Bringing IBM Design Thinking to NITTTR
Time to give an update on what we’ve been accomplishing on the work front with National Institute of Technical Teachers Training & Research (NITTTR).
After having finalized our new scope of work with the client to conduct a strategic and operational assessment and give recommendations on how to become a self-sustaining organization, we hit the ground running in week two by conducting stakeholder interviews, market research to get a handle on best practices, and preparing for a full-day Design Thinking workshop with NITTTR.
We worked with our client to line up 20+ interviews during the first part of the week with both internal and external stakeholders, including heads of departments, leadership, students, start-ups affiliated with the institute, and industry partners.
With the Director’s support and backing, we were able to execute this phase fast and glean important information to help us deeply understand the users/stakeholders, their current experience, pain points they experience and areas of opportunity to explore as part of our final recommendations. This also helped us identify who to invite to the Design Thinking workshop and the areas we were going to focus on.
Part of the intention of our CSC work was to impart new skills, new ways of thinking to our host organizations. Another part of the experience for us was to have the chance to learn in different areas and gain new skills.
I volunteered to lead our team with this work as it was a strategic skill-set I was interested in applying. I had shadowed my first IBM Design Thinking workshop back in January on another project and was excited to lead a hands-on workshop with our Indian clients, applying Design Thinking methodology. A big thanks to my sub-team who gave me the support, collaboration, and confidence to deliver this first-time experience for our client!
We had 25+ active participants throughout the day (a big feat!). Our objective was to validate some assumptions, identify other problems to solve for, and explore with our client and stakeholders to creatively think of new, big ideas to incorporate as part of our recommendations.
Our client truly embraced Design Thinking and enjoyed participating in an interactive experience. It also helped validate we were on the right path gearing up for our third week where we would be detailing out our recommendations.
Overall, it was a very successful day and a personal highlight of our work with NITTTR! Interested in reading the results of our session? Check out the read-out here. Stay tuned to see what we delivered!
