System Group Idea Club
Using IBM LOOP Model
Idea Hub Story
The story of this project began when the HR experts faced some challenges after many meetings in the enterprise’s departments which represented that employees had excellent ideas for promoting and improving the enterprise’s processes and business portfolio but there is no specific process for delivering these ideas to action. As a result, the HR team initiates this design thinking project aka ‘The Idea Hub’ to address related challenges and also design a clear and simple process model for providing the right employee’s experience to capture enterprise-related ideas.
Problem Space
The main problem which the team had to solve was that the employees' brilliant business and organizational ideas were not implemented in previous years due to the fact that senior managers almost always were too busy to develop that ideas. This has resulted in the loss of attractive ideas for improving the different parts of the enterprise as well as the loss of excellent business ideas for the Enterprise’s business portfolio.
Current Status
After running a Playback with target personas and validating our Process Model, the Idea Hub Process which designed by IBM Loop has been approved by the enterprise’s senior executives and the board of directors and it is ready for implementation. The team executes the process and expects learning from the results and HR department promote this process through the company.
Driving the Loop
SG Human Resource Team
The team goes through the loop two times to design a good-enough experience for the process.SG Human Resource Team
Problem Space Methods and Activities
To completely understand the problem space, team used IBM Loop toolkit such as:
Hopes & Fears
As the team was formed for the first time with different perspectives to solve such a problem, as a coach I felt the need to build empathy within the team to get to know each other as much as possible and to identify their fears and hopes in this project in order to manage potential risks
Assumptions and Questions
Due to the fact that the team hadn't shared enough understanding about the problem space and almost all the key areas were not obvious, so I introduced this tool to the team to clarify the problem space for themselves.
Qualitative Interview
to validate their assumptions and know their questions answers, as a coach I offered them to use this tool to gain a good enough understanding of the project's problem space.
Stakeholder Map
to make better understanding in problem space for the team, I offered this tool to them in order to reflect as a team to identify stakeholders, their expectations, and the relationships between them with the hope of communicating with them more effectively during observe, reflect, and make phases.
Empathy Map
After running the observe phase, the team validated their assumptions, found their answers, and also found new things about the problem space. So, I decided to offer an empathy map due to the fact that it could help them summarize their findings and collected insights and knowledge about users with the goal of creating a common understanding of their goals and motivations.
Solution Space Methods and Activities
To design an awesome solution, the team used IBM and other design thinking tools including big idea vignettes and
Big Idea Vignettes & Crazy 8’s
Due to the fact that it is the first time which the team wanted to use Enterprise Design Thinking for designing an enterprise's process, as a coach I decided to use the combination of Big Idea Vignettes to rapidly diverge of possible solutions with Crazy 8's for sketching possible processes based on Big Idea Vignettes outputs.
After that, with the help of the storyboard, they visualized how employees' idea sharing experience should be in the future and finally they improve the selected model as a prototype.
What do team members do after my coaching now
Before my coaching, all participants who are members of different departments were did everything to complete their projects individually. Now that they are aware of the co-creating values, they are using this style of working in almost all projects in their departments. I coach them on how to collaborate and co-creating by using some methods such as Lego Bridge Game to design and create a solution as a team with different perspectives.
There was a major problem during the loop which was members were not being agreed about the process modeling type. For example, someone wanted to design a prototype based on BPMN syntax while another wants to use Flowchart. Due to the fact that the major focus of the project was to create an enjoyable experience for employees in order to share their ideas with Enterprise, so I convinced them to use some kind of user to-be journey map to design an experience.
One thing that I felt from the first steps I understand that storytelling is a very important skill to communicate with everyone and I taught the team to use this wonderful skill in every communication and focuses to improve themselves to use this skill.
Research & Sponsor Users
One of the most valuable and noticeable insights that the team captured during the qualitative interviews was that sponsor users are very sensitive about their Idea’s Intellectual Property and they wanted to ensure that the enterprise won’t abuse their idea. After negotiating with company’s legal department, the team achieved a legal process which was supporting the employees idea’s Intellectual Property.
The team used qualitative interviews in their design research process.
Mid-level enterprise members including Enterprise Performance Management expert and Senior Visual Designer.
Hills
After two iteration, team designed validated Hills for Idea Hub.
First, team designed Hills based on qualitative interview and observation. Then team aligned Hills with running Playbacks with related stakeholders and sponsor users to align with user’s intent.
Two selected Hills are mention in the next box.
No, it was not. After two iteration team improved Hills with the help of sponsor users in Playbacks.
Playbacks
Market Playback
The team learned that mid-level employees were frustrated because their voice and their idea were not heard in the enterprise. The outcome was focus on feeling improvement for employees in the Idea Hub Process and showing them enterprise hear their voice.
Zero Playback
Team learned that senior executives' goal was gaining significant numbers of the idea once every two months, not every week. So, the outcome was that idea pitch events are going to handle once in two months.
With the presence of sponsor users and key stakeholders, the team shares their problem-space findings and solution space ideas with participants during Market and Zero Playbacks. CEO, Enterprise Performance Manager, HR Manager, and 5 mid-level employees were attended in Playbacks.
Impact
We delivered the “Idea Hub” process model which is a step by step process that helps employees to submit their ideas and also helps the enterprise to recognize and implement best ideas.
Improve the enterprise's members' employee experience by paying attention to their ideas so this increases their commitment level to the enterprise.
Yes. One of our team members (Aidin.Z) achieved IBM EDT Practitioner and Co-creator badges and he planned to achieve the coach badge in foreseeable future.
After using EDT in this project with my coaching the company decided to use EDT in three other projects related to Sales, Product Development and Service Design
You can see the promotion phase of this process in this image
