Adopting design thinking practices to satisfy customer expectation in agile practices :

Abstract

While application of Agile principles leads to better project success, some projects are still failing due to lack of understanding of exact client requirements. Agile teams have recently started adopting Design Thinking (DT) to better understand what is in customers’ mind. In this research, we explore DT practices in Agile teams using inductive reasoning. The research first formulated a conceptual framework based on a literature review. Based on this, conducted a set of interviews where the researcher interviewed ten professionals, including project managers, business analysts, tech leads, and architects of different IT service organizations. Interview findings were then analyzed using the Straussian grounded theory. Customer journey, story mapping, prototypes, POC, UX, and scenarios were identified as the most suitable methods to identify real need of the customer. Moreover, practicing human-centered approach through workshops, discussions, team communication, and end-user interaction through UAT were also identified to be effective. Based on these findings, this research further derived a model to achieve customer satisfaction through DT in agile-base projects. The proposed model categorizes best practices into five categories such as customer real need identification, transforming customer real need into pilot solutions, visualizing pilot solution for customer feedback, idea generation for pilot solution, and brainstorming.