Effective customer engagements and corresponding business growth is a result of good design. Integrating Design Thinking with our mature Agile approach, Chainbridge Solutions’ execution and service delivery is guided by three simple principals: empathy, iteration, and innovation.

Establishing a deep understanding of our customers means we recognize that organizational leaders and system stakeholders are real people with real business problems to solve. As a foundation of trusted, empathy is the starting point with every solution and system we design. By taking the time to understand our customers and their business needs, we avoid the trap of identifying customers as mere sales targets, the next project in our portfolio, or the next system to implement.

Leveraging the tools and techniques of Design Thinking during early customer collaborations helps our customers effectively articulate their business challenges and allows the team to visualize how the future systems needs to be designed and built to address their needs. This approach leads to implemented systems our customers love to use every day.

Aligned with our business development and capture approach, Design Thinking supports our efforts through pre-procurement discovery activities such as brainstorming and rapid prototyping to better identify opportunities to pursue and define the programs we want to work on. Combining these insights with the review of customer budgets, spend plans, organizational structure, and strategic plans routinely results in a win-win for our customers and Chainbridge Solutions.

While pursuing access and attention of customers is the name of the game, we do focus our efforts in support of customers’ market research activities as future project and system ideas are being formulated. Customer ideas are prime targets as inputs into many of the Design Thinking tools. Helping customers visualize future solutions such as the transformation of their workflows, applications, and systems that must accommodate the ongoing changes within their mission, goals, and objectives. This is especially germane as transformation initiatives such as Federal Human Capital modernization continue to expand across the Federal government.

In future posts, we look forward to sharing specific examples of design tools and techniques such as Journey Mapping, Story Boarding, Napkin Pitches, and Design Briefs used to successfully implement customer systems that address challenges, solve problems, and bring clear value.