Module Name: IBM Design Thinking and Agile in Pre-Sales and Delivery

Lesson: IBM Design Thinking and Pre-Sales into Agile Delivery Featuring
State Street

Brian: Welcome to the next video in the IBM Design Thinking and Agile Learning
Track. In the last video, in the introduction, we covered a lot about how we
can use IBM Design Thinking with the sales and presales process. So let’s
dig into some real examples, how it’s been used in practice. Can you give
a few practical examples?

Rich: We’re using IBM Design Thinking with many of our clients in presales and
we have an active program around the world for educating folks on how to
use IBM Design Thinking in presales. I think some of the great examples
have been BNSF, MetLife, Vodafone, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever. A great
one that is a public example that you could see out on YouTube from our
Amplify Conference last year is with Citigroup where we envisioned the first
financial services banking app for the Apple Watch. And what was magical
about that, and their whole experience from selling to delivery, was that they
had a challenge and that challenge was they had to go from blank
whiteboard to solution and deployment in 120 days. Citigroup came back
and told us that without a partner like us it would have taken them two years
to do that type of work and got it done in 120 days using IBM Design Thinking
and Agile together with them in our studios in Aster Place, New York. Really
exciting.

Brian: And I think you forgot one client, State Street, where you guys were pretty
successful using IBM Design Thinking. So can you talk a little bit about how
you used it in practice over there?

Rich: Absolutely. I think one of the most important pieces to understand right out
of the gate is we didn’t go in selling IBM Design Thinking. We weren’t even
using it as the eye candy to get their attention. It was about educating them
about our approach. And I’ll fast forward to sort of the result, but in using IBM
Design Thinking, we went from a client where we hadn’t worked in GBS in
10 years to zero to 600k to 1.5 mil to 5 million bucks and now there’s
opportunity because of the success on the strategy to go across the
company and help them transform using IBM Design Thinking and Agile for
all of the practices and projects that they have going on in State Street. So
really a magical experience overall.

Where it all started. Let’s come to where it started. Where it started was we
were invited in to address an opportunity or challenge that they had, and this
one in particular was with their enhanced custody group and security finance
where they had a tool that they were using at the time that was pretty much
cobbled together with a glorified Excel spreadsheet and they recognized that
they needed to scale that tool. And while it was good for a few people, it
would also be out of regulation and they needed to have something that
 would be tried and true, well tested, and able to scale to the needs of their
global training and operations folks. So upon taking that first meeting, it was
just a sharing meeting. They shared a bit about their tool and about what
they were looking for and we shared our capabilities like a lot of sales
sessions that might go on for any of our sellers out there. We did educate
them at that point around how we brought together an approach that
dovetails very well with Agile because something we learned early on was
that they were a big Agile shop. They had been practicing Agile amongst
their development teams, but the business yet really hadn’t understood really
how to engage them. And it was also very clear that they were siloed; that
technology was doing things, business was doing things, but they weren’t
collaborating effectively. We demonstrated a little bit about how our
framework of IBM Design Thinking and Agile can really bring their teams
together. Again, going back to that people, practices, and places approach
to deliver a great outcome for them.

Fast forward to leaving that, what I’ll tell you is that we found out later that
we were sixth out of six companies that they were considering. After that first
session and hearing a little bit about our Agile and IBM Design Thinking
approach, they gained a new sort of newfound respect for our talent and the
ability to provide an end-to-end approach. And that meant our user
experience team and the capabilities we had there, which they really didn’t
think we had. It was our industry expertise, which again they didn’t think we
had folks on our team that can go as deep and understand enhance custody
and security finance in the way they wanted a company they were going to
work with, a partner, to absorb it. And then finally the technology piece,
bringing that together. They had the confidence that we had the technology
piece, but not necessarily those other two pieces. And at that point we came
back, huddled back as a team, and we thought about how we were going to
use IBM Design Thinking in the context of engaging our buyers here. And
we put that to practice ourselves of really trying to identify the most important
needs that they had and one of those was that industry expertise. Another
one was demonstrating a different way of working than they hadn’t seen
before. And we didn’t come back and say, let’s go do a workshop. We didn’t
do that at all. What we came back in with was how could we get deeper
understanding and differentiate ourselves from the rest of those six other
players out there. And while I let Tony talk about, we made an offer to them
about coming in to do some deeper user research that Tony and his team
executed. I’ll let you talk a little bit about that.

Tony: Absolutely. So as we mentioned before, it’s important to get from talking

about IBM Design Thinking to actually doing it with the client. And so, what
we decided to do, when we regrouped about all of this, is to get them on the
loop; observe, reflect, and make. And that was how we were going to
approach this proposal. And so, what I did was I took a team of experienced
designers in there and after learning a little bit more about the tools that they
were using, we sat down and watched them work. Sat at their desks, noticed
the things that they were doing with paper, more than just what they were
 doing with tools themselves. Everything. Environmentally. What kind of light
are they in? How do they look? How is their behavior while they’re working?
And it was pretty bad. They had a lot of – there was a lot of difficulty around
their jobs everyday just based on the fact that they had so many disparate
systems to use and were actually trying to have to figure out how to be sort
of forensic investigators just to get the data they need to make a decision.
And as we noticed early on it was starting to take skill out of the equation.
They’re getting good answers because they were lucky, not because they
were smart. And they are smart. And so, we recognized very early on that
that was going to be a key part of our proposal. So doing that research,
coming back and reflecting on it, and making our proposal around those
insights was really how we wanted to work.

Rich: And if I was going to reflect on that a little bit, I would say that from an IBM
Design Thinking perspective, as we think about people, they got a very real
appreciation for our own people, for our industry talent because we had Jim
Morano there. Deep expertise and spent – I’ll get this wrong – but 10, 15
years at State Street that he was employed there, now on the IBM team. He
was able to give us contextual insight into how they work as a company,
some of the challenges there. Tony’s team was able to go in and work very
effectively with that team and really get an understanding, demonstrate our
own capabilities around user research, how that would apply to their
business, and getting that insight from our industry expertise only lended
more. Didn’t you think they got a real appreciation for our team?

Tony: Absolutely. And you raise a good point. It wasn’t just me and an experienced
design team. We took a whole team in there. So I had a really good solution
architect in there starting to a look at their backend solutions and starting to
understand with us what it was going to take to get them to the next level.
So we’re already starting to realize now how we need to frame the proposal
just based on that research. And oh by the way, just being in there gave us
a lot of insight into how they work, some of the sort of little political things
that occur in their world. We started to recognize the siloes. We recognized
that the technology team there was sort of ruling the roost around how they
approach solutions. All the things that we know that IBM Design Thinking
can solve. We can take that loudest voice out, align everyone around a
playback zero vision. And when you look at that, when we put it together for
them and show them that downstream you’re going to have a clickable
prototype that really accurately shows what this thing is going to be like in
the future, it really helps them understand what it’s going to take to get there
and it takes away all of those pain points and aligns everyone around a
common theme. And we knew from going in there that that’s how we were
going to approach the proposal and that’s how we won.

Brian: Excellent. So it really sounds like there was a lot of observing and reflecting
to enable you to make a better proposal, a more informed proposal for the
client here. Ended up being successful. So sitting here today, after going
through the user research and going through the cycles of the loop, do you
 have any lessons learned for in the future for this team or any other team
out there how to do it better?

Rich: Show. Don’t tell. Like we did. So in this case it wasn’t showing through a
workshop, but it was showing and demonstrating through our ethnographic
research, the user research that we did upfront with the client. Really
exposing them to the depth and breadth of our own talent was key, but I
would say, and I think you’d probably agree with me, is that the education
piece around the frameworks itself and our approach of the people,
practices, and places leading to those great outcomes, I think was critical.
And we demonstrated it at each stage of our interactions with the client.

Tony: Absolutely. And I think it’s important to understand that maybe not every
client is going to let you come in and do that kind of work. There may be
regulatory issues around the RFP response. But even approaching them
with the notion of doing that probably is something that maybe our
competition isn’t doing and gives them some idea that we are going to be
working differently. So always ask. Always go in there and try and find a
way to get involved with them early with IBM Design Thinking.

Brian: So in that same vein of not just talking, doing, where can myself or anyone
in the audience here see some of the work that you’ve done and leverage
some of the good ideas and insight?

Tony: We’re going to put all our documentation – so we’ll show you the pitch stack.
It should be clickable somewhere down here on this page. If you haven’t
downloaded it already, take a look at it and see how we built the proposal
around the things that I was just talking about. So you can see how we led
during the day. Having them come here and see us in our studio
environment and pitching to them how we set up that proposal around the
work that we had done for them and led with it and then let our solution fall
right out of that. It was a very powerful message for them. So that proposal
is there. Happy also to share some of our kickoff decks, just some of the
little things that show them sort of our time commitment, things we would
expect from them when we go forward, so it just – how you start to begin to
shape what happens after you win the work. And we really felt strongly we
would win work and we did. So getting prepped for that, we’ll show you
some of that documentation as well.

Rich: And I think one of the questions I get most often from other sellers out there
is, how do I put IBM Design Thinking into my proposals and SOWs? We got
material for you. Some of it’s scrubbed. You can use that. Leverage it to your
best ability. And if you have questions, the forum here; that we can discuss
and get examples from other people will be a great way for us to take this
video and then move into a discussion with the sellers around the world.

Tony: And that’s great point. Enhance custody, State Street, this was one way to
do it. It is not the way to do it. Would love to hear how other people are doing
 it out there. So please, share with us and you’re happy to see what we’ve
done, but it’s not meant to be prescriptive at all. Just how we did it.

Brian: Well, gentlemen, this was super helpful for framing IBM Design Thinking
and Agile for sellers. And in the next video we’re going to cover, after the
work has been sold, how do these techniques apply to delivery? So we’ll
see you then.