But first, identify the right problem | Data Insight
Dialog Enterprise
Sri Lanka’s Largest ICT Business Solution Provider with cutting-edge technologies to empower Sri Lankan businesses.
Introduction
Organizations nowadays talk about how they envision to transform their processes by bringing in innovative data-driven solutions. But they often overlook the importance of identifying the right problem to solve and hurry to find solutions for the unknown or superficially known problems. Identifying the real challenge is difficult because either departments work in silos making the bigger picture barely visible to the leaders or teams chase tight timelines given by their superiors; spending too much time to reach the starting point might cost them their credentials to execute a project.?The reasons for not identifying the right problem can be different but the consequence remains the same – failure.
Albert Einstein said “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it”
Identifying the right problem is, therefore, a crucial stepping stone in building an innovation-led organization. Design Thinking can help organizations achieve this feat.
Design Thinking
Design Thinking talks about a three-staged non-linear approach.
Design Thinking is an iterative approach that helps in continuously evolving the organization.
Case Study:
One of the largest global fabric manufacturers wanted to find analytics and AI-based solutions that would revamp their processes and remove operational inefficiencies. ?
The customer has its operations spread across the globe. Its manufacturing units are based in South America, Europe and Asia. Being a global organisation, it has multiple marketing teams with central governance and its Digital and IT teams have Global Governance and Local Operations.
For us to recommend the best-fit solutions for them, it was crucial to find the right problems. The design thinking methodology was adopted to identify the specific problems in the organization that if addressed, could provide maximum value to the customer.
We, as an advisory team, did not include implementation of the solutions in our scope of work and promised to help them find the solutions to their problems and additionally create an implementation roadmap for them.
The Art Of Getting Inspired
Diverse and Inclusive Conversation Is The Key
We invited multiple stakeholders from various departments (sales & marketing, finance, Digital, planning and production, innovations, HR and strategy) and at various positions (CXO, VP, Managers) to discuss the difficulties they face in day-to-day operations and challenges that they encounter in the processes. This ensured that the common issues were identified and issues that fit into the puzzle of a bigger problem were uncovered.
Only because we included a diverse team we were able to understand that there was one common problem apart from specific department problems. Challenges in all business lines were unearthed and discussed across the audience.
‘Understand - Engage – Immerse’
If we directly asked the department leads and representatives to list out their problems we might have landed up being on the periphery of the problems. During our initial conversations, someone from the group said ‘We really want to reduce the cost of failures and improve operational efficiencies’. The other person said ‘Oh yes, and also we want to have the ability of real-time decision making’.
These information were too broad for us to get inspired enough to be able to recommend solutions. We needed to drill down on these information further.
To explore the scale and scope of problem and to minimize time to shadow different personas across the geographies we used our accelerators: Persona Definition and Journey Map.
We asked the C-suite leads and departmental representatives to identify personas in their departments and to provide a detailed information about their goals, motivations and frustrations. The journey map for every persona was then defined by the leads. The journey map consisted of the the day-to-day activities that the persona goes through and the challenges and emotions they encounter during the execution of every activity.
Following this exercise, we then set up?workshops with the leads and department representatives from multiple geographies and went through the persona journey maps to create an empathy map. The empathy map captured direct quotes from the leads and representatives about their day-to-day activities, their emotions and feelings during the execution of an activity and actions that the user take to complete an activity.
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For instance, the planning manager faced difficulties every day because there was limited visibility of demand for the upcoming quarter and they based their decisions on gut feeling which was bound to be inaccurate and inconsistent. It resulted in losses to the organization - either in the form of opportunity cost due to?product shortage ?or in the form of additional inventory carrying cost due to excessive stock. It affected the lead’s performance and resulted in lost motivation. This is the reason why initially the topic of real-time decision making had come up.
Similarly, a few other departments spoke about the unavailability of demand forecasts while others were highlighted?that they were not able to determine competitive prices for the products as they did not have their hands on real-time data of raw material cost fluctuations.
We made sure that we listened to all the discussed problems.
Derive ‘Specific and Precise’ Problems
It was then time to ?unpack and synthesize the findings into compelling needs and insights. Actionable problem statements were defined at this point. This was the most crucial step before we could answer our customers on what solutions would transform their organization and bring value to them.
Our analysis of the findings in the empathy stage helped us identify a few levers under which problems could be bucketed. Cost, Experience, Revenue and Trust on Data were few of the problem buckets.?
All of the problems were translated into actionable problem statements.
For example: accurate demand forecasts had to be provided to the production planning team to help the team reduce inventory and?opportunity costs. This problem showed us that to have accurate forecasts it was important to have historical demand values in a system through which data can be pulled and used in forecasting. When asked about such a database the digital leads realized that the historical demand data was not being captured in any system and was rather just in excels and varied across the departments. There was no single system which tracked demands from their customers across seasons and geographies. Therefore, the problem statement we uncovered was ‘The issue of getting consolidated historical data of demand from various geographies, customers, seasons in a single database to accurately forecast the future demand’.
Similarly such statements were defined for all the problems.
As every organization has budget and time constraints to show value from any transformational journey, it is important that the problem statements are prioritized. We helped the leads prioritize the problem statements based on business impact and extent of dependency. Around 3-5 problem statements were prioritized across all the problem levers.
We had the ground-level problems in front of us. It was now time to find the right solutions.
Ideation Without Constraints
Recommend solutions that drive innovation
We had to achieve the last milestone of finding solutions to the problems and add value to the organization. Based on our partnerships with other customers in the same industry, we already had a list of initiatives that we could recommend. The value lies in the fact that how best we could customize those initiatives to fit the needs of this customer.
For one more time, we needed inputs from the leaders and departmental representatives. In an another set of workshops, we asked the group to turn the problem statements into multiple ‘How might we…’ statements.
Building up on the last problem statement example, we co-defined the how might we statements with the group and then recommended unconstrained solutions for every how might we statement.
How might we bring all the historical demand values across geographies and products in?a single database for the data scientists to accurately forecast the demand so that the planning managers can take informed and proactive decisions while planning production volume.
Solutions:
Not all solutions can be implemented; because of the desirability-feasibility-viability filter.
Therefore it is important to perform an analysis on whether a solution makes sense to the customer and is desirable; is technically feasible; and is sustainable and viable enough to be maintained and reproduced in the future.
The DFV analysis helped us create a strategic roadmap, tailor-made for our customer that catered to their priority needs.
In a Nutshell
Design Thinking has been traditionally used to refine product features to make the products more appealing to the customers but the concept is now being extended to develop new products and services. In fact, as we saw in our case study, its most recent applications have been in the identification of problems/use cases as part of strategy projects.
Initially, design thinking may appear to be very chaotic to the leads due to multiple inputs and contracting thoughts across departments. But eventually during the journey the leaders start seeing the value and understanding cross-functional viewpoints. It is important to keep the team motivated and engaged.
Design Thinking also makes sure that the recommended solutions have the support of the organization leads by ensuring an integrated approach of getting their views at every step.
All in all, if the problems are not clear and the solutions are required to solve those unknowns, design thinking is the way to go.