ORGM5000 Project Management Assignment Sample
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Introduction
In the globalised and digital age, the companies are increasingly engaged in global transactions, continues expansion of its business operations, growing partnership to generate new sources or revenues and other business opportunities. As a result, the business models are becoming complex which experiences multifaceted problems and pose challenges for business. The solution to this is not limited to altering or introducing new products or services but it requires multidimensional solutions (Seidel et al., 2013). This has directed the companies’ attention towards the concept of design thinking to address routine business problems and challenges to achieve market competitiveness. The task is about application of design thinking concepts to understand the reason behind the challenge faced by a company, Udrew. The purpose of this task is to identify an ongoing challenge faced by Udrew business model by an entrepreneur and to analyze the identified challenge by application of different techniques and process of design thinking to re-define the value proposition.
Background of Udrew and entrepreneur
Udrew is a one stop solution to provide small building and engineering plans and plans for smaller building projects needs like pool, sheds, driveway, walls fences, etc. The company is also engaged in assisting customers to submit finished building plans and get approval of building and engineering plans. The company was founded by Tom Young who is a geotechnical analyst, system engineer and structural draftsman. The company is trying to address the problem of home owners in planning, designing and approval process for building plans. The company is providing solution to its home owners to save time in planning building projects and reduce the hassle to deal with local consultants like builders, architects, etc, government for approvals, material and construction suppliers. The company headquarter is in Subiaco, Western Australia. The entrepreneur to analyze the organization challenge and value proposition of Udrew is a CEO of a local firm, Curtin.
Udrew organisational current challenge and value proposition
The company is faced with different organizational challenges related to globalization of its product, to develop government and customers trust in new technology, empowering customers for do it yourself as a reliable solution, gain cooperation from local government, industry and customers, continuous innovation and research and development initiatives, continuous training to enhance inspiration and employee skills. Thus, it can be viewed that reason behind these organizational challenge related to make the different stakeholder to trust in the new technology and to change the traditional way of doing things in building planning. The current value proposition of the company is refers to the company provides a fast building approval which is considered to be a good building approval.
The concept of design thinking
Design thinking refers to an innovative methodology employed by designers to solve business routine problems and problems in complex business models to reach desirable multi-dimensional solutions (Xu et al., 2017). The techniques of design thinking are action oriented to provide solutions through logical thinking, systematic reasoning and intuition to discover new opportunity and possibilities for business, people and technology. Design thinking provides a structural framework for understanding the challenges and opportunities to develop innovative solutions to benefit the end users and the business. The design thinking is a useful means to observe the actual needs and organizational constraints to redefine business model, value proposition, outline opportunities and find innovative scope and ways to test and refine solutions.
Process: The key process of design thinking includes empathy, defining, ideate, prototype and test (Seidel et al., 2013). The empathy process is to ask questions to encourage open communication to find out any negative opinion, experience from the users. This method focuses on the current experiences and observes any gap and difficulties faced by end-users. In define phase, the problem identified is redefined by identification of user needs for each customer segments from the questioning insights and considering the customer relationship with the business and its offerings. This will be useful to design the problem and related statement. In ideate phase, the possibility of meeting the latent needs are brainstormed. The ideas can be connected by storytelling, behavior patterns, etc. to develop new business model designs (Carlgren et al., 2016). The prototype is build to develop more logical thinking to draw new behavior, product application, new experiences, etc. and seek feedback to test and for refinements.
Literature: According to Glen et al. (2014) , the initial step in design thinking is systematic questioning. The author state the questioning forms an integral part of designing process for analysing a problem in-depth to gain true answers, experience, opinions or solutions. Olsen (2015) viewed the method of storytelling in design thinking as a problem solving method to encourage innovation. Similarly, Xu et al. (2017) states the process of emphasise, ideate and prototype in design thinking are effective to cite the organisational current changes for future growth and innovation.
Haruyama et al. (2013) specify the analysis of organisation problem through an initial exploratory process that emphasise on data collection from different sources. The author viewed that exploratory method is useful to identify the true needs of end-users and to clearly define the problem. This is followed by brainstorming method to generate ideas to resolve the defined problem. Liedtka (2015) describes the prototype phase is also useful for need identification and focus of exploration to get different designs insight for the problem. This method is useful in choosing the design criteria and to generate new innovative ideas and experimentation leads to section of best fit design or the diverse customer segments.
Application of the design thinking methods to breakdown the organisational challenge
To understand the organisation challenge faced by the company a series of different design thinking method are applied which are interviewing technique, use of affinity diagrams asking questions to employee and prototyping. These methods are used to get an insight on the current challenges to link with the customer requirements, technological opportunities and to identify the customer centric factors that are required for business growth and success and to generate competitive advantage in the longer run.
The researching techniques is used to define the challenges for understanding the reason from different perspective of customers, government, industry, etc. the interviewing techniques is adopted to understand the perception of the customers, consultants and existing employees regarding the technology aspects and use. The goal here was to empathise with the interview participants. In empathize phase, the company moderator through interviewing technique ask questions to customers (home owners), employees, government agencies, architects, builders, and other consultants. The empathy with internal and external customers will encourage them to speak openly about the problems, points out hidden needs and issues and discover the emotional component for the company and its products (Noweski et al., 2012). The response highlight the need or accurate information, difficulty in using the technological application, lack of trust in new technology, lack of continuous technical training, diminishing innovation culture and high cost of technological applications. This helped to discover the actual needs and level of trust in the technology and reflect on the current culture of the organisation as felt by the workforce. It would help in finding new surprises such as trustworthy relationship, financial challenge, uncomfortable with use of application. It can be noted that design thinking helped to identify the potential culture developing and assist the company in modifying the culture to become more collaborative and customer focused. The interview reflected on the different measures of culture such as employee job satisfaction, engagement with work, innovation culture, skill or knowledge gap, current training program effectiveness and measure of technology product through customer satisfaction and trust factor in new technological solutions. The researching process can also encourages storytelling and the overall processes reflected lack of trust in new technology and inability of employee to learn adapts and copes to changes.
Affinity diagrams are another technique for used in researching the organisational problem from different angles. This technique is used to develop link between the different problems to uncover a major reasons behind problems though an insight of the affinity diagram and its analysis. This is also useful to develop design concepts from different reach data collected (Jensen et al., 2016). For this, the employee were asked to use post-it notes to provide information on business goals and challenges experienced to meet business goals and to deal with different customer profiles. The information received from Udrew workforce was organized on a board to visualize the situation. This reflected on issues such as informational needs, training needs and rewards and recognition for innovation, maintain quality of services and value for money to enhance customer value. This technique is also useful to understand the analytical thinking and intuition. Once the sticky notes were posted, the next step was to mapping the informational notes into logical categories. This is visually easier to understand to link the similar and related information to define the problem and form reason behind the real problem. This also demonstrated the related problem of culture for innovation and learning as a whole which can provide a significant basis for an innovative thinking. These workshops highlight the organization challenge of culture and its non-alignment with the business offering and motivation strategy. This requires to change the mindset of its different stakeholders and to align the company culture for innovation and training with the business goals for business focused initiatives. This require initiating programs to help the development the capabilities and make employee engaged and focused to enhance innovation and make contribution to Udrew.
Value proposition: The design thinking process and techniques are used to redefine and guide the business model of Ubrew for the organizational challenges. The insights from the design thinking are used to revise the value proposition of the company to a more focused value proposition for its target audience. The interrelationship between the different features in Udrew business model is useful to understand and define the value proposition for the target customers. It also helps to logically observe the different mechanisms that are employed by the company to fulfill the value proposition. The paper form of business model canvas can be used as an important tool for prototyping the company current business model (Jensen et al., 2016). This will provide a visual demonstration of components that generate, provide and capture value. The simpler method is to use paper prototype technique where each component in the business model are represented by sticky notes under the different headings (Carlgren et al., 2016). The value proposition are identified in terms of cost efficiencies, product customization, risk reduction, time saving and other reason that customers pay to Ubrew to solve and satisfy the actual needs. The customer segments of Udrew are majorly home owners, local governments and third party professionals that provide an insight of the target market and profitability of each segment that realize the benefit from the value proposition. The customer relationship also reflects the engagement with Udrew. The revenue streams for the business identify to be majorly from the approval process and online designs segments. The business executive and the consultants together identify the common services to support business and identify possibility of new value proposition. In the design phase, the components of the business model canvas are explained to the company participants. The prototyping of business model is to understand and experiment with different designs which are done using post cards or post-it notes (Haruyama et al., 2013). The different designs of the proposed business model are then evaluated with the help of innovation team. This is useful to select the best match for the target audience. The new value proposition identified is the technological application to meet needs of customer, local government and consultants that saves time, money and efforts for building plans and small engineering projects. The prototyping technique is a useful to revise the value proposition of Udrew.
Reflection on the design thinking and its techniques
The design thinking technique helped me to solve the problems which are related with business routine. Design thinking offer the structure for develop the understanding to use the opportunity to get the successful business. As per my experience on this study, I learnt that the organization faced several the challenges in concern to the development. I found that the organization want to globalize their product for increase the profit. Additionally, it is also found that the company also facing the problem to create the trust of new technology with the customer and government. Moreover, the company also wants to make the customer reliable about the organizational product. In this study, I researched that the company faced the additional challenges like less cooperation of the government, need of continues training of the employee, need skilled staff, require continues R&D for innovation, etc.
In this assignment, it is found that there are a lot of methods of the design thinking that create issue that which should be chosen for the betterment of the organization. The interview technique, use of affinity diagram, prototype of business model and analysis of the situation are the methods to resolve the current challenge. It is found by me that the methods that are used in this assignment are very helpful for the growth and success of the business. It is also identified me that the use of affinity diagrams is helpful to solve the problem by the developing the link between the problem. I also found that this technique is useful to develop design concept and understand the analytical thinking.
It is observed by me that both the workshops are useful for the company. It is because the design thinking workshops are helpful to solve the regular problems of the business by providing the multi-dimensional solutions. These workshops use the techniques for discover the innovative ideas, opportunity for the business. Along with this, I also found that the workshop includes the limitations of the design thinking such as timing of the working, the employee has quite knowledge about the stockholders of the company, need of the accurate assumptions, etc. In addition to this, I also found that the workshop need more team member for the betterment and limitation of the verity in the product.
It is analyzed by me that I would address the limitations by examining them before start the work. I will collect the full knowledge about the stockholders to provide the right information to right people. At the same time, I would try to complete entire work in the provided time with the use of proper and effective assumptions. To address the limitation of resource, I will suggest the management that the workshop needs more team member for effectively remove the problem of workshop. It is observed by me that the process which is identifies in the literature review is compared with the provided process to overcome the issue. Finally, I evaluated that these workshop provided me many benefits to overcome the issues.
Conclusion
It can be summarised that the process and techniques of design thinking are useful to understand the organisational challenge of Udew from different perspectives and to identify the actual needs of the internal and external customers. This paper prototype technique was used for the business model to revise the existing value proposition to a more focused value proposition for its target customer segments.
Reference
Carlgren, Lisa, Ingo Rauth, and Maria Elmquist. “Framing design thinking: The concept in idea and enactment.” Creativity and Innovation Management 25, no. 1 (2016): 38-57.
Glen, Roy, Christy Suciu, and Christopher Baughn. “The need for design thinking in business schools.” Academy of Management Learning & Education 13, no. 4 (2014): 653-667.
Haruyama, Shinichiro, Sun K. Kim, Kurt A. Beiter, Gerard PJ Dijkema, and Olivier L. De Weck. “A new project-based curriculum of design thinking with systems engineering techniques.” International Journal of System of Systems Engineering 4, no. 2 (2013): 162-173.
Jensen, Matilde Bisballe, Federico Lozano, and Martin Steinert. “The Origins of Design Thinking and the Relevance in Software Innovations.” In Product-Focused Software Process Improvement: 17th International Conference, PROFES 2016, Trondheim, Norway, November 22-24, 2016, Proceedings 17, pp. 675-678. Springer International Publishing, 2016.
Johansson‐Sköldberg, Ulla, Jill Woodilla, and Mehves Çetinkaya. “Design thinking: past, present and possible futures.” Creativity and Innovation Management 22, no. 2 (2013): 121-146.
Leifer, Larry J., and Martin Steinert. “Dancing with ambiguity: Causality behavior, design thinking, and triple-loop-learning.” In Management of the Fuzzy front end of innovation, pp. 141-158. Springer International Publishing, 2014.
Liedtka, Jeanne. “Perspective: Linking design thinking with innovation outcomes through cognitive bias reduction.” Journal of Product Innovation Management 32, no. 6 (2015): 925-938.
Noweski, Christine, Andrea Scheer, Nadja Büttner, Julia von Thienen, Johannes Erdmann, and Christoph Meinel. “Towards a paradigm shift in education practice: Developing twenty-first century skills with design thinking.” In Design thinking research, pp. 71-94. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012.
Olsen, Nina Veflen. “Design Thinking and food innovation.” Trends in food science & technology 41, no. 2 (2015): 182-187.
Razzouk, Rim, and Valerie Shute. “What is design thinking and why is it important?.” Review of Educational Research 82, no. 3 (2012): 330-348.
Seidel, Victor P., and Sebastian K. Fixson. “Adopting design thinking in novice multidisciplinary teams: The application and limits of design methods and reflexive practices.” Journal of Product Innovation Management 30, no. S1 (2013): 19-33.
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