Ideation and Validation Webinar Recap

This webinar is about how to ensure citizen development success with ideation and validation. First, we start off by defining the terms “ideation” and “validation”:

• Ideation: Ideation is the practice of going from a concept to a solution. An example of would be starting a development project to boost productivity, and you want to assess the feasibility of that idea.
• Validation: Validation encompasses gathering software requirements and gaining the stamp of approval from end-users by creating a prototype solution, ensuring a viable end product. 

These two steps within the SDLC are especially important when set in a citizen development framework, as citizen development democratizes the skills needed for building applications successfully. Citizen development is on the rise in tandem with the proliferation of no-code/low-code platforms, making it easier to create software as a non-developer. However, the ease of use of no-code/low-code platforms tends to come with a stumbling block. Many non-developers simply start building an application without validating their initiative beforehand. This leads to software criteria not being established, thus resulting in a less feasible product. Spending time on ideation and validations always pays off in the long run. 

To start with, there isn’t much to ideate and validate without empowering employees to speak out their ideas. A way of doing this is by centralizing innovation as part of your company culture. An alternative is establishing an innovation committee, which is tasked with evaluating and implementing innovative ideas. Step two is to process all the submitted ideas based on priority levels efficiently. It helps to establish criteria for submitted ideas in order to determine priority and minimum requirements. Lastly, step three would be to empower employees with technology. I.e., give them the means to execute their innovative ideas and give them continuous technical support. 

The ideation strategy

The approach to executing an ideation strategy comes in various phases. It’s best practice to perform an initial screening in order to gather a maximum of three viable innovative ideas to proceed with. A scoring system can help select the top three ideas that you wish to process. It is important to provide feedback to idea submitters in order to keep them engaged and also assess whether or not the new solution is compatible with the organization’s existing tech stack. Using a Solution Board can help with making a business case and validating ideas to move forward from the ideation phase. 

Solution board: 

The Solution Board is a great tool to help identify a viable solution within the early stages of the ideation process. We use the solution board in order to help us scope out the criteria by going over the following columns:

• Target group: The potential group of people that will be using the solution. 
• Needs: Identify the pain points that the targeted users might be experiencing.
• Components:  Establish which components are needed to resolve the aforementioned pain points. 
• Business goals: Identify how the business will profit from building the application in order to get a budget allocated. 
• Success factors: Based on the core functionalities, define what will “make or break” the solution. This column is optional. 
• End goal: Clearly state what the organization wishes to achieve when putting the innovative idea into a tangible product.  

When working with the solutions board, it is essential to appoint an “assessor” who assesses criteria admitted to each column, with a workflow behind it. This allows for the Solutions Board to be filled out with high-level criteria that lead to a viable end product. 

Alternatively, organizations can opt for an Extended Solutions Board where they are able to validate more in-depth criteria.

Extended Solutions Board:

The validation strategy

This is the phase where business requirements are turned into application requirements. Early feedback from stakeholders helps visualize an application early on. Gathering feedback and translating it to user stories also allows the business to gain a ballpark understanding of the costs involved in creating the solution. This can then be used to set up a business case to get the green light on the development project. It is also recommended that during this phase, technical risks are investigated and how to mitigate them. Keep in mind that the validation phase can be an iterative process until an initial version of the solution has been established among all stakeholders. 

After the stakeholders have validated the criteria using the Solutions Board, it is time to start creating a high-level process. The high-level process takes into account the steps needed for the application to function at a broad level, this can be done in a swimming-lane format. Once the process flow has been drawn up, we can move over to creating wireframes. The wireframes can be done in a low-fidelity or high-fidelity format.  

• Low-fidelity: A low-detail, sketched-out version of what the solution (or part of the solution) will look like. Here, stakeholders can add and validate critical components needed to build the solution, such as headers, footers, buttons, tables, and more. 
• High-fidelity: The high-fidelity prototype uses the low-fidelity wireframe to visualize the end product. It takes more time than the low-fidelity wireframe, but it will give stakeholders a good idea of the solution's final appearance.  

By following the guidelines mentioned in this webinar, organizations are able to use a low-code platform like Betty Blocks to ideate and validate innovative solutions rapidly.