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When we begin a new project, our first step is to take the time to listen intently to our clients and understand their business objectives. We have customized our own modeled approach based on innovation practices learned from Stanford’s d.School to do this. With our client’s objectives in mind, we work closely with them using a three step process to clearly document the areas of opportunity. Once they are diagnosed, we align with our customers on the cause, and action needed.
Courtesy of Stanford d.School Design Thinking Playbook
STEP 1 – EXPLORE AND ASSESS
Stakeholder Interviews: A two-step process conducted internally with staff, first by electronic survey then by telephone/video conference. Feedback is often collected across the Front Office, Food and Beverage, Housekeeping, Retail, Experience Programming (music, lighting, amenity offerings), Billing and Asset Management departments to measure Service Delivery, Consistency and Quality while documenting best practices and verbatim feedback of areas for improvement.
The purpose of this exercise is to quantitatively gauge your employees and their insights into the service and product. Questions and answers with the internal audience are recorded to produce a net average result, which may serve as a benchmark moving forward and a template for the business owner to administrate again in the future.
We accompany the verbatim feedback from your team members with a comprehensive financial analysis of key performance indicators for the business (KPIs). This allows us to understand the congruence between the operational opportunities and the financial impact of those areas, helping to thoroughly formulate our plans and actions in step two.
STEP 2 – SYNTHESIZE AND CREATE
Define: Using the results from Explore and Assess, a working session will take place to synthesize the findings, prioritize focus areas and identify Values, Constraints and Gaps. Conversations will provoke clarity, insight and action where focus areas will be agreed upon and defined in a detailed format. A Focus Map could be produced with the participation of key company stakeholders, to decipher findings and identify why they are occurring.
Ideate: During this exercise we will defer judgment, encourage wild ideas, build on other’s ideas and stay focused on the topic at hand by participating in ‘How Might We’ exercises to begin concepting ways to improve the above findings. Group exercises may include two sessions of divergence and convergence to explore a wide range of solutions, then choose those which make the most sense for the business. During the divergence process, Relationship Maps could be produced to help us identify inter-related challenges and solve for them as one goal by using consolidated resources.
Goal Setting: Beginning by prioritizing ideas, we will visually map activities which have the highest return in the shortest amount of time, or for the lowest cost. Management by Objectives will be introduced and scripted using SMART goal formatting to lead the execution of property level, market level and above-property efforts and ensure organizational alignment.
STEP 3 – TEST AND LEARN
Test: One of the final steps is to then bring the ideas to life using validation, refinement and then deployment. Development of new processes and training programs to support the changes are equally important to the communication of the changes to property leaders (and sometimes guests as well). The length of this stage depends, based on a variety of internal and external factors.
Learn: Speed to market is important, as is our ability to quickly receive feedback while moving onto additional prototypes to refine the solution. Quantitative and qualitative measurements will be established, tracked and followed up on by business owners.