Portfolio

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Design Portfolio Table of Contents 1 :Introduction .............................................................................................................................................. 2 2: Value Proposition ...................................................................................................................................... 3 3: Design Process .......................................................................................................................................... 4 4: Design Challenges ..................................................................................................................................... 9 De-Fuzzinator ............................................................................................................................................ 9 Quality Clock ............................................................................................................................................. 9 Idea Management ................................................................................................................................... 10 CompaReviews V2.0................................................................................................................................ 11 Social Account Manager ......................................................................................................................... 12 Customer Engagement System ............................................................................................................... 12 Additional Projects underway ................................................................................................................. 13 5: Personal Thoughts on Design.................................................................................................................. 14 Resume ....................................................................................................................................................... 15

Rana Chakrabarti

emailrana@gmail.com

+91 9916908308

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1 :Introduction Who are you? Why do you exist?

I am a student and practitioner of design-thinking, a peddler of insights and designer trapped in an engineer’s body. I am interested in creating state-of-the art software -mediated experiences which meet deeply felt needs of its users. I believe that people think with metaphors, learn with narratives and purchase experiences. And that product design principles and narrative craft holds the key to crafting future software mediated experiences.

I bring nearly a decade of experience in building enterprise class business applications across manufacturing domains inside SAP, ranging from automotive to supply chain management. In addition, in a previous life with Siemens, I have 5 years of experience executing turnkey electrical and automation projects within India. This allows me to bring deep insights into the needs and nature of consumers of business software and sound technical skills to bring them to life.

As a design-thinker I have created and employ a design-thinking methodology purpose-built for engineering-minded communities. This was born from the insight that synthesis, something designers take for granted, is absent within engineering communities. Due to the differences in education processes, designers are taught to rely on synthesis for problem solving while engineers are not. This difference accounts for most of the incoherence during designer-engineer dialogues. To make sense to an engineer, a design methodology must have a perception of linearity, have continuity between its artefacts and be facilitated. I have spent 15 months and 7 projects validating and proving the merits of this approach.

My skills cover the range of design management, from design research to discover insight, systemsthinking to model large complex systems, narrative craft to make tangible areas of opportunity, facilitation skills to build shared context, and prototyping skills across different fidelity levels .

I am looking to create software mediated experiences that change the way people see and interact with world.

Rana Chakrabarti

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2: Value Proposition What problem do you solve? How are you different? How do you work?

There is a gap between the level of fidelity at which designers provide prototypes and the level of fidelity at which a developer can apply his technical skills effectively. Without a bridge designers and developers work at cross purposes. Design integrity gets diluted and self-referential designs result.

I bridge the designer – developer worlds by facilitating the complete design-thinking process for the team, ending with creating prototypes at low and medium levels of fidelity. These are then iterated into high fidelity by developers and checked via fast feedback loops. This allows the technical workforce to apply their skills towards a common purpose while preserving design integrity. From experience, developers are usually happy to be guided.

In musical terms, the designer provides the base tune and the corresponding chord structure to the developer. The developer refines the base tune into a finished melody. Done right both are discernible in the final product.

Prototype is understood here as any means to make an experience tangible, with a focus on interaction – this includes interaction sketches, interaction narratives, interaction storyboards, systems diagrams, frameworks and the more familiar technical prototypes. Wireframes are generally avoided due to their in ability to model interactions over time. Choice of media is made for impact and relevance. Pencil before pixel is preferred.

The design-thinking methodology followed is purpose-built for use within engineering-centric development communities. It is broadly ordered into building blocks of Design Research, Experience Design and Interaction Design.

For 2009 my goal was to be respected for his design-thinking skills. This has been achieved For 2010 my goal is to be respected for prototyping skills built on his design-thinking skills. This is ongoing.

How do you manage your energy?

I use the week as the natural unit for planning and evaluating work, and natural containers within design-thinking as the ordering principle. Keeping in mind the nature of design-thinking and the value of personal projects, the week is ordered using the frames Think: Do: Sharpen the Saw in the proportion 2:2:1. Two days are allocated for synthetic tasks, two days for analytic tasks and one day for personal projects. For example, in a typical week, the first two days might be used for design research, brainstorming, systems thinking, crafting narratives. The next two are devoted to prototyping. The last day of the week is used to engage with colleagues across levels on projects of mutual interest or work on future facing personal projects.

Rana Chakrabarti

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3: Design Process What is this design-thinking methodology purpose built for engineering communities? How does it work?

The design methodology goes by the name of software|service Design Process or sDP. It can be used to design a software offering as well as a service offering. The sDP machine below gives a 30,000 ft. view of the methodology. Along with a colleague Gerhard Hirth a patent for the methodology has been applied for.

Insight

Interaction Systems

Experience Design - xD

Observation

Finished Product

Interaction Design - IxD

Interaction Cycle - 1

Interaction Cycle - 2

Designed Software Product

Figure 1 - 30,000 ft view of the software|service Design Process

Given a design challenge the methodology first models the experience holistically and timelessly using a systems thinking approach. The systems diagram is the central tool for building shared context. Usually systems emerge at two levels of detail – conceptual and interaction. The interaction system is the springboard for the next phase, Interaction Design which orders the experience in time using product design and narrative principles. The intent is to create Flow. Time is simply the experience of travelling through an interaction system. The final product is arrived at in iterations. The analogy is to an architect who designs both for time and timelessness always keeping the final experience of use in mind.

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What does it look like a finer level of detail?

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What is sDP? The software |service Design Process is a 3 feet view of a design process, with the classic envision-prototypeiterate representing 30,000 ft and SAP’s user-centred design process representing 3,000 ft .It is closer in kind to d.school’s design process. In late 2008 though, I was working to synthesize a design process from product design and cinematic principles. The original thought is captured in a paper here under the title: where is software interaction headed?

The process is ordered into logical 10 steps to make sense to an engineering community. In reality the transition from one step to the other is iterative. Fundamentally it two building blocks – Experience Design (xD from here on) built a foundation of design research and systems thinking, and Interaction Design (IxD from here on) built on a foundation of product design principles for form and cinematic principles for flow.

What can it do?

It can help create pure service offerings or software mediated offerings depending on how it is used. However, software mediated experiences are considered the base premise.

For a pure service offering the experience design phase is expected to be sufficient. Design research and systems thinking together have the necessary rigour to discover areas of opportunity and model them holistically, and so step through the service offering. In reality, storyboarding is necessary to make the service offering tangible.

For a software offering, experience design is a prerequisite. This phase focuses on interaction design informed by the results of the experience design phase. Interaction storyboarding and rapid prototyping are seen to be the core disciplines for this phase. As mentioned before, interaction design draws on principles of product design to synthesize form and cinematic design to create flow. Flow is established before form. Form is expected to be required at only at key points in the experience and only to lubricate the experience. In this world, form follows flow.

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How do you know it works? Have you tried to validate it?

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Rana Chakrabarti

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4: Design Challenges The design challenges are listed in chronological order. The synopsis captures the essence of the challenge with links to the artefacts. For the design process please see the previous section under the column of the same name.

De-Fuzzinator The goal here was to prove that storyboarding has the requisite robustness for interaction design.

The design challenge attempted was a classic one found in nearly all companies – new values are introduced periodically in companies with fanfare, but without support at the level of behaviour. This gap absorbs the potential of the new value, leaving the status quo unchanged. The design challenge re-framed the problem in human-centric way. From this two interaction storyboards emerged. A before storyboard, articulating reality today including existing software interactions, and an after storyboard+ envisioning the future, along with a coarse interaction model of the proposed software. Post-its and pencils were used. A video was also created using Microsoft Photostory which included narration.

The validity of its robustness emerged via a happy accident – looking to explain the two storyboards to a colleague at SAP Research, I emailed them ahead. Five minutes into the telephonic conversation he asked if I knew that he was blind and if that would be a problem. I said it would not. I narrated the before and after sequences frame by frame. Soon after, we had an hour long dialogue on how we might consider using case base reasoning as the basis for a prototype.

Quality Clock The goal here was to use metaphors as an organizing principle when designing a product.

The design challenge was that colleagues in the quality assurance team were overwhelmed with processes and looking for a way to make it manageable and share experiences. The end-user journal approach was used to discover sources of information touched during a typical work week. Over several interviews it emerged that dominant organizing principle in use tacitly within quality was time. Knowing which process comes after which was necessary for survival. This suggested using a clock as a metaphor for ordering quality processes.

A design challenge was crafted articulating this. The first sketch was done in paper and pencil. With agreement on this, Visio was used to create the product. Processes were arranged by depth and time. Arrangement of processes into 30,000 ft., 3000 ft., 300 ft. and ground level views allowed matching depth with experience. At 3000 ft., “clock hands” were used to point to the most important quality processes At 300 ft, processes resolved into phases. Tasks for each phase were ordered in time into up to 8 “time tracks” on which relevant artefacts were laid. All artefacts were made clickable. Natural navigation from the core outwards and from top to bottom is suggested by the design. At ground level any artefact clicked leads to a page to learn from or share experience of using that artefact.

This was then brought to life in the form of an image map in an internal wiki. Management mandate is required to ensure building a critical mass of content into the product, only after which point, will it be useful to the target audience.

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Idea Management The goal here was to prove that systems thinking in general and causal loop diagrams in particular have the necessary robustness to model highly fuzzy systems.

Idea Management was selected as the Sinatra Test (if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere). It has the perception of being the “fuzzy front end” of any innovation centric company. This made it an excellent candidate.

The product has one release out in the market and was looking to shape direction for the second version.

The design research process adopted was a competitive market survey of successful community powered systems.

Idea Management was understood to be another instance of community powered systems. The intent was to synthesize the design elements which make the community powered systems successful and hope to use these elements as a start point for thinking about possible features for the next version. Products reviewed online were Starbucks, Dell IdeaStorm, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Innocentive, Threadless, CrowdSpring and a partner offering from Microsoft. The results were presented in the form of an affinity map which uses the frames Analogies, Competitors, Forces, Appearance, Categories, Spaces, Lifetime, Conversation System, Reward, Participation, Feedback, Perspectives, Solver Tasks, Seeker Tasks and Internal Stakeholders. This presented a 360 degree view of the spectrum within Idea Management exists. Shared context was built across 3 time zones with this.

With agreement on the design elements in place, systems thinking was used to model the experience of using an idea management system. However there was even more interesting pre-assignment. The development team for the product had been wildly successful in creating a exciting new product. This was unusual in the current circumstances and warranted a closer look. I was asked to make sense of the team dynamics. Two phone interviews assisted by webcams were conducted to understand the journey of the team – one with the team manager and the other with the product owner. This was then converted into a team systems diagram annotated to explain the team dynamics and predict future dynamics.

The interaction systems diagram was created over 3 iterations with fast feedback loops. The immediate result was that dialogues on idea management moved to a deeper level instantly. Evidence of its robustness can be found in the fact that this diagram was then used to determine the key features for the next release from a laundry list of features and simultaneously informed the long term strategic thinking of the product owner. A 60 minute narrative was created to simulate the journey of an end-user through the proposed interaction system.

Rana Chakrabarti

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CompaReviews V2.0 The goal here was to build facilitation skills in design-thinking. Sunil Arvindam, VP SAP Research, Bangalore had a first version of a sentiment analysis product CompaReviews in place.

The product mined reviews from Amazon, extracted features, evaluated sentiments for each feature and presented this using a simple explorable sentiment slider. This was already an exciting product with excellent reviews inside the company for its use and design simplicity. The challenge for the second version was to envision compelling circumstances of use which would inspire the research team and be be pitched to different lines of business inside and outside SAP. To begin with, envisioning of future uses for the product was required. Since there were no comparable products in the market, at that point, a future forecast approach was selected for design research. Secondary research on choice making strategies was done. The goal of design research was to discover the qualitative and quantitative factors involved in making choices. The first framing can be seen here. st

Based on research, a mock newsletter dated 1 Jan 2015 was created, which envisioned future uses. The newsletter assumed an environment where collective intelligence had become pervasive, the balance of power had shifted to consumers and consumers routinely rated products and services or mined crowds for making decisions, ranging from which rides to take in an amusement park to which hospitals had a good reputation. Short newspaper style articles were created, each ending with CompaReview’s role in making the result possible. This built shared context with the team and allowed expanding the dialogue on future features by providing context.

One use of the newsletter was the insight that we must account for crowd directed emergent uses along with uses we envision for internal lines of business. A second use was in storyboarding the final product to make transparent its possible uses to internal audiences.

The heart of the engagement was the frequent and fast paced brainstorms at different levels of detail. My contributions were to synthesize frameworks and narratives to make tangible the journey of a consumer from interest to purchase. Some artefacts created for the brainstorm include a holistic systems view of the consumer journey and an interaction story of a typical consumer taking this journey to make tangible the nuances of decision making involved and the time delays implicit in the journey.

Apart from this I also helped craft, communicate and coach the storyline for the TechEd 2009, Bangalore demo jam. Inputs to the development team were limited but rapport was established throughout the development cycle ending with testing the final product.

As a token of appreciation the team has placed my name in the credits section of the product.

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Social Account Manager The goal here was to blend narrative craft and interaction storyboards to make tangible a rapidly evolving product concept The challenge here was to create interaction storyboard for a conceptual product: the social account manager targeted at account executives.

The final product was to be a finished executive storyboard with professional voice over and graphics. Brainstorms were conducted between a colleague between Palo Alto and Bangalore leading to the coarse narrative. All conversations were posted into an in house collaboration workspace, 12sprints.

To get started a timing signature was created for all the roles involved in the coarse narrative. This helped surface how the roles interplayed and how to structure the narrative sequence.

To create the storyboard an interaction narrative was envisioned. This painted the journey of an account executive in first person through the proposed product. This was used as the frame for detailing the interactions.

The deliverable from my side was the interaction storyboard. This was later abstracted by professional graphic artists into an executive level storyboard. Along with this additional interaction sequences were suggested for a collective intelligence helpdesk, based on crowd sourced bug fixing based on the degree of difficulty of the issue.

As a token of appreciation my name was placed in the end credits of the final storyboard video.

Customer Engagement System The goal was here was to build interviewing skills (conversation as an instrument) to mine experiences which could then be modelled into a system.

The challenge here was to model a holistic customer engagement system which provided a map and a guide. The current process provided a map but was leading to disconnects in its use. Field visits to customers were resulting in bug lists rather than discovery and validation of insights. The process was failing to guide the field interactions sufficiently. The design research approach selected was end-user interviews along with a critical review of the current process (internal link).

A first concept map was created articulating elements of a customer engagement system. Two video-conference interviews were conducted using the “journey of the protagonist” approach. The research was synthesized into a “before” narrative. The real names have been anonymized to allow the reader to focus on the narrative.

The key insights emerging from the narrative were 1) customer engagement was loosely defined – perpetuating the status quo - a site visit was misunderstood to be a field trip collect pain points instead of discovering insights.

2) No relationship building was being done at the ground level, for example by working side-by-side, leaving no possibility of direct access to end customers in future 3) No guidance was available on what the journey of interactions should be like - thus allowing the customer’s agenda to override ours. The bug lists represented the customer’s interests.

Based on these insights a conceptual system was modelled. The goal of customer engagement was explicitly framed as discovery or validation of investment opportunities. A framework of Before-During-After was created, emphasising that customer engagement is not episodic but has preparation, immersion and reflection phases. To

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make these values actionable they were phrased as the verbs: Study- (Observe|Inquire) – Reflect. A timeline was included showing the timing of key interactions.

The conceptual system has been well received by the sponsor Gerhard Hirth. However, the exercise is incomplete.

The final step is to create an “after” narrative based the conceptual system which guides interactions and blends in existing artefacts, for example the customer acquisition process, the travel budget process and the feedback agreement process. This allows comparing the old and new process apple to apple.

A meeting with the project sponsor Heinz Hefner and the project manager Barbara Koerner is under planning to build shared context.

Additional Projects underway 1.

Test Authoring system – re-designing how test cases are authored See current artefacts – timing signature and systems diagram – warning – no polish

2.

Community Reporting system – designing a reporting system for online communities See current artefacts – systems diagram – warning – no polish

3.

Skunk works project for MD’s office - under NDA

Rana Chakrabarti

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5: Personal Thoughts on Design 1. Where is software interaction headed ?

Draws on inspiration from product design principles, cinematic principles and others sources to predict where and how interaction design will evolve 2. Scaling design thinking An application of design thinking to scaling design thinking. Prints to 4 pages printed back to back. Uses the analogy of the organisation as a living organism to propose how to introduce design thinking inside an organisation

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Resume Goal

To create software experiences that change the way people see and interact with the world

Skill overview

 Design Thinking - highlights below. See portfolio for complete list  Project management and software development - enterprise class applications – see projects  Functional domains – Automotive, Aerospace & Defence, Supply Chain Management , Manufacturing  Languages - ABAP, HTML, JavaScript

Projects

2000–current

SAP Labs India Pvt. Ltd.

Bangalore, India

Apart from the projects listed my activities include hiring activities, creating a comprehensive PP/DS education plan for new joinees, creating a rewards and recognition framework, team innovation challenge, company-wide brainstorm, event management to name a few Design Thinker – only formal engagements listed. ordered latest first  Skunk Works project with Labs Management, Bangalore on Bottom of the Pyramid – as a part of this engagement, I recently facilitated 90-minute business case challenge for 22 MBA’s from WHU University, Cologne. This was on behalf of Clas Neumann, Managing Director, Labs Network  Social Account Manager social analytics project with Erin Liman, Director, Social Business Innovation, GEPG  CompaReview Version 2.0 social analytics project with Sunil Arvindam, VP, SAP Research  Next Generation Idea Management project with Tom Massung, Director Consumer Products and Christopher Ehmcke, Solution Manager for Idea Management

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 Quality clock as part of an Effectiveness & Efficiency project for Business Suite – Core, Bangalore Project Manager – ordered latest first  Integration of characteristics based cross-location planning functions across DP, SNP, PP/DS and TP/VS with PP/DS  Enterprise services enablement for Production Planning Order, Equipment resource and Capacity Load Planning View

Development Lead – ordered latest first  Architectural feasibility assessment – Production Data Structure vs.

Production Process Model  Enhancements to production campaign planning features in APO  Ownership of SCM APO Production Planning / Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS)  Integration of warranty processes into Airline Maintenance Repair & Overhauling processes

Developer – ordered latest first  Enhancements to Warranty Claim Processing -engine and reporting enhancements  Ownership of Automotive Warranty Claim Processing product  Creation from scratch - Automotive Dealer Portal – Warranty

1995–2000

Siemens India Ltd.

Mumbai, India

Senior Executive - Marketing

Responsible for turnkey projects business in India & Asia Pacific Region as a part of ATD, regional headquarters for Siemens AG in the Mining & Materials Handling Industry. Approximately 15 quotations made independently. Closely involved with order negotiations. Skill set includes: Order Acquisition – Inquiry generation, Offer preparation, Electrical & automation system design, Costing, Pricing, Technical discussions

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 Order Execution – Techno-commercial order negotiations, Engineering supervision, Contract management, Supply chain management including -- Profitability improvement planning, Competitive purchasing , Factory logistics management, Inspection, Site activity monitoring, Order value, Turn Over target achievement.

Education

1991–1995

Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of Engg. Pune

 B.E., Bachelor of Engineering, Industrial Electronics  Graduated First Class (62.3%) in final year

1989–1991

Mithibai College

Mumbai

 H.S.C., Higher Secondary Certification  Graduated with 88% (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics)

1976–1989

Jamnabai Narsee School

Mumbai

 I.C.S.E., Indian Schools Certificate Examination.  Graduated with 83.2% (aggregate)) Languages

English, German (basic), Hindi, Marathi, Bengali.

Interests

Occasional DJ and blogger

Rana Chakrabarti

emailrana@gmail.com

+91 9916908308