Design Thinking Course at SAP Mawared Program

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Last week I got a chance to attend Design Thinking workshop with young professionals who’d be starting their SAP career after completing a Training Program, termed as Mawared in Middle Eastern region.

It was fun to participate in the workshop as an attendee, while the Regional Lead for SAP Training Program, Monika Ackermann, presented the course to young professionals. Initially I was there just to observe the training progress, being Customer Project Lead, but finally decided to join the group and learn from the trainer’s design thinking experience & share my thoughts in the class for young learners.

Since the training benefited a lot to the participants, Monika and I thought to share our classroom experience at SAP community as it may help others as well. So in this blog, I’ve summarized the concept briefly which Monika Illustrated very nicely & in number of steps and would welcome the subject experts to provide their feedback to encourage the young professionals in exploring the topic more.

Here’s the summary of what was presented in the session:

The session was divided into two equal parts; first to work on understanding the problem and then on settling on solution. The participants were encouraged to create and make choices as a team in both situations; the problem & solution spaces.

To support their learning, a hypothetical theme was chosen whereby,during Problem Analysis, each participant

• Shared personal experience in similar environment
• Clustered similar experiences of others in groups
• Interviewed others to have better understanding of the problem
• Settled on a common solution vision to help customer in achieving his goal

After forming good understanding of the problem, they worked on Solution Space in a way that each participant

• Suggested few possible solutions to solve customer’s problem
• Grouped their ideas in solution types and ranked different solutions
• Settled on most appropriate solutions for their imaginary customer
• Prototyped their solutions and presented to ‘customers’ (a group within trainees)
• Based on the user feedback, they got ready to work on solutions.

Both the exercises were fun and the trainees were happy to learn different values (empathy, flexibility, diversity, inspiration & teamwork etc.) which they’d be required to practice to be successful consultants.

Good Job Monika and Well-Done Trainees!

Here’s a picture of the classroom which served as our Problem & Solution Space:

For those interested in exploring Design Thinking more, there are number of sources available, including design thinking course at SAP Education.

Here’s a link for the training.

https://training.sap.com/shop/course/wdt100-design-thinking-for-business-innovation-classroom-010-de...