FORM : Derived from perFORMance

This is an iterative approach to develop and innovate in teams, that is propreitary to Accenture.

It has 5 phases which are :

1. Discover : Spend time with users to understand their motivations, needs and experiences, and analyze available data to uncover unique insights.
2. Describe : This phase is about articulating the expected outcomes and the business case for transforming the business at scale, making sure to create value at every step, with an awareness of the intended and unintended consequences
3. Create : generating an abundance of ideas and choosing the best to experiment with; gathering feedback from users and learning as we go; sharing rough prototypes and making refinements based on what’s desirable, viable and feasible until we get to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
4. Scale : seek to increase the number of users, channels and target markets; broaden the user experience and functionalities; improve the quality, reliability, availability and performance of technology; and apply industrialized, secure and high-quality processes that favor iteration, agility and automation
5. Sustain : focuses on encouraging the right behaviors and user adoption to ensure that the client realizes the value identified in earlier stages. Then, by using both our experience and our data to make decisions, we can see how the solution can continue to be optimized. Continuous innovation is the goal.

Key skills required are :

1. Design Thinking
2. Story Telling
3. Agility
4. Value Creation
5. Data Fluency

Ways of working

Collaborate as One Accenture

1. Kick off project with a Team Canvas
2. Capture everyone's perspectives and get a shared view of the project with Territory Mapping
3. Build a Power Map

What is a Team Canvas?

It is an exercise to help everyone's key strengths, skills, priorities, and how to help them to shine. It helps in obtaining a shared understanding of what everyone brings to the team, and how you'll all work together and achieve.

On a whiteboard we list down goals:

• What do we want to achieve as a group
• What are our feasible, measurable, time-bound goals
• What are our personal goals.

Followed by Values :

• What do we stand for? What are our guiding principles?
• What common values define the core of our team?

Followed by Roles and Skills :

• What skills and strengths do we have on board in the group?
• What roles would help us get where we want to be?
• What are we called as a group?

Followed by rules and Activities :

• What are the rules we want to introduce after doing this session?
• How do we communicate and keep everyone up to date?
• How do we make decisions?

What is Territory Mapping?

It is a way of understanding the current state of a FORM journey. We start with listing what we like and dislike today. This is followed by listing hopes and fears for the future.

What are power maps?

Power Maps are visual representations of a client’s organization that display influence networks, roles and attitudes towards Accenture and the competition. At Accenture, there are two main types—Account Power Map and Deal Power Map.

Account Power Maps are used to develop relationship strategies and depicts a total organization or division. It starts with the client's organization chart and shows official reporting relationships. It is used in account planning sessions.

Deal power maps are used in deal pursuits to create win strategies. Can help devise different strategy options such as "whether to do", "with whom", etc. It is specific to a deal and focuses on key players in a dela decision. It incorporates 4 quadrants aiding in the development of the win strategy by helping us understand how to approach individuals, determine buyer values and identify win themes and messages.

Clients are divided into :

1. Analytical
2. Amiable
3. Driving
4. Expressive

They can have a varied loyalty as well. We use these four quadrants to arrange stakeholders in and then create a weighted directed acyclic graph to determine the quality o relationship with individual stakeholders.

Once drawn correcly, we analyze our "I wish I knews".

What is our positioning?

1. Leverage pople with a positive relationship score, with the Expressive, and/or Amiable styles.
2. Using similar strategies we understand our strengths and weaknesses, byy understanding our relationship to evaluators, recommenders and the influencers to the decision.

Design for people

1. Use Design Research to understand what users need
2. Try methods like Shadowing and Directed Storytelling to explore people's experiences and reveal patterns
3. Document your findings in a visual way, using a Journey Map
4. Take the Human Centered Design Learning experience to expand your knowledge and get inspired.

Design research has a 3 steps to succesful design research :

1. Planning : Scoping your research, defining your research samples and choosing the research methods
2. Doing : Get out into the field and understand the people and their contexts
3. Understanding : Analyze and synthesize your research data and get to actionable insights.

Research can be exploratory, generative, and evaluative. Exploratory research can help immerse the experiences, culture and landscape of a product or service. Generative analysis can help generate insights which can inspire design. Evaluative can test assumptions and decisions that have been made along the way.

Evaluative research can be done with the following soft skills :

• Curiosity – Question everything. Don’t be afraid to ask silly questions – there are no silly questions.
• Observation – Notice everything. Don’t focus on your notes, focus on people.
• Patience – Listen to every story, even if it isn’t directly relevant. Then listen to it over and over again!
• Neutrality – If you react positively to something, instinct suggests you may also react negatively.
• Empathy – It is the capacity to step into someone else’s shoes, understand their lives, and start to solve problems from their point of view.

What is Shadowing?

Shadowing is a research method where you follow a person for some limited time (e.g. some hours) and observe that person’s work or life flows, actions, routines, patterns and decision making while they perform a task or job. It reveals people in their specific context, revealing details that you might not get by just interviewing them.

Some frameworks that may help is using the "Day in the Life Studies" to record the participant's entire day or "Journals and Mobile Mapping" that allows participants to self-document.

Once shadowing is done, we perform "Affinity Clustering" and insights creation to identify needs.

What is directed storytelling?

Directed storytelling is a research method where a person is asked to tell a story of a particular experience. This helps to capture the personal stories of users and understand their experiences with a given subject matter or topic in a short period of time. The patterns found in these stories help you and your team produce ideas for solutions and new opportunities. Use it when there is not enough time or other restrictions for longer term observations of users.

Frameworks to use are the 5 Whys, Affinity Clustering and a Journey Map.

Develop Insights from data

Focus on 360˚ value

Innovate for impact

Adopt an Agile mindset

think and act sustainably

One way of doing these are to have a How Might