Power Platform | Design-Thinking to help

It´s been a while since I published an article about Power Platform „running“ on Design Thinking outlining how design thinking workshops could be run and what value they generate in context of Power Platform. A couple of times, I was asked since then around the concept of Design Thinking, so I thought of sharing some more insights today.

Well, I won´t share the insights of a Desing Thinking workshop that I´ve delivered to a customer or been part of in respect of data & insights collected. But to better help you understand the concept, I created this template for successful implementing Power Platform with a secured operating model in 4 easy steps to follow.

#1 Define a challenge statement for your Design Thinking to follow. Use any tool you like to run your workshop with. You could use a whiteboard, pen & paper, a digital tool designed to run design thinking sessions or as you can see from my visual above – even Power Point. In the center, you should allow all the ideas around your challenge statement to be collected. Sometime´s your team will find related ideas or items to an idea already shared. Try to bundle them and make it less complicated for attendees to follow-up on.

#2 Define Cluster for all the ideas collected and give them a name to work with. Each of your ideas should end up in a cluster and no idea should be left inside the ideas box. [If so – it might not met the challenge statement] Move related items as well or define more related items based on ideas that you think are duplicates of previous collected ones. Discuss the ideas with those that provided them to better understand the driver behind this. It will help you to find the correct cluster for a specified idea. Sometimes an idea could be part of two or more cluster in a slight variant. Don´t stop discussing it. Each idea could be equaly important.

After you´ve done this excercise you might ask yourself on how to follow-up with all these fantastic ideas, bring them into a sequence & structure that allows a project team to work on PoCs/MVPs, etc.

#3 – In this case, you could use above difficulty & importance matrix to further qualify each cluster previously collected. There´re four quadrants from least importance and least difficulty to most importance and most difficulty. Place each of your named cluster in this matrix and you will therefore have a first rating in terms of them being of

• High value
• Tactical
• Strategic
• Luxury

Again, this excercise is not for a single person, it´s the Design Thinking audience who performs this excercise together and on some cluster you might discuss the importance & difficulty heavily. In the end all of you should agree to the matrix found and feel comfortable with decisions made.

#4 – Define an Action Plan based on the importance & difficulty matrix. You should have found a sequence or ranking of each cluster. Because each cluster can contain various ideas or actions to follow-up with, as a last step it is important to define this action plan and outline who is taking care of each action and by when do you plan to finish this action or share first results.

If actions need more description, feel free to provide them and extend the table to fit your specific needs. Above visual should only demonstrate, how an action plan could look like in the end.

With these 4 simple steps to follow inside a Design Thinking workshop you should have a good feeling around running yourself a Design Thinking workshop for Power Platform or requesting of being part of one.

Until then, …