On-Track is a product of a Google Ventures-style Sprint Workshop in which our assembled team set out to discover how the organization could better serve the unmet needs of its members. The outcome of our week-long exercise was used by our marketing team to sell a service called Planning 20/20, which provides Hospitals insight into the execution of their strategic planning efforts.
How Hospital CSOs Stay One Step Ahead Of Problems
Mapping Out The Problem
Gathering a diverse group of Engineers, PMs, Salespeople, and UXers, we began listing out all of the challenges we were currently facing within our service offering. This included transitioning from one monolithic application offering to something more à la carte. The goal was to determine our long-term objectives in addition to nailing down outstanding questions and potential obstacles that we’d have to resolve for our effort to be successful.
We then created a map outlining what we collectively thought the process was as it exists today. Once our draft had been created, we pulled in experts from around the firm to give their perspective on what we were proposing. This highly interactive session had us making changes to our white boarding diagram on the fly to accommodate existing hospital setting scenarios. Once our experts weighed in on the direction (3 green dots), we picked our target: an ambitious, bu manageable application to aid Chief Strategy Officers in identifying immediate problems in their growth projects.
Sketching & Remixing
We reviewed and shared interesting solutions to similar problems in different industries via Lightning Demos. After highlighting specific differentiators, we began individually sketching our best ideas, employing techniques from the GV workshop. We then spent the rest of the day refining those ideas on our own. We also began recruiting customers that fit our target profile in order for us to test our ideas later.
Gallery & Decision Making
The next morning a refined version of our best ideas was placed on the wall and participants were given stickers (small red dots) to highlight which items they found particularly interesting. This would help us refine the concepts that had the most potential of meeting our long-term goal. The items with the most dots would move onto be storyboarded and ultimately presented as a prototype to a select group of members. The Decider (high level executive sponsor invited to the critique) was given extra dots to tip the scales to whichever idea she deems to have the most potential.
Defining Roles / Building The Prototype
The teams were divided into various roles. Typically, PMs would take on the job of contacting volunteers, aggregating content, or working on language, whereas UX representatives would create the assets needed for the demo. I delegated building out the InVision prototype while I created all visual assets for the prototype using Sketch.
This flow describes the primary user (Chief Strategic Officer) going from receiving a text message on their device to taking action by contacting their account representative directly.
The focus of our exercise was to do something that was risky, or that had a high reward if we were to get it right. We chose to do a mobile app that focuses on informing CSOs how well their strategic plans were performing in advance of quarterly earnings reports. This would be accomplished through the use of text messaging on the phone. The CSO would receive a message telling them the status of a particular effort. They could then drill down and find out more information.
Testing, Listening, & Capturing
The prototype was loaded onto a phone and presented to five members. The development team watched in a separate room using GoTo Meeting so as not to cause unnecessary uneasiness with a larger group in the meeting. All participants jotted down notes on post-it notes, then we stuck them on the wall for later evaluation. Once the last interview was over, we then reviewed the wall to look for salient themes. We then created a priority list of things we needed to improve. Overall, many saw great value in the application which means we will be testing it on-site with members to either validate the idea further or determine whether or not the need is already being filled by another tool.
Results
As part of a larger corporate rebranding, I took our design one step further than our InVision prototype by creating an ad that mimicked the new branding style. The quick/simple representation of the tool helped others who weren’t as familiar with our effort get an at-a-glance understanding of how we defined the value proposition. After we completed the project, it was used to generate excitement for Planning 20/20. We were able to come up with a viable product in less than a week, get it vetted through senior leadership, and tested it with a potential members. At the end of the day, we identified patterns (both positive and negative) within the tool and had clear direction should the company decide to invest in building it out in the future.