I had a couple of great experiences last week and both had to do with helping teams with designing things that were not a products or services. Many people associate the word "design" with the process of styling consumer or industrial products (smart phones, fork-lifts, appliances, etc.) or the generation of the final work products (typically CAD models & drawings) that enable components to be manufactured. These views of design are very limited. To me, everything that humans create involves at least some degree of design.
The design experiences I had last week were in helping a team turn around a quotation to a potential customer quickly and to help my students develop the solution method for a lab that I assigned them. Not real innovative or sexy, but these teams were engaged in design nonetheless. In both instances, the process advanced significantly faster once I was able to have the the team members working collaboratively rather than as individual contributors. Once the focus was off of the tools and on making decisions about what was needed and how that would be done, the design activity accelerated considerably.
If the quotation activity had been done the traditional way with individual contributors focused on the production of work products of sufficient detail for accurate cost estimation, there would have been too much engineering done prematurely and there would have been far less coordination and consistency across the different domains. What was done differently this time was to have all of the contributors in the same room, reviewing the same information, and iterating on the solution. We were using Design Thinking methodologies to develop the quotation not only fast, but with a quantifiable metric of the confidence in the cost estimate.
For my students working on their lab assignments, the situations is actually very similar. Traditionally, the students would read the assignment, identify what they believe is required, and start coding. What I had them do differently was to start by drawing the problem out graphically and to discuss what must be produced as output. The students started talking to each other, making suggestions, and questioning assumptions and the approach to the solution method.
The basic approach involves stepping through this process and cycling through iterations that refine the design and/or explore design alternatives.
The first stage, inputs, is to collect as much information and context as is possible. It is also important to capture any available information as given or references. For both the quotation effort and the lab, this was fairly easy. The quote team already had a lot of information (prototype costs and a BOM, many drawings, a due date, etc.). The students also had the assignment with input information clearly identified, a list of the required outputs, and a due date. It was fairly easy to generate a preliminary problem statement at this stage for both efforts.
The following stage, analysis, is to develop a deeper understanding of the goals, requirements, stakeholders (and what is important to them), and where the challenges and opportunities are likely to be. This analysis stage is the analysis of the problem, not of the design. For the team charged with generating the quotation, it was important to categorize what information they had and understand what was going to be critical to generate a cost estimate in the time they had. Rather than trying to get every item on the BOM to the same state of completeness in order to have them all quoted, the team identified the few items that had the largest impact on the cost and the confidence in the overall cost. For the students it was critical for them to capture what was being asked for BEFORE they just started to code. For both efforts, the teams had to think harder about what the real problem was and debate these assumptions. A lot of wasted effort was avoided by not diving into the doing prematurely. Both teams had the ability to create refined problem statements at this point propelling them into the next activity: generating output.
The quote team was able to start generating output that captured the known and assumed costs of each item in the BOM. By using some simple conditional formatting and sorting features in the spreadsheet, it was becoming more obvious where they needed to concentrate their efforts. The key was to have a cost estimate and an assessment of the quality of that estimate for every item first. Their output at the end of the first cycle through was a complete cost estimate to the BOM as well as a quality metric of the cost for each item and a weighted average for the overall cost. This information, in one place and in a format that was easy to work with and that supported visualizing the outputs was critical in being able to move forward efficiently.
For the students working on the lab, their output consisted of a flow-chart that detailed at a high-level the individual calculations that would need to be made and the overall logic that would be required to solve the problem. Because they put it up on the wall, it was visible for the entire class to see. I advised them not to try to solve each problem line-by-line the first time, but get through the entire assignment with the flowchart being assessed as being capable of being used as a template for the code.
The real power of the methods come from continuing to cycle through the process. With each iteration new information that influences the design is discovered so it is important to not try to get bogged down on the first cycle - go through the process once, get comfortable with the process, and let the process inform the decisions. It is important for the team to stay engaged and collaborate for as long as possible. Clearly, at some stage there will be activities that can only be performed by an individual; when this is the case, there must be a demonstration of the output to the group to close the cycle before moving on to the next iteration.
Both teams found that once they had the first cycle complete, they were able to quickly identify the most challenging aspect of the project and prioritize accordingly. By keeping the focus on making progress collaboratively and with output that was visual and able to be demonstrated a significant acceleration of the development was realized. Proof that the solution to problems always involves creative design and that design thinking methodologies can be applied to realize innovative solutions faster.