Facilitating design sprints
Background
In 2019 I advocated for a trial of a week-long design sprint as a way to help the business make some decisions on product direction. I have since arranged and facilitated three full sprints, each of which has been a catalyst for product development projects, with two successfully launched, and one in its second development phase.
This case study explores a sprint I held in Houston, USA as a cross business-effort between our UK and US teams.
The Problem
Tracerco has been sending engineers to plant and refineries around the world for many decades to diagnose internal flow and integrity issues of process equipment. This involves the use of gamma radiation to see inside pressurised vessels whilst the process is still running.
The service offer has traditionally involved a site visit, followed by a written report that is delivered by email. The reporting delay often delivered insights too slowly to clients and the time-to-invoice was much longer than the business wanted.
A Design Sprint was proposed to explore possible digital service enhancements and rapidly test customer appetite.
Planning and execution
To get the sprint off the ground, I worked with one of the business directors to sponsor the workshop and had him attend a number of the sessions. I identified a team of 7 people from around our business from both US and UK including, sales people, engineers and on-site personnel.
The sprint took place in our Houston office where we could easily host in-person testing with local customer representatives.
Over 4 days I led the workshops through problem exploration, ideation and prototyping. On the 4th day we invited representatives from 4 oil & gas operators to experience the prototypes and provide feedback.
Ideation
The sprint team chose to focus on shortening the time to presenting the client with a report, meeting the business aim of reducing time to invoice. The broad scope of ideas included:
Providing an immediate on-site preliminary digital report
Rapid upload of preliminary report to a web platform
Improving customer retention by enabling historic comparison of previous tower scans
Providing access to a live view of the scan in progress with client commenting
Using drone technology to scan assets rather than sending personnel up towers
Prototyping
Having set the team the 1 day challenge of prototyping an experience that covered all of their ideas, we came up with:
A mock up of a visual tower scan report using a Power BI dashboard
A short marketing video to explain the value proposition (with the help of a marketing agency partner in the UK)
A mocked experience of a live tower scan using drones, produced and animated in PowerPoint
A live demo of the preliminary on-site reporting experience involving one of our site engineers role-playing the interaction
Outcomes
Customer appetite for online reporting, especially with historic comparison was strong, with a cautious interest in drone scanning for future consideration.
This sprint led to the beginning of the Diagnostics Insights Platform project which has been in development since 2020 and is now entering its 5th phase of development.
The platform has been well received by customers and now has several thousand scan reports hosted. By offering the digital reporting, we were able to increase the overall price of our scan services with little pushback from customers. We continue to engage with customers on new report formats and comparison tools.
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