Bringing Your Personal Perspective to a Project

By Daisy Ortiz-Berger 

January 2010

Teams need to bring their personal perspective, experience and creativity to inspire breakthrough solutions to projects.

When we think about innovation, we might all agree that it is about implementing new ideas to create value. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition definition reads, “1: the introduction of something new, 2: a new idea, method or device.” My perspective is that it usually takes having an idea and making it real through a project or a new product or service. Some might agree that what drives innovation could be competitive pressures, economic constraints, change in customer base or personal insight on how things should be . . . getting to an “ideal state.”

In my professional career, I have had the opportunity to see creative ideas come to life in various forms and from different types of teams: advertising agencies, marketing departments and other lines of businesses. It is as simple as having creative types in a room brainstorming ideas that are breakthrough and that become the next innovative launch of a product or service. How do you drive innovation from common projects? Teams need to bring their personal perspective, experience and creativity to inspire breakthrough solutions to projects. I have worked on several projects that have led to innovative solutions, improving a process or driving new technology.

Several years ago, I led a project where I was able to use my Six Sigma Black Belt skills to drive process improvements, which led to new technology to automate the current event sponsorship program at Bank of America. Our team started the project shouting out ideas on what would be the ideal solution for an end-to-end event sponsorship process. We wanted to fix how we currently handled providing sponsorship funds for local events. Additionally, we wondered, how can we automate the communication to eliminate manual steps and improve the approval flow for faster response rate in order to expedite sponsorship opportunities throughout the bank? Through the use of Six Sigma tools, process mapping the current state, defining the ideal state and identifying any gaps allowed the team to design a new system that would improve the current sponsorship process. The design led to an innovative solution and the development of new technology.

The team could not design and develop this type of technology in-house and in a cost-effective manner to meet the required timeline to implement. Again, through my personal experience as a sourcing manager in supply chain, I recommended that we outsource the development of the new technology and focus on the design of the sales process. Supply chain management partners began working on a BRD (business requirement document) to capture all the functionality and system requirements needed to make the technology user-friendly and flexible for additional enhancements.