Case Study

WIP

Demand Management

MANAGING CHANGE 🐛

Insurance

Change Management

Technical & Operational Portal

Employee Experience

Systems & Processes

Intranet

Research

Design

Ideation

Prototype

Many clients engage us to devise a strategy to achieve operational efficiency. It’s an inevitable truth that organisations need to adapt their processes to accommodate employee workplace needs. Just as caterpillars go through metamorphosis, we need to provide the right environment for the butterfly to do what it does…

Employees need to be able to execute their tasks with utmost efficiency as part of highly functional and high-performing teams.

System automation is leveraged to provide a consistent method to activate workflow and tasks. These platforms ensure requests are registered, categorised by type, sized, sorted and sent to relevant resource and enablement teams to respond to promptly.

However, due to the scale of dynamic enterprise organisations along with the complexity of ecosystems and requests, naturally, functionality may not meet expectations. The impact is that people resort to taking matters into their own hands, reaching out to colleagues for answers, trying to find loopholes within the system sliding in through the side door or doing whatever it takes to achieve a successful outcome. Incidents and requests go missing, there’s no visibility of the resolution progress, execution times increase, inaccurate reporting happens and everyone is left frustrated with the process. Over time, people lack confidence and trust in the technology in place. Workplace culture suffers.

In all instances, we performed elements of:

• Necessary employee and user research,

• Architected information to support comprehension of where the organisations were at and where they needed to be

• Devised a strategic roadmap and implemented tactical solutions to bridge the experiential divide and reduce technical debt

Deep dive into instances and what I’ve observed across governance and the entire process from discovery to delivery across various industries.

Situation

As employees in the workforce, we deal with quite possibly the worst enabling platforms in our internal ecosystems to address our daily work. We’re driven by making life a little easier for other people online, but who has our back?

The need for the submission and visibility of requests follows the increasing demand for projects. In all cases there was no comprehensive intuitive platform/system to host all things change across all these organisations we helped out.

We hypothesised that it can be challenging to understand; what constitutes the size of complexity change, when escalation is needed, and the visibility of all requests in various stages of the pipeline.

Understanding the challenges of the existing internal ecosystem and leveraging insights helped us design the best one-stop-shop solution for all inbound projects and requests for support. Our goal was to ensure that we provided the best possible experience regarding internal service requests.

THE CHALLENGE

Eliminate blockages, moments of frustration, human intervention support and bottle-necking of incidents, requests for service and change to attain operational efficiency.

How might we:
Embed consistency and visibility throughout?
Increase control over service requests and incidents?
Improve clarity around roadmaps, governance and ownership?
Reduce workflow complexity for response and enablement teams?
Improve transparency across project initiation and business cases?
Improve collaboration with demand drivers across the project lifecycle?

By investing in platforms that help us achieve our key tasks, underpinned by an understanding of people, we help provide the best possible solution leading to operational efficiency.

Solution

Assess and refine the product roadmap into sprints, identify milestones, perform a Gap Analysis and get started on quick wins.

A majority of clients used the popular Cynefin Model Framework to cluster and triage service requests.
https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making

THE IDEA

Compare current state analysis with the optimal experience and bridge the gap with research, information architecture, ideation and delivery and testing processes in agile sprints.

THE PROCESS

Current State UX Review

All projects included an audit of the existing treatment of service requests and what it looked like in the tangible sense (digital product) beyond the service design and across all touchpoints. We dived into the data and identified key metrics and success factors. Data also provided details of volume so we could understand the magnitude of blockages and success in workflows. Interviews could validate the reason why these issues were happening around data-derived hypotheses.

User Interviews

Form Design

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Personas

For all of the related support channel systems, we had to encapsulate the mindsets and behaviours of each user archetype. Personas brought alignment in who we were accommodating with our designs and captured the common themes that emerged from qualitative research. Time invested in thoughtfully articulating this helps the businesses impacted by these challenges understand what the core problems we need to focus our attention on. With each of the projects, it was interesting to see we clustered collective mindset based on the employees of each business unit and work function. These generally emerged as including a demand team, response team and resolve team. In all organisations, we found an alarmingly large amount of detractors from using the systems created because they just didn’t have confidence in the current processes established.

Ideation

Usability Testing & Analysis

“There's no feedback for where things are at! Tell me where I'm at and manage me.”

PARTICIPANT

"We don't know what we don't know, so how can we find the right category?"

PARTICIPANT

"Sometimes I feel like I'm not being heard."

PARTICIPANT

"Regarding governance process] there's no warning of you need this, this and this' - no warning of what the process looks like."

PARTICIPANT

"Enhancements seem to occur in the background and get rolled out for unknown benefits."

PARTICIPANT

"We don't know how to extract value out of our systems."

PARTICIPANT

“How do we know what we want is a project? You dont always know if it needs to be a project for IT to get things initiated.”

PARTICIPANT

"Either be the squeaky wheel or know who to talk to, where even this isn't enough sometimes."

PARTICIPANT

"The experience you have is very dependent on which project manager you get.”

PARTICIPANT

What participants said and did…

“Ahhh, that helps though… I might try my email address and then I’d click on forgotten username.”

PARTICIPANT 1

“I’d just click on forgotten username and password.”

PARTICIPANT 2

“And it’s got little help things too. Pretty simple, good.”

PARTICIPANT 1

“I always ignore them unless I get really stuck. Cause at first, no I didn’t (notice the tooltip)”

PARTICIPANT 3

“The less copy the better, simple and clean. You don’t need all that copy unless you’ve got a problem.”

PARTICIPANT 2

“I guess if you put in the wrong email address, thinking that its the right one, it does show you the other options available.”

PARTICIPANT 2

“I like this one (Variation B) more cause its got more detail… It’s a little easier on the eyes. Everything is there infront of you”

PARTICIPANT 1

“A lot of people don’t know about the question mark, to hover over it. I guess less tech savvy older people. So that’s quite straight forward.”

PARTICIPANT 3

“I prefer this because it give a little prompt of what the email address is or which phone number… This is my preference.”

PARTICIPANT 4

“I like how it’s explained. Yeah, I think that’s everything you need to know.”

PARTICIPANT 1

“Useful? Could be. Yeah, because obviously when you need it you know how important that page is.”

PARTICIPANT 3

“Absolutely, because there has been cases where I’ve had like maybe and old, two addresses and a home address or like a PO box… So yeah, definitely beneficial”

PARTICIPANT 4

“I want an SMS. Yeah, so I like SMS things because its easier than having to enter your email and then get all of the details and then going to your email.”

PARTICIPANT 4