Co-authored by: Aravind Mahendran

We are at the final stage of the blog series. At this juncture, we would like to provide a brief on what made us write the blogs on ‘accessibility’, ‘security’, and now finally, ‘design thinking’. We are keen on solving the puzzle of how asset light technologies are adding incremental value towards creating the need to pivot to service R&D. Firms with large legacy and product R&D organizations will have to transition in a non-disruptive manner towards Service R&D. They would need extensive collaboration, where the usefulness of design thinking comes into play. It plays a critical role in facilitating this major transformation.

The proverb, “Rome was not built in a day”, rightly describes the effort and planning taken to build 21^st century technologies. From an R&D perspective, the key aspect is product centricity, and the need to focus on three key scaling factors – security, accessibility, and design thinking. Hence, our plan is to address these areas that undoubtedly form the key pillars for solving the puzzle. After addressing the first two pillars in the previous blogs, here, we are finally writing about design thinking process.

Design thinking for VUCA world

Design thinking approach has been in the limelight for a while, with major players in the market aggressively adopting it. Hence, we are keen on taking our readers through the key aspects of embedding design thinking in this VUCA world. Our intent is to help R & D enterprises be aware of the experience that organizations go through and have an open-minded approach towards real world problems. How do we embed such a culture in product design? It is hard to define a boundary, and the key factor that an organisation should keep in mind is the significance of distinguishing between problems that are puzzles and those that are mysteries. The design thinking approach for a VUCA world must have chaos, should be completely out of box from the very inception.

Start with a design, rather than trying to end it. Design is an investment.

HCL’s insider story

With an increasing number of next gen products and services, organizations need to look for new ways to improve quality and speed, apart from lowering costs. Agile methodologies, faster delivery cycles, and technologies originating through disruptive forces are changing the way we test. “Test Consulting Kit” is an essential technique for design thinking. It came as a part of the initiative to produce light weight products by our Product Testing Services (PTS) division. It helps in capturing the maturity level of customers, and achieving end to end testing solution needs by mapping them to market forces.

We have identified eight major market forces that the quality assurance decision makers need to consider. By looking at how these market forces affect companies, we can help organizations gear for the future to meet the QA goals of 21st century and positively impact their value zone through digital transformation, automation, and domain contextualization.

Challenges faced in non-tool based assessment

• Sub-optimal utilization of stakeholders’ limited time
• Collating data from multiple sources
• Chances of data loss
• Inefficient analysis of collected data
• High probability of biased judgment

In order to combat the challenges and establish standardization for assessment process, HCL has developed a web-enabled product called the “Test Consulting Kit”. It allows assessments to be completed precisely and quickly with minimal efforts. 

Key Benifits

• Enables swift assessment of the maturity level of an organization; reduces assessment effort by ~30%.
• Eliminates biased judgment by bringing an objective scoring mechanism
• Facilitates quick identification and prioritization of improvement areas
• Enables the availability of both online and offline versions with access to centrally store, analyse and publish

How HCL can help you through design thinking

HCL’s experience in design thinking process, allows it to identify your problems, create a quick prototype, and test it on your environment. HCL also creates customised and formidable framework that provides distinctive benefits on reduced time to market, cost, and defects.

References:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140716035046-203314798-slow-thinking-versus-vuca-design-thinking

http://www.kpcb.com/design/design-and-vc

http://www.kpcb.com/design/design-and-vc