Step 6 — Implementation
Blog 9/10
After 10 weeks of Design Thinking we were almost ready to enter the final stage, implementation. But before that we re-grouped for a half-day session to look at the results of our Prototyping. Prototyping took us a couple of weeks and we’d got lots of useful insight — confirming which ideas were worth going after and what were the initial iterations we could start looking into.
We started the session looking at the Design Thinking process in the context of the wider workflow of developing a Product. Even though we’re at the end of this process, we’ve a long way to go to turn our ideas into real, applicable solutions developed in an Agile way (see below for example).
The rest of our session was structured around several useful exercises which helped us order all the research we had gathered so far, unearth the links between different ideas and how implementing them would work.
The first exercise saw us visualising what our organisation would look like with our ideas implemented and we had to answer 6 questions:
1. How do employees experience their career?
2. What are employees saying about it?
3. What are they feeling about it?
4. What impact has it had on our HR teams and managers?
5. What does it need to include?
6. What does Harvard Business Review have to say about it?
We did this together, shooting ideas left, right and centre. We were energised and thinking bold, setting the vision for what we want the future to be.
For the second exercise we imagined ourselves having implemented the ideas and looking back answering the below 6 questions — we were looking back to plan forwards. We used this to really feel what would be the crunch points to these ideas being a success and how to overcome any barriers.
1. What was the immediate support you requested from the business to get things moving?
2. What were the first signs you observed that success was coming? What did you hear, see and feel?
3. What was the most important factor in achieving successful implementation of your ideas?
4. What were the biggest barriers you encountered and how did you overcome them specifically in the below areas; People and engagement, Financial planning, Tools and technology, Leadership and accountability
5. What was your role in achieving this success?
6. When you realised it was so successful, how did you celebrate?
Then we each had time to create a Business Model Canvas (BMC) for one of the 4 ideas that we’d tested and iterated. The BMC is a great tool to look at the main parts in the implementation of the product. An important thing to keep in mind here is that this will change as your project/product evolves. Again, it’s just to get the initial feeling for it.
We spent the final part of the session developing the roadmap for our four different ideas. This involved a tonne of post-it notes and helped us agree what needs to be done, by when and by who. We only had time to pull out a few major milestones and delved in a little more detail into the roadmap for the next 3–4 months. We’re planning to use this to build the tasks for the coming 3 months to our team task board.
There’s one more part that we didn’t have time for but are planning to do in the coming weeks — create an elevator pitch; and practise telling our story for stakeholder buy-in. Now we’re at the point of implementing our ideas, we’ll have lots of stakeholders to bring onboard.
