Using the Design Sprint for process engineering problems
For issues with a well defined problem statement, the Design Sprint can be a great tool to design, prototype and implement successful solutions.
As a process engineer in a complex industrial plant, I find we are often trying to juggle many projects at once. This can make it difficult to focus on quickly delivering value on a single project. An agile approach that can help is the Design Sprint.
The Design Sprint is a structured process, designed by Google Ventures for
answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. It’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more — packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use. (GV.com)
Nominally, the process runs over 5 days :
On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a high-fidelity prototype. And on Friday, you’ll test it with real live humans.
It builds on the design thinking structure and provides a framework for problems that are well defined and require targeted focus to get an MVP solution (Minimum Viable Product) up and running (or SLC as this blog convincingly argues — Simple, Lovable and Complete.)
The focused timing of the sprint provides a creative constraint that ensures only the key scope of the problem can be worked on and to be successful participants cannot be distracted by other periphery issues or considerations.
Spotify have adapted the process to a shorter sprint, run over 4 hours, designed to:
- better understand our users’ pain points, goals, needs;
- go wide on design explorations;
- then, finally narrow down and get deeper on the explorations
Some tips to get the most out of the process:
- Problem Definition — Ensure you have a very clearly defined problem with the participants in the sprint having a very empathetic understanding of the customers pain. Consider using the Experience Map, Empathy Map, and systems thinking tools to help you look at connections and linkages beyond the linear 5 why’s type analysis.
- Sketch — The initial phase when you approach a problem with design thinking is to avoid converging too quickly on a solution — now is the time for divergent thinking and coming up with as many ideas as possible. When you think you have enough — come up with more! This 3rd Third concept from Tim Hurson gets you to examine a process 3 times before looking to move one. A Solo sketching activity called Crazy Eights — participants fold a piece of paper into eight squares, and they have 10 minutes to get their dieght ideas on paper. Then, they picked one idea to draw in more detail within 20 minutes.
- “How might we…” questions — a great prompt when exploring the problem space is a ‘How might we…” question. How might we create a solution that allows both x and y? How might we stop that problem? Another good question is “what has to be true… for this to be the right solution?” (Design sprints for kids)
- Team selection — ensure you have a fully autonomous team selected to conduct the sprint to ensure that they will not be stalled through the sprint while they wait for other resources outside the team to provide approval or a skillset that they lack.
- Design sprints are great at creating interesting but messy prototypes, ripe for further exploration. They rarely produce production-ready solutions. (The design sprint hammer)
- Design sprints are a great way to reduce the cost of failure in situations of high risk and uncertainty. If you’re comfortable working in a Lean environment, the outcome may simply be understanding what doesn’t work (The design sprint hammer)
Lean Kaizen Event
The design sprint is very similar to a lean / six sigma tool called a Kaizen, which is also focused on creating business value by rapidly creating a step change in a particular business area, through the creation of a autonomous team of people, taken out of the day to day business noise.
A typical 5 day Kaizen event might look like this:
- Day 1: Document and agree on the current state. Define desired state.
- Day 2: Discuss possible solutions. Agree on changes to implement.
- Day 3: Implement improvements
- Day 4: Refine improvements, develop new standard work
- Day 5: Train on new standard work. Communicate changes to management. Celebrate success.
And over a wider frame includes these event phases:
