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Ashar Kazi delivers an innovative approach to technology driven problem-solving while driving strong collaboration among multiple and diverse stakeholders. A Design Thinking Specialist from Canada, Ashar’s focus is project management and human-centered solutions across different industries. 

Recently Ashar led the mass-scale launch of Branchless Banking services at Pakistan’s largest bank, HBL. As Head of Customer Segments and App Development for Konnect (HBL’s mobile wallet for Pakistan), he spearheaded overall product management with emphasis on market strategy, partnerships and vendors, as well as hiring and training across departments. 

Living in Canada, Ashar served as IBM’s Lead Client Executive where he engaged clients to solve complex business challenges and build partnerships to push the frontiers of technology. At software giant SAP, Ashar served as team lead for their inbound marketing unit and subsequently transitioned into the inside sales organization at SAP. 

Ashar also served in various roles at Trader Corporation, Club Intrawest, Overwaitea Food Group, Phoenix Media, Petro-Canada and the University of British Columbia. With over a decade of working and learning across North America, Europe and South Asia, Ashar delivers an innovative approach to technology driven problem solving.

Ashar is certified in Design Thinking from IBM Canada and Project Management (PMP) from PMI.

“Design is the process by which we devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones through the creation of artifacts – objects created by humans through creative reasoning.” – Herbert Simon

What exactly is DesignThinkingPMP?

Both Design Thinking and Project Management are integrative approaches to problem-solving that can enhance organizational outcomes.  Applied across an organization, Design Thinking can encourage teams to collaborate in remarkable ways to serve their end customers. Incorporating this approach into the fabric of Agile Project Management practices has resulted in groundbreaking innovations.

Design Thinking is essentially an approach to problem solving with an emphasis on human centered solutions. Design Thinking focuses on some key areas such as empathy with end-users, strong problem definition, diverse team collaboration, a tolerance for failure, prototyping and iterative testing.

PMP (Project Management Professional) is an internationally acclaimed certification for Project Managers issued by the Project Management Institute (PMI), the world’s largest non-profit association for project management professionals. When applied to Project Management, Design Thinking contributions can be instrumental in achieving successful outcomes.

The PMI Journal (Apr 2016) published an article that highlights three key areas where Design Thinking contributes to effective Project Management:

• Managing the exploration phase
• Management involvement of stakeholders
• Managing a project in relation to the strategy

Design Thinking improves design outcomes because its tools and attitudes address and mitigate the cognitive biases that strongly impact any creative process and flaws that can result in failures. More specifically, consider the following three categories:

1. Decision makers’ inability to see beyond themselves and escape their own past, their current state, their personal preferences, and their tendency to be unduly influenced by specific factors.
2. Inability of users to articulate their future needs and provide accurate feedback on new ideas, making it difficult to develop value-creating ideas for them. 
3. Flaws in decision makers’ ability to test the hypothesis they have developed. By working on multiple options and reflecting on the results of real experiments, Design Thinking can help mitigate such biases.

Applied across an organization, Design Thinking can encourage teams to collaborate in remarkable ways to serve their end customers. Incorporating this approach into the fabric of Agile Project Management practices has resulted in groundbreaking innovations.

Contact DesignThinkingPMP to learn more!