Jérôme Bloch (PDG, 360DigitalHeroes): Design Sprints in few words

 

Design Sprints allow companies to maximize performance and innovation in an extremely short period of time. Interview.

 

Can you present the sprint design in a few words? 

 

With the ongoing digital transformation, all companies, from start-ups to multinationals, face the same problem: they must achieve a very high level of performance on short time scales. The principle of sprints comes from IT companies like Facebook, which have revolutionized the way a project is managed by multiplying very short meetings - sometimes 1 minute - followed by intense coding phases focused on a specific point for a predefined period of time. Today, the practice has been extended to many other projects in the company: optimizing recruitment, clarifying company values, boosting communication, etc. These sessions combine collaborative work and training in order to achieve a tangible result in 3 hours or 1 day, the results of which are easily measured using one or two key indicators.

 

What are the golden rules of sprinting? 

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The first is to align all participants with a resolutely positive state of mind. A person speaking necessarily brings a stone to the building and it is forbidden, for example, to criticize an element without making a proposal for improvement. Then, stakeholders must understand the incremental methods. A 20-minute sprint, undoubtedly makes it possible to make significant progress but not to reach perfection. However, in many companies, the obsession with excellence kills many projects in the bud. In Design Sprints, the idea is to progress within the time allotted, and by making progress, the objectives set can be achieved. Finally, the last golden rule is that all team members must demonstrate a high sense of responsibility to do their part of the work between two sprints and accept the risk of formulating bad ideas to move forward. It often takes a hundred ideas to find a luminous advance!

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Can you give us some examples?

 

I can give three. The first in communication is websites. Anyone can now easily put a website online in 3 hours and improve it in the following weeks. The old method of working for 6 months or 1 year on a website before putting it online leads to instant obsolescence and obscures the main problem: creating content. Second example, in the financial sector, giant strides have been made in IT projects by having IT specialists work on sprints with business experts. Innovation is no longer the prerogative of computer scientists. As a last example, a few days ago in Brussels, we created a 12-page brochure for MEPs in 3 hours, bringing together 8 experts in the room. Developing such a document by email would have taken months and hundreds of corrections at a cost 10 times higher.

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« In Design Sprints, the idea is to progress as much as possible during the time allocated »

Jérôme Bloch, CEO

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