an Energy company. The task was to come up with various scenarios for improving the efficiency of operations leveraging technologies. I decided to explore design thinking as a way to conduct the workshop.

If you want to know more about, design thinking, please check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking

For ideal workshop in design thinking, it is recommended that define and research phases of the process should be thoroughly conducted in advance of workshop day. The workshop should be focused solely on presenting the findings of define/research & ideation.

To conduct the define phase I used the following:

1.        Interview with operations team (identified team)
2.        Researched the documentation
3.        Shadowed employees who are identified as product ambassadors

The output of this phase was a three point problem statement. I made initial validation of this problem with the team.

The research phase was based on past experience and past data. I built various scenarios in the form of user journeys on how the operations take place. The different user journeys and scenarios presented with situations on where efficiency improvements can be spotted.

Based on these journeys, I elaborated on what are the user motivations and needs. Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_journey

This was followed by an ideation phase. After the ideation, we finalized on top three things to focus for innovation in improving efficiencies. We concluded to transactionalize document storage and management.

This was later put into prototype phase for quick user feedback and execution of the idea. Throughout the process, ensured the business change aspect for better adoption of the idea.

My strong recommendation to use this design thinking for workshops. This would be especially useful to cut through some of the stereotype solution formations.