Visualization

1. Challenge

I am responsible for IT Service Delivery function for entire Asia region which covers 18 business units,  spread across 16 countries and more than 5,000 employees. Around 60% of the workforce operates  from 160+ offices across the region and rest 40% of the workforce are always mobile – most of the  time they operate from home or customer site. While my company spends a reasonable size of the  budget in IT services and significant efforts put by the entire IT team,  year by year the services were  found to be degraded. In last 3 years, employees satisfaction score has reduced from 80% to 62%.   This low and degraded employee satisfaction is a roadblock to company ambitious digital  transformation journey.

2. Selection

Employee satisfaction is the key ingredient of any organization growth. Most of the time, people will  not be open to share what is not working for them, however it reflects in their performance and  collaboration.  And hence it is necessary to address the current IT Service dissatisfaction challenge  and enable the employees to be more productive (in their way) and agile working from anywhere.   Without much delayed after attending this Design Thinking course, we selected “IT User satisfaction”  process to explore and come up with appropriate solution.

3. Application

We began the exploration of this problem by following design thinking structured principles. We  looked at all existing data such as employee satisfaction survey questions, population, results,  demographic information. We also looked at the IT services catalogue which explain the list of IT  services being rendered to all employees, collected the user incident logs and user requests for the  last 12 months. We looked at the physical space where IT Helpdesk team operates. Collected the  information about the IT support staffs and their interaction with the users in a day-to-day basis..

4. Insight

While all these data found to be perfect in silos, we tried to observe in a connected manner. We spoke  to around 40 employees from multiple departments, different job role, onsite vs mobile worker and  tried to understand what good IT service is mean to them. Surprisingly found, huge disconnected what  IT teams thinks & acts vs the employees need. One example – the service catalogue is more internal  to IT with technical terms which most of the users unable to understand, IT has one size fits all  approach for all the devices provided to all users while each person has a different job nature, while  about 40% of the employees are mobile, there was no IT support beyond 9x5. While users are using  multiple local languages, IT support is limited to English. Almost 50% of the users have reported  inadequate training and communication related to modern technologies. IT follows classic change  cycle for technology refresh, while users are not training/communicated appropriately.

5. Approach

Visualization is very important for the process design as it allows unlocking our brain, it allows to think  in non-verbal way, it allows to access part of our brain, part of our creativity that we may not be using  as part of our regular conversation. To solve this above problem, we leveraged visualization tool to  think and design most effective solutions which is very close to employees need. We identified the  unique job role exist in the company and collected all relevant touch points for them with IT.  Developed a day-in-life scenario considering purely what employee need. After performing this  exercise, documented the actionable outcomes. Got validated these visual steps and needs with  around 10 employees and got a strong positive confirmation to go ahead. We co-developed the WoW  Experience scenarios and conducted pilot in one small country with around 100 employees. With  strong governance, experienced very good result in 3 months. 87% of the employees have confirmed  the new IT service model is what they were looking for and most relevant for them. More than 90%  of the employees shared that, they are now able to collaborate well with their peer and access  business information in much faster way than before. They are quite happy with the empathetic  service rendered by new IT staffs.   The new IT tools provide them, proactive information of their  need.

