Process Journal #9 - Process Reflection
Reflect on how you can make improvements to the structure of the creative problem solving process to improve the outcome of each phase in order to get better overall results and summarize those ideas in a new post in your process journal.
The creative problem solving process helped our team understand what problem we wanted to focus on and how we could solve it. Some stages took longer than others and were not as straight forward. I think that for the overall process, there could be some changes to get the results we wanted quicker. This process and the way our team worked may not fit with other teams, as each group is compiled up of unique individuals.
What stages can be removed, and what stages need to be added?
After going through all the steps, there are a few steps that could be added and taken out.
In my opinion, the accept phase could have been removed for this class. Everyone knows that they need to accept that changes are needed, so this step could be combined with the analyze phase. Under the analyze phase, I think it could should be rephrased as “research and analyze.” In order to analyze anything, you would data, which would come from the research. After evaluation, I think another round of implementation and evaluation would be necessary because there may be different prototypes to test. Implementing the first time will not always work out as planned.
What methods and techniques are mandatory for each stage of the process?
I think that there are a few things that should be mandatory for each stage of the process. For the beginning of each stage, the objective should be stated and understood by each team member. Although each stage states what should be done, the objective can explicitly state what to get out of this stage regarding a certain topic. Once the team goes through the process, there should be a reflection from all the team members. This allows everyone to communicate their thoughts and what they got out of the process. If there is misalignment between people’s thoughts, this is a good time to set things straight and get everyone on the same page before moving forward. If there is still no agreement at the end, maybe the previous objective or reflection from the stage before can help guide the team the right way. This may take longer but it could make each step more effective.
