Customer Visit
The week before last one of our teams headed over to the Isle of Man for a customer visit. Due to Covid restrictions, customer visits were put on pause for much of 2020/2021 meaning that workshops and planning sessions were held remotely. As restrictions have now lifted the teams are now back on the road and enjoying the benefits of in person collaborations once more.
The team went to visit a client that had been discussing a technical problem with a complex permissions model. The resolution for a solution was not coming easy, the problem our client had was multifaceted and deeply complex, a challenge that spanned the whole company and needed to fit many different customer profiles with varying needs.
It was clear that the team needed some help so Unipro stepped in to run them through a ‘Design Sprint’ - a collaborative time-based activity that includes members of the delivery team and wider stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs), typically runs for 3-5 days. Its purpose is to help solve complex technical challenges and design (or re-design) a product.
The activities were well received by the client who have already taken on board some of the new problem-solving techniques introduced. The team got much more out of meeting in person rather than virtual planning as it’s a collaborative process. Additionally, there are steps where the team gets to vote on ideas and suggested solutions. Being together in the room foreshortens that process.
The benefit of the Sprint process is that you get different people into one room , agreeing and working on the same problem. The process is so different to blue sky thinking or collaborative working in that it’s designed to ensure you are all problem solving and coming up with ideas independently but collaborating and agreeing which parts of ideas/sketches/solutions will solve the problem best. The whole process is brilliant for fast tracking alignment, understanding, strategy, goal setting, market analysis, competitors SWOTs, design, prototyping and testing.
We look forward to continued work with the client as the project progresses.