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Implementation Lessons for Consultants (LinkedIn Learning)

Driving change as the Implementer

First, your stakeholders need to know the benefits and their role in making the change successful. Make sure you or your client have communicated the compelling business reasons to relevant stakeholders. Otherwise, they won't be engaged.

Second, create a distinct picture of what things will look like when your solution is in place. Fundamentally, people will engage with a change if they know how it'll affect their job. If they feel confident they'll know how to use your deliverables, they can provide valuable input. Paint that picture for them and your solutions will yield the intended business results.

Next, identify change champions: stakeholders who will spearhead your solution. Make sure they're fully on board and have time to help you implement. Your ability to manage your client's organizational change is restricted by the available resources. Expecting clients' staff to take on a major change effort while holding them accountable to perform their normal day job isn't fair and could be a recipe for failure. Work with your client to ensure the right people are available to help so your solution is properly deployed.

Fourth, work backwards from your change picture and determine what steps your client needs to take. This is sometimes called outcomes mapping. Make sure your client understands how implementing your solution will affect their current business processes.

Then, help your client perform the outcome mapping process. Derive the steps required to your client management team. For example, once I decided I had to move, I knew where we wanted to live in the new city but I had to think through the steps to get there. Selling my current house, buying a new one, arranging from a moving company, all had to be thought out. It should be noted these change management activities aren't often a formal part of the consulting contract but they need to be performed so your client will get full value from your deliverables. Tell your client about them early in the process and be ready to help in whatever way you can. When you drive and support sound change management, your deliverables will generate value for your client and it'll keep their head out of the sand and focused on improving the business.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/critical-roles-consultants-play-and-the-skills-you-need-to-fill-them/driving-change-as-the-implementer?u=2171914

Author: Bob McGannon

Some insights are ‘evergreen’ — they’re relevant for a very long time. Those insights might teach you something about the fundamentals of…

#user research #synthesis

At IDEO, we embrace doing things in person. When it comes to design research, we appreciate interacting with the people we’re studying in…

#user research

When you’re researching one thing, you often learn about something else.

#user research #synthesis

To continue with our series on product strategy, in this article I’d like to focus on, well, focus. The importance of truly “picking your battles” as an organization. And I don’t just mean deciding what to work on and not work on, but picking the few things that can truly make an impact. This is …

“Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.”

After releasing an MVP for the product I’m currently working on, we spent a research iteration on a series of check-in interviews to refresh our alignment with our stakeholders and user groups on what they’d consider their 1 year and 5 year visions for the process we were looking to improve.

After the first few, I started visualizing what they were saying into a basic vision map to use as something to point to in the remaining interviews as a tool for communicating more visually.

We got awesome feedback when we shared it with our users and stakeholders. Now when we talk about the future, we can be picturing the same thing, and it's given people something to point at and say 'no, that part isn't quite right. it needs to incorporate 'x', and we are able to understand in a really clear way.

One significant adjustment we made when talking about our vision map was to adjust what we called it. Because the department of defense has an analogous solution for visualizing plans, we were able to use their language when talking about our artifact and get even more aligned on what our goals with sharing it was. See more here: https://dodcio.defense.gov/Library/DoD-Architecture-Framework/dodaf20_ov1/

After reading this article, my rudimentary map seems analogous to a wireframe and a visiontype is the high-fidelity prototype. (I think he outlines what a visiontype is very well. It is not a big-up-front-design prototype. it is a tool in the kit for 'starting with the end' and making sure you're aligned with a reality that people can get behind.)

As long as we communicate clearly with our stakeholders (who are used to a waterfall approach and seeing a fully designed app up front) I think creating one could add new dimensions to the conversation we have about our vision and increase creativity in speculating about a future that is constantly changing. I want to challenge my stakeholders to see how adaptable our process is to change, while still feeling comfortable that we are sharing a vision for successful outcomes.

Confidence intervals are everywhere in the quantitative research world, but in small scale qualitative research there isn’t a truly…

“Confidence intervals are everywhere in the quantitative research world, but in small scale qualitative research there isn’t a truly analogous concept.”

Qualdesk uses a custom score to express how confident you are that an insight is useful and accurate.

Three main ways this could be useful stand out to me immediately:

- since I’m frequently sharing insights out to team members who aren’t always sitting in the research, communicating the weight of evidence/confidence in the insight can help those proxy to the research calibrate their own decision making and sense making about the domain and the problems at hand.

- since we focus on speed and incremental delivery so heavily, we’re ruthlessly prioritizing only the top 2-3 insights from a set of interviews. We keep de-prioritized insights in a ‘repository’ so they can resurface if patterns emerge, but I can see how a confidence score that was attributed in the moment of research (alongside where an insight came from, when, etc.) could help us move quicker when revisiting those insights and deciding next steps.

- lastly, giving confidence scores to insights, especially those you’re acting on, seems like a unique way to measure how well you’re doing at balancing time and risk. (we’re seek to strike the right balance of time/resources on research according to how risky the bet is and how much evidence we see necessary before building a slice of functionality)

When gauging the success of a solution we delivered, using this additional metric (though subjective) as a signal for whether the difference in time/resources we spent to gather more evidence or “increase the score” seems like a helpful feedback loop for improving discernment around your future time/resource/risk bets.

#user research

I am one of the incredibly fortunate people to call Hugh Dubberly my mentor — he “discovered” me, believed in me, and teaches me more every…

//Highlights

Be a Crystal Goblet A researcher’s job is to be a crystal goblet: To be there as little as possible. To make space for the research participant to fill.

Shut the F*** Up Less talking. Listen. Help the participant feel that what they’re saying is of interest. Your job is to be there as little as possible. You can tell if you’re doing this right by getting a transcript done of your research session. You’ll see good researchers have a sentence, half a sentence that trails off… and then paragraphs of response. This is a sign that you’ve created space for that person to fill. You are almost transparent.

Be Quiet People are uncomfortable with silence. Breathe, count to 5 in your head, wait. They will be moved to fill the silence with that thing they weren’t sure they would share, the thing beyond their pat answer. See what they really have to say.

Use Incomplete Sentences This creates an immediate uncomfortable silence, and also keeps you from putting words in their mouths. So instead of, “Would you say this experience was good?” (this is a terrible technique) or even, “Would you say this experience was good or bad?” (also not good) instead, “Would you say this experience was…?”

Use their Words See Steve Portigal’s iconic TiVo story. If they say “TIE-vo”, you say “TIE-vo”. If they say “wirey thing-y”, don’t say “dongle?”. Say “wirey thing-y”. Remember, you’re trying to be there as little as possible. By using their words, you are inserting yourself less as a presence.

Don’t ask them to be crystal balls. Remember: attitude is a terrible predictor of behavior. Whether or not they tell you they’ll buy or use a product in the future has almost nothing to do with whether or not they actually do. (If you must, better to ask them to predict what other people like them will do.)

Be a Crystal Goblet Part II The Crystal Goblet analogy shows up after research too: when you’re considering what you’ve learned, be careful that you don’t insert your own ideas into what you heard. This is called confirmation bias, and it’s hard to avoid.

#userresearch

“Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.”

A visiontype is a way to demonstrate big concepts in a realistic way.

It’s goal is to envision a valuable, engaging future product experience.

Jeff Middlesworth describes them as the best visual for where the company and product is going.

It’s a north star that a company can develop a product strategy around. He went on to describe a visiontype’s ability to align and excite engineers, sales, and marketing to get behind it. It creates a mission that inspires the people implementing the strategy to bring it to life.

#stakeholderalignment

Color Factory will take instagram-worthy pictures for you

https://www.colorfactory.co/

“There are photo booths integrated throughout our space, in hopes that it will free you to put your phone away, be in photos with your friends and family, and appreciate the exhibits more fully.”

“Before you enter, you’re handed a Color Factory card with a barcode. Scan it on one of the tablets available and type in your email address. You can use this card around the museum to scan it in one of the six photo booths to have your picture taken! You can take as many photos as you’d like and they each get sent to your email for free!” -- Source

The room has cameras/photobooths positioned with lighting and instagram in mind so that you don’t have to take your phone out every moment to take photos.

People are still there taking photos, but this concept is a great start / an unfortunate necessity with society’s addiction to phones, social media moments, and taking photos.

---- My friend Jared told me about his experience and the technology here, but I also did a little research and primarily read this article and this one.

Photo from this blog post

Meal Lime - Non-Touch Gesture for Sticky Hands while you cook

https://www.mealime.com/

When you’re in “Cooking Mode,” you can change recipe steps by gesturing your hand over the screen, simulating waving away a page.

Mealime also overrides your phone’s sleep settings, keeping your screen on and displaying the recipe, so you never have to login and re-navigate to your recipe with your messy hands.

--- My co-worker Cindy told me about Mealime and was freaking out about this feature. I could immediately identify with both of these issues while reading recipies from my smartphone.

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