ImprovingRIT Paris teamwork process
Rakuten Institute of Technology is the global R&D team of Rakuten. We conducted a study on how to improve RIT relationships with its business partners. More than 50 persons participated, and we obtained 6 concrete solutions immediately implemented.
Company
Rakuten Institute of Technology
Year
2018
Time
3 months
Role
Team of One
Context
Rakuten Institute of Technology’s (RIT) mission is to improve Rakuten products and services using cutting-edge technologies. RIT doesn’t collaborate with clients, but with internal partners from the same company. As a consequence, the success of RIT rests on the level of trust and common understanding of its partners. RIT Paris team had the intuition that using a more user-centric approach than its traditional tech-centric approach could benefit to its operations.
Challenge
Our focus during this study is the RIT Paris team, the French division of RIT. Created in 2014, this R&D team works with the French marketplace of Rakuten, and with European and Japanese Rakuten businesses. In the past four years, the team almost doubled its size (from 6 to 11), but kept the same way of working. We defined together our challenge :
How might we gather and understand RIT partner’s needs and data systematically, so that RIT and its partners propose together solutions adding value to the business ?
Approach
The preparation took 2 weeks, the process 8 weeks, and the conclusion and transfert 3 weeks.
Our initial user research step led us to identify four angles of approach when dealing with this complex challenge.
"We decided to launch a study using Design Thinking methods, about how to improve the relationships between RIT and the teams we partner with. We wanted to involve RIT team members as well as our partners and it was not obvious how far we would be able to do that, but the degree of involvement, the interest of the participants and the outcome of the study were far beyond our expectations."
Laurent Ach, Head of RIT Paris
