Danny Alexander reflects on his project team’s experimental approach simultaneously tackling two different projects associated with agriculture in India – Digital Green and Arohana.  

When we first began the Digital Green project, I wrote that we were also running an experiment. Here's what I wrote:

“At IDEO.org we’re always looking for ways to become more efficient and more (cost) effective designers. For this reason, we are excited to be testing a new way of structuring projects—with our design team running two projects together in parallel, rather than in series while in India. By combining these projects—both related to agriculture in India—we’ll not only save time and money, but more importantly, we’ll leverage the learnings of both projects to support each other.”

I promised I'd report back, so what did we learn? 

Well, although it was great fun combining teams and traveling as a group of four, while we were in the field for our first trip we realized this new structure might not work going forward. Visiting Arohana first and Digital Green second, our heads were full of information and it became hard to keep it all straight, not to mention the added travel of having to visit two clients each trip. We did have a much better base of knowledge to develop insights out of, but moving into synthesis and prototyping we decided it'd be better to have two teams of two working full time on each partners' project rather than one team of four working half time on each.

It was a difficult decision to make, but we think it made all the difference. Having the extra time and focus led to greater outcomes and eased the process a bit for each team. It was a great learning experience, if nothing else, and I'll continue to blog about other team structuring experiments we run here at IDEO.org in the future.