For this task I decided to use a recent problem that I have
been dealing with at work. The problem is that the services consultants are discovering
priority one product issues on client sites and as a result, major product
issues are being exposed to the clients.
In order to expand on the issue and
attempt to come up with solutions to this problem, I called together a few key
members of the services team to work through the issues and look for a resolution
being;
- Snr Principle Consultant Oil and Gas
- Principle Consultant – Mining
- Snr Project Manager
- Snr Manager Professional Services
I decided to use Compendium from the CogNexus Institute (Click here for the web site)
to visualise and document the process.
I ran two workshops across two Friday afternoons. The first
was a workshop to bring all of the players together and kick-off the process I
was undertaking. At the end of this meeting I asked each attendee to think about
the issue over the week and think about how the issue relates to them in their
particular role and to bring that info to next week’s meeting.
The second meeting was where the real work took place. We
began by brainstorming ideas and issues on the white board for about five
minutes to get our brains into problem solving mode and to get started with a
clear idea of the actual issue. We then moved onto the compendium software on
the projector as per the image below.
We determined that the issues were presented due to a number
of factors such as:
- Developers not understanding what the product is used for.
- Overall client side inexperience within the product team.
- Test team not effectively uncovering product issues.
- Test team being unfamiliar with real world scenarios.
- Unstandardisd approach to client configurations making resolutions hard to diagnose.
We wanted to keep it really simple as suggested by Spenner and Freeman (Harvard Business Review,
2014), because we realised that being able to sell our ideas to the executive
team would be mandatory if we wanted to instigate real change.
To
that end we came up with four ideas for further discussion.
- The Test team need to know more about real world systems.
- We need to expose Product developers to client issues.
- Product developers need to be more active with Services consultants.
- Services consultants should have more influence over the scope of product testing.
We
decided that setting up a client virtual machine in-house would allow us to
cover off many of the areas exposed in the list below with no input required from other departments.
- Demonstrating to developers what a real system looks like.
- Utilising this system to run pre-site testing within the services team.
- Training services consultants on a standard client setup and making them pass a certification of sorts.
- Allowing the test team to optimise their testing against the system
We also realised that we would not be able to make the necessary changes independently. So as a follow on action, we
will also be proposing to the heads of the other departments, to form a
fortnightly meeting comprising of decision makers from all of the departments in
order to discuss issues and attempt to work together, to further investigate these issues and agree on solutions to them.
Upon reflection of the tool I used, I felt that it really helped to organise our thoughts, stimulated opposing and supporting feedback and self documented the results. I would recommend using such tools to others faced with problems that require group involvement.
References
Harvard Business Review,. (2014). To
Keep Your Customers, Keep It Simple. Retrieved 14 September 2014, from
http://hbr.org/2012/05/to-keep-your-customers-keep-it-simple/ar/1
Task 4 Comment - Makali
Task 4 Comment - Makali
