Design Thinking Enterprise rollout for a shared service centre

A leading Shared Service Center of a global organisation headquartered in UK, providing Finance Delivery & Information Services to their global parent network, connected with Turian Labs to engage in Enterprise-wide Design Thinking and culture-building to help them shift their internal positioning, and delivery within their organisation.

Project Brief

• Introducing a culture of innovation and problem solving to continuously offer greater value and reliability, within acceptable cost structures, to enable the above

• Infusing the practice of Design Thinking into the organization’s problem-solving repertoire to enable the above

• Helping the Shared Service Center become a recognised, strategic partner across countries/regions and operating departments, by consolidating dispersed support service centres globally into a single centre. This would be possible by expanding the range of services into new, underserved areas, shifting from the undifferentiated transaction-based cost-effective services to value and skills-based services.

Approach

We began our journey with a joint session with key stakeholders (senior executives) across the board to review existing innovation initiatives and the overall innovation culture.  After this session, an implementation roadmap was created, which outlined key activities in the near and short term.

Over the course of the next 9 months, we delivered:

5 DEEP DIVE WORKSHOP | 2 DESIGN THINKING SPRINTS | 75+ PARTICIPANTS IMPACTED

Series of deep-dive Design Thinking workshops

We conducted a series of workshops for program leads, senior managers and executive leadership:

For program leads & senior managers:

Workshops were attended by cross-functional teams. Workshops objective were:

• To bring teams up to speed with the concept of Design Thinking and how it helps in the innovation journey

• To introduce teams to the various tools which can be used in real-time business scenarios

• To provide experiential learning and build confidence in deploying learnings from the workshop 

For executive leadership:

This workshop was attended by the executive leadership team, including the CEO/MD of the firm. The objectives of this workshop was to:

• Help leadership get a quick immersion into Design Thinking and its relevance today

• Help them empathize with their teams who will be using the Design Thinking tools as a part of their innovation journey

• Help them ideate on potential solutions for a pre-defined strategic problem
  

DESIGN THINKING SPRINTS

A selected group of participants trained on Design Thinking methodology was selected to applying their learnings to a few real-time business scenarios projects through Design Thinking Sprints.

These scenario-based projects spanned 3 months, with 5 planned interventions. Projects ranged from low to medium complexity, with the objective of going through an entire project cycle in a set time-frame, which allowed teams to implement the Design Thinking tools in real-time business scenarios.

• The project kicked-off with the teams ideating on probable problem statements and defining the project scope which was followed by conducting secondary research to understand the broader contours of the problem at hand.

• The next step involved diving deeper into their problem statement, identifying the various stakeholders and preparing an interaction guide for user empathy.

• Once user interactions were complete, teams assimilated their findings and converged towards redefining their problem statement: this was one of the most critical stages in their journey.

• Once problem statements was redefined, teams ideated on potential solutions, followed by rapid-prototyping in the form of storyboards and paper sketching.

• The final stage involved presenting findings in front of key stakeholders and decision-makers for validation and feedback.