Aligning JPD to double diamond process?

[Tim Cromwell]

Hi all,

My team is currently assessing how we might best use JPD and was wondering whether any other teams had figured out how to best align it with innovation/human centred design processes like the double diamond?

I.e. beginning with a challenge/problem, identifying opportunities, and in turn, ideas, etc etc?

How have teams aligned JPD to these processes when only "ideas" and "insights" are supported in JPD, with "ideas" being the primary entity type?

Any thoughts would be super helpful.

Thanks!

[John Sayers · Accepted solution]

Hi Tim,

We are using Product Discovery across all our IT Portfolios and larger projects, and have had a great response across the board. It's very easy to use and customise, so each Portfolio customises their Product Discovery project to suit their needs e.g. they have created drop down Business Area list, System or Product Lists, Team Lists, Change Type lists etc. which allows them to slice and dice the data whichever way suits their needs. They can look at all ideas together on the Effort/Impact Matrix, or filter to see just for one (e.g.,) Business Area or Product, to facilitate prioritisation.

I think of each instance of a PD project as being for a dedicated resourcing pool. So each Portfolio has it's down PD project (which has dedicated resources to work on the systems and business area they are responsible for) and each large project (which again has resources dedicated to the project) also.

We develop the ideas in PD to go/no-go point and then if they are a Go they become in-flight and are built-out and managed in Jira Software / Big Picture from then on until complete/delivered. Once they become in-flight we no longer manage or update the line item in PD.

Ideas can be anything from a large project to small project, to Technical Debt, Small Changes, Feature development, or simply just an idea or concept or initiative.

We are also finding it a useful tool to bring and show at Steering Groups to aid discussion and prioritisation.

Finally, one of the great selling points for me internally is that all ideas for a project or Portfolio are in one place, and everyone knows where to go to see them, manage them, comment on them, and promote them. Goodbye to a combination of spreadsheets, Word docs, Teams and  SharePoint, Jira Backlogs, and (mostly) ideas people say but have not written down anywhere.

Whilst we don't use Double Diamond I hope the above description of our use of PD helps.

Thanks,

John.

[Tim Cromwell]

Thanks John!

[Tanguy Crusson · Accepted solution]

Hi @Tim Cromwell ,

Generally we've seen teams using the flexible fields and views to do that - a bit like how you would do it in spreadsheets. Here's what we have in the FAQ:

Can we create different issue types and their relationships? (e.g. parent/child or opportunity/solution)

Not yet, but it's on the roadmap. In the meantime you can use the flexible fields and views system to do this. Here is an example:

Demo: grouping solutions by opportunities. And here's a recording for how to reproduce this configuration

[Tim Cromwell]

Thanks @Tanguy Crusson , glad to hear this is on the roadmap.

Looking forward to seeing how we might be able to manage not only the solution space, but also the problem space in JPD.  It'd be great if we could track user research against a particular design problem/challenge, and have visibility of the ideas that were generated from the design challenge. Is this something like this perhaps on the roadmap?

[Jonathan Guerrero Corcho]

Hi @Tim Cromwell ,

We're trying to use JPD on the same way you're doing, to manage discovery of problems/opportunities to turn into solutions.

At this moment the only option I see is that an Idea is a problem/opportunity to be solved, and I use the different status of an Idea to manage de double diamond process.

The other topic, I'm still struggling a little bit how to do it, is about how to manage and know their status of different tasks you have to do during that process (i.e. research, ideation, validation, ...), this is well solved about delivery but not about discovery. Nowadays we are managing separately with another project, but follow up in JDP it's done manually.

Hope this helps,

Jonathan

[Tim Cromwell]

Hi @Jonathan Guerrero Corcho , thanks for reaching out!

We're still testing out how best to use JPD, I've tried your approach with using an Idea to capture the problem state but got stuck when trying to figure out how to represent (clearly) the multiple ideas that might be generated from the problem state.  Further, my thinking is the problem/opportunity would want to have different fields to ideas?

The other thought I've had is to consider JPD as (currently) only useful for the second half of the double diamond, and capture design challenges somewhere else (e.g. Confluence) and link them through to ideas tracked in JPD from there?  I'd prefer to track the whole design process in JPD of course :)

With regards to actually tracking tasks, I agree - during research/discovery you'd want to track the work you're actually doing (in Jira)!  But things look a little weird in JPD when you've linked a research epic into an idea, but it appears under "Delivery".. Something I'm also trying to figure out too.

Thanks again!