DESIGNING Processes
Challenge: Decrease employee workload by optimizing current processes on a new service platform.
My Role: As a Business Designer I critically audited the current services to find opportunities for optimization and alignment. I worked with stakeholders to determine the necessary steps and key actors. I assessed and prioritized opportunities for Salesforce implementation based on impact, level of effort, and risk to deliver a cohesive implementation strategy.
Team Structure: Service Design Lead, Business Designer (me), Business Designer, Interaction Designer, Visual Designer, Project Manager
Summary: A data regulatory federal agency came to Fjord DC initially asking us to “improve the work/life balance for their employees”. Through a series of co-creation workshops aimed to serve as both user interviews and prototype testing, we discovered that the main drivers for this imbalance were general employee workload and inefficient processes. Within 3 months, we aligned and optimized each of our client’s processes and identified opportunities to implement Salesforce to further increase tracking, knowledge transfer, transparency and efficiency.
Our process
We began this project with two asks: help make employees’ work/life balance better and implement Salesforce into the solution. As the business designer, I began by breaking down the employees’ work/life balance into an issue tree to better understand both what the drivers for this were and what potential levers we could pull to improve the situation. It was clear we could look at this from one of two ways: improving the culture or improving the process. We held a series of workshops to investigate where the key pain points were and validate our assumptions for improvements.
Within the first workshop we discovered it was not a standard system but rather every employee performed their role based on their experience (what had worked for them and what hadn’t). Each employee had a limited view of the process and could only speak to the steps before and after their own step. Culturally, this meant they didn’t understand the value of their contribution which affected their individual pride and annual performance reviews. Systematically, this meant they couldn’t see what was coming down the pipeline to prepare for an influx in workload or address any bottlenecks. We also realized that the employees were performing two separate but simultaneous processes that at a high level were similar but ran on different time lines. The two processes affected each other and when an issue arose in one it created a bottleneck in the other. However, there was no system that highlighted or communicated this to those working on the other process.
We took a critical look at both processes to simplify and align them. We then addressed each step to make sure we knew each necessary actor and the tools needed for the process to move forward. Once the process was simplified, we looked at how we might optimize it with Salesforce. We prioritized opportunities and assessed risk, impact, and level of effort to identify feasibility and an implementation strategy. We then worked with the client to identify metrics we could build into the system to make sure we could accurately determine success at any moment of the process and use these metrics to continue to improve the system.
Future State Service Design Map with Salesforce Implementation Strategy - Click to zoom