Design thinking in SAP Activate

What is design thinking?

• A human-centric approach for solving complex problems by generating new ideas, design thinking is for everyone who wants to solve complex problems or create innovative products.
• Design thinking brings an outside-in perspective that helps us understand the goals and needs of our end users and customers, by which we can draw inspiration and insights that help us see new opportunities and drive solutions.
• One of the characteristics of design thinking is to rapidly come up with non-coded prototypes that illustrate ideas and drive conversations. These prototypes are used to validate solution concepts with end users as well as with technical experts.

So, the solution iteratively gets to this optimum that balances the three aspects equally.

The ingredients for design thinking are as follows:

• Combining diverse people
• In a creative space
• With an iterative approach

Design thinking is a technique that (also like many other areas) SAP Activate leverages for user-centric results in multiple contexts. Therefore, design thinking nicely complements SAP Activate:

• Design thinking in SAP Activate lets us focus on a few of the areas where it can be used. We will take a look at a few of the areas; it is not restricted to only these areas, and readers can explore other areas in other phases as well.
• Some of the needs during requirement analysis can be easily tackled by design thinking. For example, collecting requirements from stakeholders and end users and understanding and defining functional requirements.
• In order for project scoping to have better alignment with your stakeholders and scope project in the right way, you can again use design thinking (full or design thinking inspired workshop for project scoping). It will help with benefits such as creating a mission statement for the project; establishing collaboration across the different lines of businesses and stakeholders for the project; identifying the stakeholders and sponsors of the project.
• For business process design when we are challenged with designing a new, or redesigning an existing, business process, design thinking can always be of help. The design thinking workshop can help us to quickly gather knowledge about the "as-is" of the process and help to develop the "to-be". It also helps to build momentum with the customer to raise the acceptance of the new process and get the buy-in from different stockholders.
• For IT architecture design similar to business process design, one needs to quickly gather knowledge about the "as-is" situation of the IT landscape before working on the "to-be" IT landscape. Similarly, it also helps to build momentum with the customer to raise the acceptance of the new IT landscape and get the buy-in from different stockholders.

You can conduct the design thinking session and then transfer the outcomes for all the preceding activities to the SAP Activate templates.