We introduced design thinking to our client by taking them through a design research sprint. This work has enabled our client to spread design thinking to other business units, which has led to new opportunities for our company.
4 weeks
1 kickoff workshop
8 remote interviews
1 ideation workshop
5 opportunity spaces
Research Director
Design Researcher (me)
Design Researcher
Data Scientist
client communications, plan methodology, facilitate research sessions & workshops, create deliverables, presentation.
ABB is a Fortune 500 company that sells, operates, and maintains heavy equipment and technology in a variety of industries. Our particular stakeholders for this project sell maintenance contracts and manage the logistics of the service engineers who go out into the field to update & fix the automation systems.
Our stakeholders had recently developed a new innovation process that included using ‘design thinking’ to quickly validate the value of internal ideas. They wanted to pilot this new innovation process with a quick 4-week project before trying to spread it throughout other lines of business. Our goal was to conduct research with field service engineers to understand the value of a concept that won an internal hackathon. Simply put, we needed to understand how service engineers troubleshoot problems with power plant automation systems, so that we could assess the value of a new concept before they spent time & money developing it.
To understand the troubleshooting process, we needed to speak with field service engineers and technical support experts. We managed to identify 8 people who were willing to participate in remote research sessions within a week, due to our quick turnaround.
Priming Survey: sent survey prior to interviews in order to inform our research sessions & prime participants with stories to share with us.
Remote journey mapping: used Miro boards to illustrate a journey map of troubleshooting a control system while participants filled in the blanks.
Exploratory data analysis: analyzed 13,291 corrective maintenance work orders over the past 3 years to identify patterns in the data.
After analyzing our research data, we facilitated a remote ideation workshop to generate ideas based on what we learned. We invited both our client and research participants to join the workshop in order to get a variety of perspectives. We used Miro to host the workshop so that everyone could generate ideas on the same board in real time. After the workshop, we organized the ideas into themes that we planned to prioritize.
We planned to prioritize the concepts generated from the workshop alongside the original hackathon concept. We designed a remote prioritization activity that had participants rank the concepts based on both value and feasibility. Unfortunately, our client was hosting an internal conference during our last week of the project, so we were only able to get one response. However, we still showed our client how they could prioritize the ideas moving forward.
We built a presentation to show our client that the hackathon concept was valuable, but also that there were a number of other opportunities that were more valuable and more feasible. The deliverables from this project have been shared throughout our client's organization to spread design thinking to other business units. We have received additional requests for proposals to do similar work for other stakeholders within the organization.
"Surround yourself with people who know what you don't know. Become enticed by the unknown." - Linda B. Smith
© 2021 Braden King