Design Thinking and Agile

Introduction
This client of ours is mainly involved in project executions. The project durations vary from 2-3 weeks to 18 months. The client had tried out multiple off the shelf performance management systems (PMS) for employee evaluation and feedback. However, neither the employees nor the leadership was happy with the outcome. They decided to build captive PMS from a software vendor and approached us to help them in building it.

Problem
The employees were not happy with the existing PMS because they looked at it as an overhead. Also, they thought that the evaluation and feedback from the managers twice a year was very generic and didn’t really help in planning improvement actions. Managers were not happy with the system because they had to make extra efforts for recording their review comments and have feedback discussions with their teams and generally it ended up in non-agreement on multiple points. The leadership was not happy because during the review cycles, the project delivery suffered as well as the whole exercise did not provide any valuable insights for employee improvements and was being carried out as a ritual.
The client also wanted a working application within 4 weeks as their contract with the earlier PMS vendor was about to expire and they did not want to extend it.

Approach
Koinvent decided to integrate Design Thinking and Agile methodologies to ensure user satisfaction and quick availability of the software. We formed a team comprising of employees, managers and software designer. We provided them with the expected outcome at the end of 4 weeks, 3 months and 6 months, a framework to operate within and the kind of reports the leadership team would require. Koinvent facilitated the meetings and discussions to arrive at the optimal solutions. Since the employees and the managers are the primary users of the system, their expectations were fulfilled to a very large extent. Leveraging existing project management system and working along with the software development team resulted in quick implementation, bug fixing and enhancements.

Outcome
We worked with the client extensively for 4 weeks and then intervened as required during the next few months. At the end of the 3 months the PMS is up and running with all the employees, managers and leadership team using the system to their satisfaction.