Author: Ece Babaoğlu
Design thinking is a buzzword that is talked about in recent years. Have you ever wondered what it is? Is it a term that is used in the world of art and is an artistic discipline? The answer is: No, it is not. Let me simply explain to you. Design thinking is a notion of business management that could be used in every area that comes to your mind: it could be about project management, e-commerce, marketing, IT, or transformation. It is used in top companies to improve their processes in a revolutionary way, rather than old and outdated business management techniques.
Why Is It Important?
Firstly, I would show some statistics. It is reported in 2023 that agile-using firms are 1.5 times more successful and they generate 60% more revenue and profit. It has its focus on customers to provide quality and value, with a measuring of progress that leads the firm to optimize its success with more control. According to the data in 2018; projects using Agile methodologies are 28% more successful and almost 71% of organizations use it with different frequencies. Although the focus point was on technology for many years the attention is shifted to users’ wants and needs. Certain metrics are specific for every different business and adaptable to change in different circumstances. According to this, firms can have a more clear way of doing way of their businesses so that they will have a “designed way” of doing their job. In a nutshell, scalable, practical, and creative projects are getting done with agile methodologies.
What is Agile Anyway?
You might be wondering what agile is and how it is related to our topic of design thinking. It is a set of different methods and practices combined, with the target of iterative development. Design thinking and agile go hand in hand, to provide easier, more creative, and more practical solutions to problems.
Let’s get our attention onto main the stages of design thinking which are the core phases of different types of businesses to promote their work’s effect and gain more value from it. Here is a simple step-by-step scheme of the overall design thinking process.
Empathize: In the first step, the customer is the main element for businesses. A business manager or any worker of the firm should put themselves into their shoes. Organizations should spend time with their consumers and consult them. This way, they will be led to identify the pain points of their product or service. It could be a good action for customer-focused departments to work closely with the other departments to provide integration within the firm. As the Interaction Design Foundation stated, “Empathy is crucial to a human-centered design process such as design thinking, and empathy helps design thinkers to set aside their assumptions about the world to gain insight into their users and their needs.”
Define: Secondly, the problem needs to be well-identified. It will lead to a solid and meaningful understanding of the work and help the workers to create a roadmap before they progress into further steps and avoid wandering off from the main target.
Ideate: It is the phase in which stakeholders think about the problem throughout and search for different ideas. Each related department could be working on the same problem because it is possible to solve the problem from a different point of view.
Prototype: A prototype should be created according to the users’ needs. The ideas will be put in order in a scheme. This phase will help to navigate the processes and help the firm find solutions to specific problems by getting feedback from the customer.
Test: This is the final part, it is required to test frequently to keep up with the optimal solution then. It is an ongoing process that evolves with users' feedback and reactions at different times and situations along with the preceding trends, developing technologies, and thus; emerging brand-new needs.
It is truly indispensable in today’s world that a design thinking mindset is a must. Many start-ups are implementing design thinking into different stages of their businesses. Many corporate firms are also shifting to agile working, which serves effective, successful, and up-to-date business practices. The agile concept is relatively new. Companies may have difficulty adapting their processes and various practices to agile and making their employees adapt to the brand new, agile way of working. This style is reported to make businesses achieve success fast, easily, and effectively.
To be honest, it requires time and effort to implement this discipline into the workplace and bring out most of the value of a business. Here is a quote about how hard it is for businesses to get into agile working because of the habits and ongoing patterns of people’s way of doing things and the stigma of sticking to old, outdated processes. "By now most executives have at least heard about design thinking’s tools - ethnographic research, an emphasis on reframing problems and experimentation, the use of diverse teams, and so on - if not tried them. But what people may not understand is the subtler way that design thinking gets around the human biases (for example, rootedness in the status quo) or attachments to specific behavioral norms (“That’s how we do things here”) that time and again block the exercise of the imagination."(Jeanne Liedtka, ‘Why Design Thinking Works’, HBR). However, although the barriers; it's worth the hassle.
REFERENCES:
Zippia. "16 Amazing Agile Statistics [2023]: What Companies Use Agile Methodology" Zippia.com. Nov. 27, 2022, https://www.zippia.com/advice/agile-statistics/
Techno FAQ, https://technofaq.org/.
Person. “Agile Project Management Methodology - What You Need to Know?” Kissflow, Kissflow, 20 July 2022, https://kissflow.com/project/agile/agile-project-management-methodology/.
“Agile Project Delivery Confidence - PWC Project Delivery Confidence Mitigate Project Risks and Deliver Value to Your Business When Agile Becomes an Organisation's Standard Project - [PDF Document].” Fdocuments.net, https://fdocuments.net/document/agile-project-delivery-confidence-pwc-project-delivery-confidence-mitigate-project.html.
“Agile Project Delivery Confidence - PWC Project Delivery Confidence Mitigate Project Risks and Deliver Value to Your Business When Agile Becomes an Organisation's Standard Project - [PDF Document].” Fdocuments.net, https://fdocuments.net/document/agile-project-delivery-confidence-pwc-project-delivery-confidence-mitigate-project.html.
“Where Good Ideas Find You.” Medium, https://medium.com/.
Afreen, Sana. “Design Thinking and Agile: Everything You Need to Know.” Simplilearn.com, Simplilearn, 30 Nov. 2022, https://preprod.simplilearn.com/tutorials/design-thinking-tutorial/design-thinking-and-agile.
(PDF) Barriers and Opportunities of Implementing Design Thinking in ... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353683188_BARRIERS_AND_OPPORTUNITIES_OF_IMPLEMENTING_DESIGN_THINKING_IN_PRODUCT_DEVELOPMENT_PROCESS_OF_A_BUSINESS_TO_BUSINESS_COMPANY.
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