Design Thinking for Tech Selection, Part 4: Prototype (Video)
In his presentation at KMWorld 2018, Real Story Group's Jarrod Gingras discussed how to apply the five phases of design thinking—empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing in choosing the right technology for a digital workplace.
In discussing, stage four—prototyping, Gingras said, organizations should take their final two choices of vendors “and say, we're going to get you to the final round and do something that we like to call a competitive proof of concept. Or sometimes people call it a bake-off. Anyone ever done this? Yeah? Have you done it over, like 1 week or 2 weeks? 6 months? Yeah, and they can take any time, any length of time that's necessary.”
The people who spend time during this phase doing the proof-of-concept and bake-off correctly, eliminate a great deal from their decision. This is because they learn so much about what it's like to use this technology.”
“But you're also learning what it's like to work with this partner. And, so those lessons are invaluable to learn before you sign into the full contract and start a full implementation. If you could bubble up those lessons learned earlier in the process, you're going to be much, much better off.”
The key to a bake-off done right is to make it real, said Gingras. “So again, I want you to go back to those real scenarios so typically, we take that set of scenarios that we created for the RFP, and demos, and pair it down to a usually more manageable set of scenarios and we say, we might provide some real content to work with, we get real people to interact with this, with the team, and we set them up in real environments, as much as possible, and we mimic a real implementation, as much as you can.”
Not everyone is able to or needs to do a 6-month bake-off, said Gingras. “No, that's not real. But you know, at a minimum, you need to do a proof-of-concept.”
Many speakers have made their presentations available at www.kmworld.com/Conference/2018/Presentations.aspx.
Learn more at KMWorld 2019, coming to Washington, DC, Nov. 5-7.
Watch the complete video of this presentation in the KMWorld Conference 2018 Video Portal.