​

Press Release

Design Sprint, a springboard for innovation​

Luxembourg, september, 11th 2019

​

A phenomenon created by firms such as Facebook or Google, sprint design is invading companies. Jérôme Bloch, CEO of 360DigitalHeroes explains how these sprints maximize business performance and innovation in extremely short timeframes.

Can you introduce sprint design in a few words?

​

With the ongoing digital transformation, all companies, from start-ups to multinationals, are faced with the same problem: they have to achieve a very high level of performance over short time scales. The principle of sprints comes from IT companies such as 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 precise point for a predefined period of time. Today, the practice has been extended to many other projects in the company: optimising recruitment, clarifying company values, boosting communication, etc. These sessions combine collaborative work and training to achieve a tangible result in 3 hours or 1 day, the fruits of which are easy to measure via one or two key indicators.

What are the golden rules of sprinting?

​

The first is to align all participants with a resolutely positive frame of mind. A person who takes the floor is bound to make a contribution, and it is, for example, forbidden to criticize something without making a proposal for improvement. Secondly, the speakers must understand incremental methods. A sprint of 20 minutes, undoubtedly allows to make significant progress but not to reach perfection. However, in many companies, the obsession with excellence nip many projects in the bud. In Design Sprints, the idea is to make progress in the allotted time, and by dint of progress, the goals 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 between sprints and accept the risk of coming up with bad ideas to move forward. It often takes a hundred ideas to find a bright breakthrough!

 

 

Can you give us some examples?

 

I can give you three. The first in communication is websites. Anyone can nowadays 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 hides 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 IT specialists. As a final example, a few days ago in Brussels we created a 12-page brochure for MEPs in 3 hours, bringing 8 experts together in the room. It would have taken months and hundreds of corrections to produce such a document by email for a cost 10 times higher.

 

Quote:

"In the Design Sprints, the idea is to progress as much as possible in the time allowed."

Jérôme Bloch, CEO of 360DigitalHeroes

​

​