Design Thinking Workshop Led Quality Engineering Transformation for A Leading Australian Airline

Challenges.

The airline had multiple business units and each business unit had its own quality requirements and testing needs. Testing maturity was not up to the mark and it delayed time to market.

The airline wanted to enable a productive collaboration between different IT and business stakeholders, in an outcome-oriented manner, to generate innovative solutions to bring a step-change in testing services.

Solution.

Coforge proposed to conduct a half-day design thinking workshop to identify innovative solutions by enabling an open and collaborative discussion between senior resources from Coforge and client teams. Members from different departments, applications development and testing, testing practice, delivery, procurement, finance, IT applications and operations, were identified for participating in the workshop.

Coforge had preliminary discussions with client leaders to understand their challenges and need and classified them under three key categories, required to bring step-change in their testing services.

• Thought leadership on cutting edge tools and technologies
• Innovations in test automation
• Organization level strategy to generate value

Coforge designed a workshop structure that facilitated knowledge sharing and discussion. The objective was to ensure that the initiatives emerging out of the workshop are not only innovative and out-of-the-box but are also thought through in a way that it can be implemented. To ignite the thought process of the participants, we brought in what good looks like for testing services across the industry before the participants got into the ideation phase.

The Process: Two teams were created with equal participation from both Coforge and Client members in each team. Ideation was done in three separate sessions, for each of the identified categories. The time-bound ideation session involved brainstorming on five areas with respect to each of the category.

• What is working?
• What is not working?
• Why is it not working?
• How might we enable or solve or help?
• When should this be in place? (e.g. M1, M2, Q1)

The session created a lot of pointers which were then sorted, merged and duplicates removed to arrive at selected points for each area. There were fun activities between the ideation sessions to lighten the mood and free up the mind for creative thinking. Further collective brainstorming was done to narrow down on some generic thoughts. After each session participants had a very clear idea on the end goal and the initiatives to be implemented to achieve that goal.

At the end, a combined session was conducted to create the implementation roadmap of the identified initiatives.

The impact.

• The participants by expressing empathy were able to understand the different points of view from both organisations and develop clarity on the end goal, to be achieved. This resulted in productive discussions and many out-of-the-box ideas were generated.
• Totally, 65+ ideas were generated, funnelled down to 18 initiatives selected for implementation.
• A prioritized implementation roadmap was developed jointly with individuals from the group nominated as owners for each initiative.