Not afraid to admit we got it wrong

Earlier this year I wrote an article on user centred research and design, a process and set of tools used to create a service that focusses on what users need before balancing this with technical business requirements. There are five key steps where you:

1. Understand the user and the context of use
2. Specify user and business requirements
3. Create potential solutions (using 1 and 2 as inputs)
4. Evaluate the effectiveness of your potential solutions (against point 2)
5. Iterate; although this isn’t really a step, it’s best practice to ensure your design is always centred on user needs

Whilst this is best practice, there are circumstances where you do not get the chance to do this work. One example is when you are responding to a tender and are part of a competitive process. Here you must consider the requirements set out in the tender documents carefully and then respond in the best way you can, given the information provided.

This happened to us recently. We proposed an end-to-end service that optimises the advice journey for our prospective client and its customers. We got through to the presentation stage and it was there that we hit a big problem!

During the presentation it became clear that they did not understand what we were proposing or at least not within the context of what they currently do.

For any organisation and anyone involved in business development, this is one of those nightmare scenarios, where the proposal misses its mark, and the prospect looks confused.

Fortunately for us everything else we said, including our approach to innovation, social values, and ambition, got us through as an alternative option to the next stage where we were told what they did and did not like about our pitch.

We now had three weeks to turn this around. What do we do?

We followed our best practice approach to UCD and evolved our original proposal considerably. It showed our stakeholders that we are not afraid to admit we got it wrong, that given an opportunity we can demonstrate how we work with clients to find an optimal solution, and that we can do all of this in a very short period.

As a result of key insights elicited from the sponsor and senior user relating to the:

• Organisational attitude, appetite, and capacity for IT change; and
• Characteristics of their user community

We developed a proposal that better suits their requirements and gives them the innovation they need whilst minimising risk.

Now, I can’t say this will end well as we have only just resubmitted the proposal and we must present to them later this week to see if we progress. What I can say is that this has been an engagement that we have enjoyed, ultimately it has played to our strengths and that we would love to work with this client.

Keep your fingers crossed that we get through, and keep an eye out for our next post where we will let you know what happened.