the problem. But even after the project moves into prototyping and testing,
there’s plenty of room for overlap of the
two approaches.
“Once you start focusing on a specific
solution or specific design, then you can
move more to the agile,” says Mr. Tarne.
“But it’s not ‘spend the first two weeks
of the project doing design thinking and
then we’re on to agile.’ Keep some of
the principles that are common between
the two of them: prototypes, iterations,
getting lots of feedback, working with
the user.”
Ms. Kuypers’ team uses design think-
ing during the discovery and design
phases of projects. The multidisciplinary
team starts by interviewing customer
stakeholders (such as business and IT
decision-makers) and end users. The
results drive a design thinking workshop
with the customer.
“A critical part of our strategy is to require participation from both IT and
business,” she says. “The output of the workshop is consensus among the cus-
tomer decision-makers and their end users on the must-have features needed
to solve their problem.”
A major focus of the workshop is crafting a group of design thinking problem
statements, she says. For example, “How might we design a way to provide users
with the capabilities they need to accomplish their goal?”
“Team members
in a design
thinking workshop
need to come
from disparate
backgrounds for
maximum creative
thinking.”
—Jacqui Speers
