GPS (large company)

...what didn't go so well was I wasn't integrated with the company, so I was working by myself most of the time for the first three months. [2187]
what didn't go so well was I wasn't integrated with the company, so I was working by myself most of the time for the first three months. I couldn't reach to other people to ask for help 'cause I didn't know anyone, so I didn't really have integration on the company, and the client wasn't prepared to receive whatever we were working on, so- [2185],[2186],[2184]
we don't know what we want to do, so we were going further in details and we had questions and they had no way to answer our questions because they were not even sure they wanted what we were doing. [2189],[2190],[2188],[2191]
Finished the project, we delivered, and they just forgot about it, it never became real. [2192]
To guide us according to his own vision, but he didn't have the company backing him up, so they never used whatever we were producing. Finished the project, we delivered, and they just forgot about it, it never became real. [2193],[2197],[2198],[2195],[2194],[2196]
The practice leader was the one responsible for the project, and he was making pretty much the decisions. [2199]
The expectations that the client had was proved that wasn't exactly the expectations that people had, so we tried to follow what the client [2201],[2200]
There was not too much creativity to be truth about it, it was pretty much about following what are the mobility trends, what people want, to have more than one computer, and now to use things in different computers. [2202],[2203]
t's never very easy thing to stop the project when everything is already in place, the contract, the money is allocated and everything, so I think bureaucracy was stronger here and we keep going into the project even though we knew that we shouldn't be doing, that was [2206],[2205],[2204]
Yeah, so when it got here we realized how messy it was and that maybe what we were going further wasn't what the client expected in the very beginning with this brief, and we tried to stop the project. [2208],[2207],[2209]
was a bit frustrated when he left because we were ... Because of this attempt to stop the project we were late on whatever we needed to produce, so he had on the calendar four weeks expecting it on the end of the four weeks we would be in such a stage of the project and we were not, so I was left with whatever was still needed to do by myself. There was a bit of frustration, but not to him- [2214],[2211],[2212],[2213]
The client, the client that came to us and said, "We are losing whatever specialty we had before, we are getting back ... Our competitors getting ahead from us, what can we do to leap frog and become the first ones?" And this was extremely atypical project for IDEO, we got this project through ... The CEO of the company was friends with our CEO, so it's like you cannot say no to this project, you really need to do this, although you don't understand anything about financial services [2164]
The client, the client that came to us and said, "We are losing whatever specialty we had before, we are getting back ... Our competitors getting ahead from us, what can we do to leap frog and become the first ones?" And this was extremely atypical project for IDEO, we got this project through ... The CEO of the company was friends with our CEO, so it's like you cannot say no to this project, you really need to do this, although you don't understand anything about financial services. [2161],[2163],[2162]
It was considered a service project, so again, it was in the service practice, and we were allocated three girls to an industry that's pretty much all men .. [2165]
That did this project. We spent pretty much our first two or three weeks before even going to the field reading the manuals of people that study for financial advisors so we can catch up on all the terminology and all the concepts and all ... And myself not being a native speaker was even more ... like, I have no idea what in the states financial services are so important, so it was a very high learning curve and it was very interesting because of that. [2167],[2166],[2168]
It was pretty much to get up to speed and then have all the questions, and the relation with the client was extremely good because they were also women, it was really funny, so they were very tolerant and very helpful to explain us all ... Everything we wanted to ask and the terminology, so it was quite funny collaboration and very surprising that they trust us, they really believed that we could do it, even though we were- [2169],[2152],[2170]
They were very confident that we actually were the right people to do the project, and it revealed to be really the case. [2171],[2154]
And I think what I learned from that project was that pretty much design is everywhere, it's just a question of how you approach it and your mental model when you approach things. You don't need design by industrial design or communication design or fashion design, it's pretty much an obstruction because you can actually use design skills for every industry, so that was interesting to learn, but again, I don't know if I can talk about creativity here. [2172]
Because what we pretty much told them was, again ... There is something we usually ... I don't know if someone already told you about cross pollination and how IDEO is always so much based on this principle that the more diverse people you join together coming from different experiences and from different disciplines the more likely you will have people saying, "Well, but this really reminds me of something else." And you bring the mental model and the processes and trying to apply to the situation, and sometimes works, sometimes miss fires, so I think what happened here was exactly like we were so out of the industry and like that we could bring our knowledge and mental models from the consumer industry and apply them to the financial industry, something that no one else did before, and so I think that was the middle ground that we could feel comfortable because we know what we are talking about and you guys can be helped if you do exactly what [Apple 00:43:14] is doing or what Target is doing could apply to your business. [2173]
It was a bit lower than the other one, there was mostly CFOs or whatever in the room, but they were effective, so they were pretty high. Whatever we were recommending them was pretty quick to be applied in reality, so it was pretty high. [2175],[2174]
Quite high. [2176]
Oh no, it was just ... Yeah, what we proposed them was ... Yeah, it changed. They were very focused on this idea of ... I don't know how to say ... Okay, so leap frogging and getting to be better than the others, and what we came back to them and say was, "Listen, what you need is to clean your house and reorganize your offer because it's such a mess. You have pretty much a company made of acquisitions and you are not talking to each other." So yeah, it became pretty much transformation project together with whatever online tools we were proposing. Yeah, we change a lot. [2178],[2177]
It was very good. Yeah, I mean, the people we were talking on a daily basis was amazing. [2179]
It was good. It was ... There was lots of anxiety going on and we needed to cope with that, but the relationship was good. [2180]
I don't know. There is no recipes, you just try to minimize whatever new disturbances can come. I, for example, I had my boyfriend's birthday happening in the same week as we had interviews and my project manager was just like so nervous, so nervous, and scared and I couldn't ... I had no courage to ask her that I needed to fly to Europe to go to his birthday, so I just ... Every time I was about to ask her I thought that, "No, if I'm going to do this she's going to have a heart attack." So yeah, so [inaudible 00:54:06] [2182],[2181],[2160],[2183]
Reference Tags
[2187] Inexperience,[2185] Insufficient Feedback,[2186] Internal changes/challenges,[2184] Lack of resources,[2189] Alignment,[2190] Insufficient Feedback,[2188] Internal changes/challenges,[2191] Vague goals,[2192] Reactance,[2193] Indecisive leadership,[2197] Insufficient Feedback,[2198] Internal changes/challenges,[2195] Lack of organizational encouragement,[2194] Vague goals,[2196] Vague roles,[2199] Authority bias,[2201] Alignment,[2200] Lack of real innovation mandate,[2202] Finding Existing Ideas,[2203] Lack of organizational encouragement,[2206] Alignment,[2205] Communication issues,[2204] Selfish motivation for the project,[2208] Anchoring,[2207] Conservatism,[2209] Premature idea evaluation,[2214] Alignment,[2211] Lack of organizational encouragement,[2212] Lack of resources,[2213] Unbalanced workload pressure,[2164] Great example - External Influences,[2161] Inexperience,[2163] Lack of resources,[2162] Micromanaging,[2165] Ultimate attribution error,[2167] Cultural differences,[2166] Lack of resources,[2168] Unbalanced workload pressure,[2169] In-group bias,[2152] Inexperience,[2170] Trust,[2171] Trust,[2154] Trust,[2172] Great example - Individual & Team outcomes for future efforts,[2173] Communicating ideas across domains,[2175] Decisive leadership,[2174] Organizational encouragement,[2176] Risk compensation,[2178] Internal changes/challenges,[2177] Scope creep,[2179] Communicating ideas across domains,[2180] Resilience,[2182] Avoiding conflict about relationships,[2181] Resilience,[2160] Risk compensation,[2183] Unbalanced workload pressure