The Contingent Workforce Program Journey- Part 4: Foundations of a Solution

Part 1: The First Step

Part 2: Neutral Discovery

Part 3: Current State Analysis

Part 4: Foundations of a Solution

When I talk about contingent workforce (CW) program maturity, I often use the question, "what do you want to be when you grow up?"?

Most of us had this question posed to us throughout our lives, some of us are still trying to answer it.?But in the context of contingent workforce and how programs mature over time, knowing what you want your program to become is a vital question that requires some thought and understanding to answer. In the past few articles, we've walked through taking initial steps, establishing problem statements, extrapolating root causes, and understanding your program's current state.?With that baseline, you're now ready to begin building the foundations of a solution.?

Design thinking ideation

In its most simple form, design thinking is a way of solving problems and coming up with solutions by designing from the end-user's perspective.?Essentially, what would the consumer want the process to be??I would never claim to be a design thinking expert - but like many things in life, we cherry pick aspects of experiences that have gone well in the past and use them in a way that we find effective.?For me, design thinking ideation is one of those experiences that has brought about very positive results in designing a CW program foundation.?I'll also add that what I'm talking about today is only a small part of a much larger methodology.

With design thinking ideation, I feel it's a great way to start thinking through what you want your CW program to be. It's an opportunity to get creative and allow stakeholders to be a part of something amazing!?To start, you'll want to continue having your neutral consultant involved and even driving an ideation session. Gather your stakeholders from your governance group .?If you haven't already, review your current state and make sure everyone is aligned on the root causes of the problems .?

Set the stage that this session is purely about ideation and thinking out loud on the, "what could be."?There are no right or wrong suggestions.?The only caveat is that the suggestions must come from an end-users perspective.?Think of it as a very human-centric approach.?This could be from somebody using the process/service/tool trying to obtain a CW, or from someone who's involved in a process that interacts with a CW process (e.g., an approver in a budgeting process).

The goals you want to achieve during the session:

1. Document the ideal process, tools, functionality, service
2. Anchor these ideas back to the root causes - what problems are they solving? Why are we trying to solve them?
3. Understand how this impacts the end user and other upstream/downstream partners
4. Try to get as many ideas as possible - you never know which one may be a game changer for you?

Walk through the process of, "I have a need for a non-employee (contingent) worker."?Where does it start, where would it go, how would you get there??Give yourself some physical (or virtual) whiteboard space to add sticky notes for each idea along the end to end process.?After you write something down, ask yourself, "what's next; now what?"?Feel free to express thoughts around where something may live or how it may work.?Even if there are competing ideas, that's perfectly fine.?Continue through the process.?Remind people of the spirit of what you are trying to accomplish; stay on task.?

Don't lose sight

During design thinking ideation, we're thinking of ideal solutions to complex problems.?There may be folks in the room that want to ground us back to reality and start asking questions or saying things like:

• "How will all of this work together?"
• "How will we fund this?"
• "This isn't realistic."
• "No one will sign off on this."
• "Rabble, rabble, rabble…"

That's OK, and normal.?It's hard to start thinking of an ideal state when we know the difficulty of actually approving and implementing solutions.?Your consultant should be able to step in and bring the group back to the focus of the goals.?It's important during this session that we challenge assumptions.?We need to be creative. Maybe, even have a little fun.?

Don't get caught up in all the details of how exactly everything will work.?We're not solving every little detail and defining final processes.?We're simply trying to get our creativity flowing to begin documenting crafty solutions to problems that most folks in the professional world do not understand. Through this, we're simply trying to form a foundation in which we can continue to build upon.?Design thinking is an iterative process. We start with an ideal state (foundation), then refine our build based on continuously anchoring back to our original root causes.?

Throughout the evolution of CW program maturity, it's imperative to always ask ourselves (and I'll say it again), "what's the problem(s) we're trying to solve?" It's far too easy to go off on tangents and other rabbit holes.?Without even knowing it, we've lost sight of our original intent. So keep it simple - document the what and why of the problems, and stick to solving for those.

3,651 Sticky Notes

As you wrap up your session, you may find you've create a huge mess of ideas with at least $30 worth of sticky notes.?Awesome. Similar to root cause analysis, the next step is to create buckets and themes based on the responses provided.?Your consultant should be able to group together through the end to end process what your ideal state looks like.?They can also provide advisory on what may work best based on industry standards.?This doesn't mean that you have to do what everyone else is doing.?It simply is meant to give perspective and help everyone understand the potential.?

As the ideal state is worked through based on the group's input, as always, it is critical to do a readout with the group to validate what was heard.?Double checking your work not only helps you in the design but it supports change management, and ensures that your stakeholders feel heard.?Additionally, you can either include leadership as a way of checking in on progress or including them in the next part of the journey.?Stay tuned for the next article in this series on how an ideal state becomes the baseline for your solution roadmap.

Final thought

I'd like to acknowledge that trying to summarize a design thinking ideation session into a 1,100 word article leaves out many fine details.?My goal is to outline some high level elements that call out the intention and thought process that would go into designing an ideal state. The devil is always in the details.

If you enjoy my Contingent Workforce Ramblings, and would like to talk with me about how to elevate your CW program from a neutral perspective, please reach out to me.?I'd love to be able to help!