Overview- the problem

The creation of a new organization can be one of the biggest challenges for employees and a business itself, knowing how the team works, how will the delivery be measured, when do decisions get made and when can they be changed can cause ultimate chaos if the process is not orchestrated for adaptability.

Goals

• Build a blueprint of the organization and how it is currently working while preparing how it should work.
• Discover gaps in the teams process to increase efficiency and transparency to leadership.
• Ensure this Single Point of Truth is adaptable for new organization changes to reduce time with documentation and focus on delivery to have higher business yields.

Constraints

• There is currently no understanding of how each team hands off deliverables
• Subject matter Experts(SE) for each team in the organization have to be located
• A new type of business process must be created for adaptability handling all the different touch points

Solving the Problem - The Process

1. Interviewing each team in the organization to find the SE’s
2. Ensure each team is in alignment with the process/review and change as needed
3. Finalize with leadership and present findings to the organization

Interviewing each team in the organization to find the SE’s

There were a total of 7 teams inside the organization, starting with the leaders of each time, I spoke with each one to gain and understanding of generally what each teams objective is and who they believed was the most knowledgable on the team.

This was perhaps the easiest of all the steps, as the leaders were eager to gain an understanding of the other teams in the organization and gain clarity and speed of product delivery within the organization.

Some leaders have their teams already working on process flows or just recording steps as they were familiar with the starting of a new organization, however, every single team that had started recording were using different formats and terminology which would be solved during the business alignment step of the process.

Begin mapping the information/steps known-review and change as needed

needed This step became the question of a larger question, what tool and format would be the most appropriate to share across teams that each would understand and easy to adapt to later.

Some of the key points of information needed to be included in this mapping were:

• Job Role
• Deliverable
• Format of Deliverable
• Deliverable Handoff
• Go/No Go Decision Points
• Team alignment across the business process of the organization

I researched what tools were available in the company and what type of mapping format to use and many solutions included different flow charts to accomplish this goal. However, in large organizations this can create more confusion managing multiple documents to see how activities happen within an org.

This led to the focus of creating a new type of business flow that included it as a all in one. I held a vote with the leaders after providing a tool analysis and we chose to stick with Lucid Charts as the tool to hold all the information as primarily it was easily shared format via web URL that anyone could access within our org that matched our directory constraints.

This involved created embedded pages/flows, and creating a Job Role card to keep the deliverable name, format, how it was delivered(email, verbal, file type) and any important links relevant. I created the base of the visual using Adobe illustrator and then left the text to be manipulated inside Lucid Charts, which allowed for anyone to create their own card when something changed or needed to be added.

This became the working document as I went to each team and collected and discussed the business process.

Ensure each team is in alignment with the process/review and change as needed

Managers were mostly using Microsoft products such as Excel and PowerPoint to build their reports, however, each manager organized their report in different styles and access had to be granted every time a new report was made for executives to have access.

This was what I would say is the hot zone of delivering this type of solution is getting every leaders agreement on terminology and how we all worked together. Some teams were using terms such as Financial Assessment and others were using Business Analysis for the same deliverable. Each one having it’s own argument for why and it ultimately led to two different situations: Discovering there was a whole new step in the process yet disclosed or a conversation had to commence to finalize the terminology.

The number of cycles this took to finalize were not counted, but there were many.

Finalize with leadership and present findings to the organization

By this point, I have spoken individually to every leader including mine about the findings and got my sign off for delivery. I held two different sessions, one to go over the Business Flow and another to go over how to manage and update it.

The Take Away

That while UX has been around long before a website was ever even thought off, for example the Door, adding hinges happened over a hundred years ago which made life so much easier than picking up a door to shut and open it.

There was a realization that handling business alignment has opportunities to create a cleaner experience that will encourage a community like thinking and trust between teams of an organization to manage expectations, have common lingo and improve with the common knowledge.

I am used to impacting thousands of users, internal or external users, and this one seemed to have a smaller user list (about 60), but created an impact to the work environment to employees in a way I had never thought of. I always thought, how can I create an app, to solve their problems, automate their processes, make information cleaner and easier to access etc. This was breathe taking, users don’t have to be using a website or app for me to impact them.