Looking back, I think Wednesday was the most important day of the week for making a succesful presentation possible. This Blogpost shows why.
Starting the Day
After meeting with most of the group on Tuesday evening, we started Wednesday morning a bit later than the other days.
First, some people already prepared Empathy Maps for Dustin as a Sales Manager representative, Chris as an IT Manager representative and Southwire in general. We tried to collect pains, needs, tasks and goals. The purpose of this was to get an overview again of what information we got from the interviews on Tuesday at Southwire (see blog post on Tuesday).
After and during this, we also prepared some questions we wanted to ask Robert from Celonis who we would meet again right before lunch.
During this meeting it felt like, we lost the focus of our project. We were trying to figure out, which problem fits the best for a solution we could develop. Our focus shifted away from all the pain points we learned about, and instead was limited to thinking about a real solution we could introduce that might just solve one specific problem. But this was not the point of Design Thinking – and not the point of our seminar week.
Getting Back on Track
Armin reminded us, what Design Thinking is really about and what our real goal should be for this week. In this week it would not be possible to provide a ready-to-use, implemented solution that Southwire can adopt immediately. That would have been consulting. We instead, as ‘Design Thinkers’, can generate value for Southwire by thinking outside of the box and provide a variety of ideas for different pain points that also look beyond the obvious solutions.
This reminder helped us all a lot to understand what we should really be working on until the final presentation – and to get back on track.
To also mention some thing besides work this day: For lunch we went to the GCSU cafeteria for the first time. It is called ‘The Max’ and I think the name describes it really well. Unlike the average German cafeteria, ‘The Max’ is all-you-can-eat. You can choose between a lot of different food and snacks. Pizza, burger, fries, pasta, cake and ice cream are just some of the examples.
From Pain Points to Ideas
After lunch we kind of restarted our day. Instead of thinking about what specific solution we could provide, we took a few steps back and collected all the pain points again we learned about on Tuesday. We collected all points at the whiteboard first and then tried to categorize them. For this, we finally defined five main Problems: Lack of Knowledge Management, Lack of Data Management, Lack of Communication to Customer, Lack of Automation and Lack of Proactivity.
This Defining builded the foundation for a very productive split up into five different groups, where every group worked on one of the Defined pain points. We started with each group creating a Persona of who is affected by this Problem and figuring out how we came up with this specific pain point. After presenting our first results to each other, we were ready to start with the Ideation phase.
For Ideation most groups did ‘Crazy 8s’ to come up with 8 ideas in 8 minutes from each person in the group. This was very helpful to come up with a lot of ideas besides the obvious ones.
We were working a bit longer than planned this day so unfortunaetly the pickle ball pitches the Americans organised had to be cancelled. But I think every group was really happy with their ideas and the overall progress of this day. Everyone had a much better feeling after this day than before and we knew what we would have to do until Friday afternoon to make a good presentation possible.
Knowing how much we still had to do the next day, for me this evening ended early just with another Walmart visit (I definetly lost count a this point).
