From Pretotype to MVP with the Hitachi Solutions Design Thinking Studio

Seeing is believing !

Here at Hitachi Solutions, we believe that seeing is believing and that using design thinking, rapid prototyping and business value assessment with a diversity of lenses is a great way to help our customers quickly assess how technology can help them drive their digital innovation and business transformation.

We've built a cross-functional hub as part of our Digital Innovation Team that is focused on delivering and showcasing transformation in action as part of our Design Thinking Studio. The objective of this studio is to bring together a cross-disciplinary team of experts in design thinking, UX design, citizen and pro developers and change management who can bring experiences to life and then help scale them from MVP into production. This diversity in the team, both from a cultural, expertise and generational perspective promotes Rebel Ideas which make for more creative and innovative solutions.

It's not just about building prototypes and MVPs. Whilst the objective is to rapidly prototype and build an MVP very close to the business problem and observe and empathise with the end-users, we also setup the technical environment and programme methodology with a production project in mind. Hitachi Solutions is a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) organisation and our teams work in close-knit teams. Using Azure DevOps and robust ALM processes, the initial development of the as-is MVP is setup as if it was a fully scaled project with the right Epics, User Stories and Pipelines in place so that the MVP can evolve to production just as soon as the business value, and technical feasibility is proven.

Another key objective is to design with accessibility in mind where the UX needs to meet stringent design guidelines. Many of our projects are within Public Sector as outlined during a recent presentation for "la Journée des Acteurs Publics Solutions". Applications need to be developed with accessibility in mind as they are used by a broad spectrum of citizens who require differing levels of guidance.

To illustrate the Design Thinking Studio in action, let's take an example of a fictious project for a social care platform for vulnerable citizens and those in need. This is an extension of work we have already done around the Vulnerability Hub with several local councils across the UK and representative of the kind of project we're working on, including the recently announced InnOvaTe project with South London Partnership.

Working closely with the team, one of the first steps was to create a high-level customer journey based on stakeholder interviews carried out with different personas : vulnerable residents and care providers. These interviews give us insights into unmet & latent needs from different perspectives. Observation of these stakeholders also gives us context of their day and the challenges they have. The purpose of the Customer Journey is to map these and the ideal experience - like in the simplified example below:

We then start to look at how the user experience could be enhanced and how we can meet persona needs and address their challenges through digital innovation. We often use storyboards / concepts and pretotypes to think through the user story for the entire customer journey or maybe just part of it that needs reinforcing due to current challenges or adoption issues. For example, in one recent engagement with a customer, we looked at the end-to-end customer & employee journey as part of our Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement project with them. It turned out that there was a bottleneck at one step of the journey and after some end-user observation, a good fit was a Powerapp and some automation to both increase CSAT and improve the employee experience. We therefore built a rapid prototype on Powerapps, connected to Dataverse & Dynamics to address this particular part of the journey.

Let's take a look at how we turned our customer journey above into a storyboard with inputs from different stakeholders and the innovation team:

Once a certain number of concepts are created, we bring together the best ideas into a final storyboard - we call this Round Robin where each person builds upon the creations of others and the final result is a collective efforts from a diverse set of lenses:

Once the concepts and customer journey is mapped, we can go one step further and create a prototype. Based on the complexity of the solution, we can do this using technologies such as Figma or directly using low-code. The objective of this step is to engage end-users, gather feedback and iterate. The example below was created by one of our UX designers and includes converting the storyboard/pretotype into a prototype, taking into consideration the user population :

In parallel, we look at business value in terms of productivity gains, NPS, revenue projections as part of the business value assessment. The project above is related to reducing the cost of care and increasing the comfort of vulnerable citizens. Others we have worked on include linking the use of Microsoft cloud solutions to the reduction of non-compliant product batches and increased operator productivity in a manufacturing production line, reduction of maintenance costs and uptime in aviation or reduction of completion time or management of defects in property management.

This blend of design thinking, prototyping and business value assessment then defines the path forward for implementation of an MVP and scaling to Production. Our expertise in DevOps and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) enables our teams to take the output of these customer engagements and build the right user stories and pipelines to move the project forward. We also compliment this with Technology Maturity Assessments for different Microsoft services such as Power Platform, Data & AI and Azure to gauge the readiness of the organisation from a technical project implementation perspective and also from the human & people angle with our Change Management Assessments

The final objective being able to rapidly showcase the vision and prove value of a technological investment, closely aligned with business & operational strategy, with end-user empathy, and then scale-up through the use of our Consensus Framework. In a nutshell, be as agile as a start-up, whilst being able to rely on a large, international and established team of experts to scale-up.

For our French-speaking friends, please don't hesitate consulting some other ways that our Digital Innovation & Design Thinking team can help rapid prototyping in Power Platform, both in Application Innovation & Intelligent Automation: