Though the concept of 'Design Thinking' has been in use since the early 90s it has gained significant importance in the recent past.
This is majorly because of the development it has seen by growing past its original applications in product design and website development.
An article in cio.com brings out the progress of design thinking.
The term design thinking is often associated with David Kelly, Stanford professor and the founder of IDEO, one of the leading design firms established in 1991.
The process which started as a a problem solving approach has now grown to appreciate what now called the human factors.
'Latest advances in Design Thinking now offer a human-centric approach and repeatable processes to take all these into account and focus on just the right problems and the most efficient solutions,' the article states.
A recent PMI study reveals the 47 per cent of projects that are in trouble today are there because of a slip in requirements management.
'Business users are called upon to do something that they have never signed up to do -- design solutions. Business Analysts just come and ask them what would they like to see in a finished product,' the article points out.
Placing business users on development teams helps to better translate their vision to code but offers not protection against ineffective solutions and occasionally, going after completely wrong business goals.
If you hang our with PMs, you hear a lot of complaints about the Scope Creep common phenomena.
'That one is about managing expectations and dealing with 'difficult' people who cause Scope Creep by coming up with all of these 'unforeseen' requirements,' the article states.
You see, when business requirements or an RFP is created based on a 'download' from one stakeholder, there is a very good chance that they will later realize that they've forgotten something. Other stakeholders and other business units will also pick up on missing pieces.
