CEE Design Sprint 2023: an insider look

CEE Design Sprint is a one-of-a-kind event within Mazars Central and Eastern Europe, that brings together Mazarians from all across the region to work on an innovation project meant to solve an existing challenge identified in the company, either at a local or regional level. As the event itself brought forward its own part of innovation, this year, our teams got to experiment with virtual reality and consolidate their projects while using it, following the theme of this edition: The inclusion of VR into the onboarding process.

Throughout this article, we will follow three perspectives, those of our three colleagues who participated in the event: Iustin Braharu, Senior Software Developer, Raluca Necula, Senior Consultant, and Marwa Al Murisi, Business Development Senior at Mazars in Romania. Through a series of testimonials, they have kindly taken us with them and showed us the step-by-step process they have gone through in this edition of the Design Sprint, generously offering us details about their projects, how they have interacted with their respective teams, what were the bumps that appeared on their creative road. Even though they had never experimented with VR or with such a project before, they had all the support necessary around them. Let us hear from our colleagues about their experience below.

The first and one of the most important aspects of the event was the opportunity to work in a multicultural team, alongside people with different backgrounds and seniorities and to learn from their experience and best practices along the way. Our colleagues were separated into two teams, with Iustin and Raluca being teammates in one and Marwa in another, each group being comprised of five or six members. The teams and the connections established between the members really acted as the foundation for the projects and one of the important pillars for success. The work that the teams have put together can be split into two categories, as they worked online up to a certain point and offline after that, with their meeting in Vienna being able to meet physically and establish together the final details and aspects of their work, before presenting their projects to the colleagues in the region.

We got together from the start, understood the assignment, easily made plans, exchanged ideas, and wrapped everything up. Once we were in Vienna, we managed to speed up every process, working in the same room helped a lot. The work was split based on what every member was comfortable with or had more experience with. The VR heavy work was left to the more experienced users, while the writing of the script and the design of the virtual room was assigned to people more inclined to art and creativity, Iustin shared with us about his team.

Putting emphasis on each other’s strengths and knowing how to value everyone’s opinion and perspective in order to cover multiple areas and work more efficiently was a practice that got the teams further in their progress. Concerning this, Raluca shared: Guided by our team motto “In a fast-changing world finding time for meaningful social connection can be a rare treasure”, we have generated as many different ideas as possible to solve the problem in a short time using the Brainwriting Method. This was our best approach as this method brings together the perspectives and strengths of team members.

She added: Each team member had the opportunity to write down their own ideas and then we had a debate in which we chose the ideas that inspired us the most. In this way, we created the framework to primarily express our ideas and then vote together on our ideas and build on each other's ideas as a team.

 At the same time, Marwa stepped in to share a glimpse of the way her team was organised, mentioning: I had not worked with any of them before, but the more they assigned us projects to do together, the better we worked as a team, and it was just the tip of the mountain to this experience.

Each step of this process had a different image for each of the teams, in terms of methodology and way of working. While Iustin pointed out that they created a virtual space where the new joiner can learn about the Mazars team members and learn in an interactive way, with who he/she is compatible with when it comes to hobbies, interests and so on, Raluca went more in-depth, breaking down each one of the stages: We chose a newcomer profile – Persona (reference model representative whose problem do we want to solve) - based on which we built our project. We created a Virtual Room that contains a special place named “Who is Who Library” where each new Mazarian can find the presentation of his team’s members. To help our Persona during the onboarding process we also created a Virtual Room containing a fun game “The Personality Quiz” where the colleagues can find out, by answering  a series of questions, with whom within Mazars they are mostly compatible, based on their common interests and hobbies.

For the team that Marwa was a part of, the workload was split into four stages: empathizing stage, gathering our common onboarding process gaps, the defining stage, we classified these problems, noted them on our board, specified our personas, and addressed the right questions to utilize active listening for our first assignment - which was to interview newcomers and examine whether our experiences/gaps were also validated. Then came the ideating & prototyping stage, during which Marwa emphasized the importance of the support received from the organisers, mentors, and guides, whom did an impressive job by ensuring we maintained focus on each stage, each topic, and each theme. The last of the stages was the testing one, during which we put our topics down onto the VR space in various formats and assessed it, Marwa recalls.

Our lovely colleagues came back from Vienna not only with memories in their minds that they will not forget soon, but also with key lessons and takeaways. When asked to conclude their respective experiences from the CEE Design Sprint, they thoughtfully pointed out that it was a major success, and although a lot of work was put into making all of it possible, the result is simply spectacular, our colleague Iustin mentioned. Marwa did not shy away from praising the event, saying that the CEE Design Sprint was the living proof that allowed me to meet like-minded people with the same ambition which elevated the overall experience seamlessly and truly felt like a sprint from identifying to acting. Last but certainly not least, Raluca focused on the elements of novelty learned in the process, mentioning that: apart from the Design Thinking Methodology that we learned, we were introduced to the world of Virtual Reality. We learned new techniques in terms of innovation within a company by using Oculus glasses.

Summarising perfectly what the Design Sprint experience meant, Raluca pointed out that we are living in a fast-changing world with a deep focus on digital transformation but besides that, the human-centered approach is about cultivating deep Empathy with the people you are designing with, generating ideas, building prototypes, sharing what you have made together; but most important, putting the innovative solution out in the world.

And with that, we ended our virtual journey throughout this special event taking place each year in our company, and we could have never been able to do so without our amazing colleagues, Marwa, Raluca and Iustin, who generously donated their time and effort and were willing to share with us their memories, feelings and wisdom taken from this year’s edition of CEE Design Sprint.