❁ Active Listening, being aware of our own biases and prejudices:
When we listen more, what's shared is more. That's an age old wisdom, but practiced not so well very often. By Listening what I mean is honest, bias less listening. It leads to discovering new opportunities, ideas, learning new things both good and bad, opening avenues for better engagement with people. It’s the key to resolving most problems that might be over complicated with cumbersome work processes and time.
❁ Better cross functional collaboration by applying Design thinking approach:
We can apply the design thinking approach to the cross functional team, we work with. When people with different skills and function come together, starting small, with one simple easy goal activity works best. It sets the stage for establishing a common shared vision and objective, engaging the diverse members better and providing an environment for each to share their perspective.
❁ Constant Learning and Feedback cycle is the most effective tool for excellence and accountability:
Very simply put, learning, collaborating and opportunities for excelling is what engages people most. Informal learning and discussion forums, groups, meet-ups, facilitate an inclusive environment that is growth supporting for individuals. From personal observation, organizations, places that have had a culture of supporting and facilitating informal forums and groups, does well in terms of initiatives taken up by individuals and new idea implementations, propelling towards growth.
❁ Actively identify redundant s and optimize for better time management:
Optimizing processes or even a user flow not only provides for better time management on a day-on-day basis, but also improves accuracy, decreasing chances of error. A dedicated and strategized effort on optimizing, brings about tremendous time and cost save over a time period or business cycle. For businesses and critical institutions that run a day on day repeat processes like hospitals, stock markets, banks, saving on time is as essential as balanced diet for healthy growth.
❁ Alignment of User/Stakeholders needs, Value proposition and business goal:
Alignment of user/stakeholder needs with value proposition and goals should always be a guiding pointer with each step in a project/product design/implementation of a solution. The best fit products must align all three. If at any point during design and testing phase of MVP there's a number of iterations occurring from missed information, it points to a mis fit. A thorough research that focuses on alignment of user/stakeholder needs with value proposition and goals, automatically leads to reduction in number of iterations and error correction cycles, in reaching towards the optimal solution.
❁ Summarize and communicate Project state at key milestones:
When a solution/project impacts multiple stakeholders, summarizing the project current state in form of what's implemented so far, what remains, the series of next action points, impending timelines and dependent stakeholder roles in it, communicating these, keeping all stakeholders in loop provides clarity and opportunity for course correction if required. It's advocate in avoiding disasters.