The Collaborative Sourcing Model

I received a request for clarification from Dave Cooksey of PhillyCHI on what I meant by "IDEO style" in my recent post A Process for Creating a Proposal for Interactive Projects.

"Mark - Thanks for sharing this with the group.

I have lots of questions, but want to start by asking what you mean when you state in your blog entry:"Additionally it relies on a leader who is facilitating a team IDEO style rather than an account manager who is trying to find the solution on his or her own."

For those of us not familiar with IDEO or their working style, can you give a few bullet points to clarify? And for PhillyCHI members, do you / your organizations have processes similar / dissimilar? Anything you can share with the group?

Dave Cooksey

PhillyCHI Chair"

Here's my response.

Dave,

That's a good question. I put " IDEO style" forward as a broad brush stroke. I advocate the foundations of their process, not necessarily the details. How they handle and staff projects seems to revise itself every couple of years - so I can't really sell their process in detail.

The following details then, of what I call the Collaborative Sourcing Model, are in the flavor of IDEO but come from my participation with many studios in the SF Bay Area web development and ID scene. Nathan Shedroff and vivid studios were instrumental in introduced me to several of these tenets as part of a manifesto called User-Centric Design (which you are all natively familiar with I am guessing).

Here is the Collaborative Sourcing Model.
* Great solutions to problems come from teams working together to solve them
* This model requires a leader
* Great leaders know how to bring the right people together and get their brains to turn on and think with others on the team. They don't seek the best solution alone - or even have much of an investment in being the person who seeded the killer solution
* Solutions to problems start with insights about the customers as seen through the different disciplines and then work themselves up to become business structures and strategies

Challenges to this come from the Business Model of Design. The Business Model of Design means the following
* This model requires a leader
* The Leader is solely charged with being the source for new ideas but may find support through academic pedigree, key opinion leaders, and solicitation of input from production and manufacturing teams.
* Solutions to problems come from leadership pulling in the right generic business models and strategies and placing these structures down on top of the problems of the specific industry

While I think many of us feel at times that one describes heaven and the other hell, many challenges we face in creating digital media and interactive experiences require a balance between the two.

Thanks for the opportunity to write to the group on this. Let me know if you want more detail. It's kind of a cause for me, and I consult on it regularly so it's on my mind constantly.

BTW: IDEO's site: http://www.ideo.com/

Regards,
-Mark