Deutsche Telekom: How we ran an Enterprise Design Sprint with 70 people
by Katharina Weber, Associate, EDA; Dennis Middeke, Partner, EDA and Tomomi Sasaki, AQ
This is a story about a GV style design sprint. If you’ve never heard of that, you can learn more here or read the book.
Enterprise Design Associates is a strategic design consultancy based in Europe. Together with the YOU AND ME team at Deutsche Telekom, we prepared and facilitated a large Enterprise Design Sprint Camp with 70 participants and 12 Design Sprints in parallel.
Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies. YOU AND ME is the internal workplace ecosystem for their 220.000 employees. Since its launch in 2012, user numbers have grown steadily, as has the complexity of the ecosystem.
The YOU AND ME team started small but now consists of 45 people. As is common in large enterprises, teams are located in different cities across many countries. Of course, this structure supports silo-ed working. Valuable expertise within the team stays undiscovered.
In a company environment where many platforms and services compete for attention in the digital workplace, it is essential to deliver the best user experience possible for employees. But given the organizational structure described above, team members were finding it difficult to work towards a shared and cohesive product vision.
It was time for a change. The YOU AND ME team needed to re-think their organizational set-up and ways of working. EDA has been a long-time partner in supporting this change. As part of these initiatives, we introduced the Design Sprint methodology to the team. Results from a pilot sprint were very promising, and helped us quickly develop ideas for product challenges.
Could design sprints tackle the organizational challenges as well? Could we use them to foster collaboration across teams and engage more partners in joining the ecosystem?
We started to think about design sprints at a different scale. Together with the YOU AND ME leads Alexander Derno and Michael Wand, we developed the idea to invite the whole team, stakeholders and potential partners to an Enterprise Design Sprint Camp in Berlin.
In February 2017, we ran a sprint with 70 participants from 15 cities in 12 teams.
Did you make any modifications to the process?
Since our main goal was to foster collaboration and exchange across departments, the biggest change we made to the process was to invite 70 people and run 12 groups at the same time.
We wanted to present the shared vision developed in the pilot sprint and show how their respective challenges were all intertwined. We wanted to connect colleagues from different backgrounds and locations. It was critical to bring the whole team into the same room.
To run a design sprint at an enterprise level, you need to adapt to the conventions of the organization. Shortening the process to only two days was key to bringing in so many people. We kept every phase of the design sprint process, but naturally the activities were condensed significantly.
We booked a gorgeous 1000 m² indoor courtyard at Deutsche Telekom in Berlin to hold the sprint camp. The location was used as a telegraph office many decades ago. It is a beautiful and historical place, one of the nicest event locations in the company. And with its vibrant startup and innovation culture, Berlin was the perfect location for team members to gather.
Organizing an event of this size required weeks of preparing. But to put it in the words of the YOU AND ME lead Alexander Derno: “A meeting with 70 people is difficult… but it’s faster than 1000 small meetings in 4–6 months!”
What questions did you want to answer in your sprints?
The teams worked on the 12 most important challenges that YOU AND ME was facing at that time. The sprint topics came in different flavors. Some were very concrete, e.g. to develop solutions for a new feature or idea. Others were more about working on organizational challenges, process optimizations or product strategy. We saw that the design sprint method also works very well for these types of challenges.
Three examples of sprint topics:
- How can we improve the user experience of the YOU AND ME enterprise search?
- How can we bring the offline YOU AND ME employee magazine closer to our digital offerings?
- How can we establish a developer community to help YOU AND ME grow faster?
Who was on the sprint teams?
The whole YOU AND ME team joined the sprint, as well as experts, external suppliers and stakeholders invited from other departments at Deutsche Telekom. We had a mixed group from all sorts of backgrounds: Business, Design, Development, HR, User Support, Communications, Testing and Operations – to name a few.
Each sprint team consisted of 4–5 people from different backgrounds and one topic owner. This was mostly the product owner that would continue working with the results after the sprint.
In past sprints, we have seen that the “casting” of teams is a critical component to create real impact. We did not randomly put people together in teams but tweaked the assignments over and over until the day before the sprint to make the most of everyone’s expertise and skills.
EDA provided six experienced sprint masters, some of us trained directly by Google. Each sprint master facilitated two sprint teams.
How did you make your prototypes?
The first day focused on understanding and framing the challenge, as well as generating and evaluating ideas. We used tools such as “How Might We Questions”, “Crazy Eight” and the “Value Effort Matrix”. The second day was all about prototyping and validating ideas.
Many of our participants were not familiar with prototyping methods. To get everyone excited and prepared for the prototyping phase, a design thinking expert from the Deutsche Telekom Innovation Labs gave a lightning talk on this topic. Everyone found this very inspiring and we will be sure to do it again.
After this talk, the 12 teams took a variety of approaches in prototyping. As we only had two days, there was no time to make high fidelity prototypes. Instead the teams came up with paper-prototypes, video prototypes or storyboards.
A key learning about the prototyping phase was that it really helps if at least one person in the team is comfortable with sketching. This can be a dedicated designer or someone who is good at visually expressing thoughts.
What did you learn from the test?
The validation phase was condensed to an exhibition of all the prototypes from the different sprint teams. Participants walked around the room, visiting other teams to give feedback on their ideas and solutions.
Since the participants were also users of the YOU AND ME platform, this activity acted as a mix of user feedback and stakeholder interviews. This phase was thereby very crucial to connect the different teams and find synergies and overlapping topics.
What’s next for your project?
Following the sprint, a smaller group continued with a full day of documentation and debrief. The organization team, the topic owners and some of the sprint facilitators reviewed the results and next steps for each team.
Five months later, most of the results are under development or already implemented.
What worked/didn’t work about the sprint process?
Shortening a 5-day process to 2 days requires some compromises. In a feedback session at the end of the second day, participants expressed a wish for more time for some of the phases, especially for prototyping and user feedback.
Participants were delighted to see all of their colleagues and work together in a dedicated time without distraction from email and other meetings. Many colleagues who did not know each other before connected at the Design Sprint Camp. People were also inspired by what they learned in the lightning talks and the new methods.
Will your team sprint again?
The answer is a clear YES!
The next sprint camp will be at the end of 2017. In preparation, we are working on a sprint kit and information about design sprints. This will provide presentation material and checklists catered to the organizational context of Deutsche Telekom. In addition to our bigger events, we want to enable smaller YOU AND ME teams to run their own design sprints.
After analyzing the lessons learned, we created an improved agenda for the next Enterprise Design Sprint Camp. At our next event, there will be more time for prototyping and a bus (yes, a bus!) full of real users for testing.
Many employees at Deutsche Telekom are excited about sprints and want to participate in the next one. We are confident that the approach will spread to other departments within the organization.
At EDA we are working on extending the design sprint method to fit the needs and particularities of large enterprises. If you are interested, check out our Enterprise Design Sprint approach or get in touch.
We are organizing the INTERSECTION Conference on Enterprise Design in Barcelona, September 7–8, 2017. Join us to hear more about our work with Deutsche Telekom and many more interesting cases.
Thanks to everyone who made the Enterprise Design Sprint Camp happen:
- YOU AND ME (Deutsche Telekom): Alexander Derno, Michael Wand
- EDA: Dennis Middeke, Katharina Weber, Benjamin Falke, Milan Guenther
- AQ: Tomomi Sasaki
- TGTH: Bartosz Balewski
- DigitasLBi: Benjamin Buch, Daniel Zander
Photos © Deutsche Telekom AG
