The Importance of the Discovery Sprint: How ETS Optimized Business Processes

The Discovery Sprint is a crucial phase in innovation and digital transformation projects, yet many potential clients underestimate its importance. It’s an intensive and targeted process aimed at identifying the main challenges, opportunities, and requirements of a project, thereby providing clear direction for the following stages.

In this article, we will discuss how the Discovery Sprint played a fundamental role in the project with our client ETS, outlining the approach taken and the results achieved.

What is the Discovery Sprint?

The Discovery Sprint is a key initial phase in any digital transformation project, product design process, or business process improvement initiative. This intensive process, lasting several weeks, focuses on a thorough exploration of the challenges and opportunities within an organization.

Through activities like stakeholder interviews, business context analysis, and targeted workshops, the Discovery Sprint aims to gather critical information and map out strategic objectives. The goal is to clearly identify key issues, the needs of various teams, and areas with the greatest potential for improvement, thereby enabling the development of a well-defined action plan.

This approach reduces uncertainty, prevents wasted time and resources, and ensures that the subsequent design and development phases are based on concrete data and measurable objectives. For companies like ETS, the Discovery Sprint has been an essential step in aligning optimization initiatives with real needs and strategic priorities.

The project with ETS: a case in point

In the case of ETS, the Discovery Sprint included an exploratory phase based on 16 interviews with staff, during which five main themes were identified and prioritized according to perceived criticality:

1. Organizational Structure
2. Work Management
3. Communication
4. Software and Tools
5. Process

From here, we developed the initial Goal Tree, a map that guided the entire discovery process and will continue to guide the subsequent experimentation phase, ensuring that interventions remain aligned with ETS’s business objectives.

Tenders and workflow optimization

During the discovery phase, it became evident that there was room for optimization in the workflows for tenders and project management. In particular, the need for a preliminary analysis of risks and opportunities emerged as crucial, followed by shared and accurate management of documentation related to tenders and projects. This approach highlighted significant potential benefits for the entire process.

To address these issues, we developed a tender evaluation matrix, which provides operational guidance on prioritization and management methods. This matrix was created by analyzing past tenders to identify relevant classification criteria, such as profitability and risk level. In parallel, the project aimed to optimize the project workflow, with the goal of improving operational alignment and reducing uncertainties throughout the entire project lifecycle, ensuring more effective management of resources and responsibilities within the team.

Proposed solutions and roadmap of interventions

At the conclusion of the Discovery phase, several solutions were proposed to address the identified issues.

These include the creation of a central hub for information access for the various business stakeholders, based on the MIRETS methodology, which enables structured risk analysis of infrastructure assets and extends the approach to a single management system that can provide a complete and integrated view of tendering, contract risk and invoicing from a single platform.

The roadmap for the subsequent activities was divided into three phases: design, validation, and scalability. The goal is to test solutions iteratively, measuring results at each phase and adapting the approach based on the feedback gathered.

The importance of clarity and method

One of the key outcomes of the Discovery Sprint with ETS was the recognition of the importance of clarity and methodology in the workflow.

Accurately documenting objectives and actions was essential to building consensus among stakeholders, ensuring that all team members worked toward shared, comprehensible goals. This transparency facilitated communication and reduced the risk of misunderstandings, providing each team member with a clear view of their responsibilities and expected outcomes.

Moreover, a specific focus on risk management helped structure priorities and intervention methods. Identifying and analyzing potential risks early enabled the team to anticipate issues and adopt preventive measures, thus improving decision-making effectiveness and responsiveness to uncertainties.

This approach has led ETS itself to prioritize its internal risk management. In the coming weeks, with an additional Discovery phase, we are beginning development of an innovative new risk-tracking platform tailored to ETS’s needs and updated processes.

Conclusions

The case of ETS demonstrates how the Discovery Sprint can provide added value even in complex contexts, helping companies identify critical areas to act on and outline concrete solutions.

The Discovery phase is not just a preliminary activity, but a critical step in ensuring that digital transformation initiatives are effective and sustainable. Well-launched projects with clear direction are on the right path to successful outcomes.

If you're wondering if the Discovery Sprint is right for your company, consider the benefits you could gain: clear mapping of goals, the list of activities to achieve them, better resource management, and reduced uncertainty. Being prepared from the start makes the difference between a project that solves problems and one that creates new ones.