Learning  Launch  -  An  example  from  an   IT  support  program

Challenge

I  manage  a  global  IT  support  program  for  a  large  financial  institution.  The  program

involves  support  of  over  100  software  tools  across  25  teams  (technology  tracks).  One  of

the  key  challenges  I  have  faced  is  with  respect  to  keeping  the  program  stakeholders

(Clients,  Application  Development  teams,  Other  support  teams)  on  the  latest  status  of

projects  (work  that  takes  multiple  weeks/  months  instead  of  hours/  days  that  a  typical

support  work  item  takes).  Being  a  support  project,  the  team  is  primarily  expected  to

monitor  the  work  through  the  ticketing  system,  where  tickets  are  generated  from

proactive  monitoring  of  systems,  user  queries  and  to  address  system  issues  that  impacts

business.  We  also  have  time  bound  Service  Level  Agreements  (with  a  financial  penalty  if

missed).  Our  program  is  a  little  unique  in  the  sense  that  the  same  support  team  is  also

expected  to  deliver  projects  (upgrades  of  the  tools  we  support,  pilot  new  software  tools/

platforms,  patch  vulnerabilities  across  the  entire  infrastructure  landscape  etc.)  which  is

categorized  as  “non-ticketed”.  It  is  this  responsibility  that  makes  it  hard  for  the  same

team  to  spend  effort  in  not  only  doing  the  project  work,  but  also  keep  the  stakeholders

informed.  I  hope  this  gives  a  good  idea  on  the “What  is” aspect  of  Design  Thinking

approach.

Selection

The  typical  solution  to  this  issue  in  many  such  programs  is  to  have  meetings,  send

emails  and  publish  reports.  The  challenge  with  this  approach  is  the  timeliness  of  the

update  and  the  frequency  of  update.  By  the  time  we  put  together  a  report  and  walk  the

relevant  stakeholders  (lack  of  participation  in  such  meetings  is  also  an  issue),  the  status

is  already  stale.  As  a  team,  we  had  to  find  a  solution  that  was  optimized  on  effort,

addresses  the  timeliness  issue  and  does  not  create  additional  burden  of  creating  &

publishing  reports.  The  team  brainstormed  collectively  to  identify  a  new  solution  that

could  help  in  making  the  entire  project  status  update  process  less  effort  consuming  and

more  transparent  for  all  users  -  the “What  if” .  Our  organization  has  multiple  tools  to

communicate  in  a  social  medium  across  the  org.  E.g.  A  tool  called  Collaborate,  Atlassian

vendor  tool  called  Confluence  and  Microsoft’s  SharePoint  platform.  After  reviewing  the

features  of  these  three  tools,  we  zeroed  in  on  Atlassian’s  Confluence  for  the  following

reasons:

● By  default,  every  member  of  the  organization  has  read  access  to  Confluence  site.

This  translated  into  zero  effort  for  the  team  to  “provide  access”  to  someone  who

needs   to   read   the   status   updates.

● Our  team  is  the  administrator  of  the  tool  and  hence  there  was  no  learning  curve

for  our  team  to  start  using  this  tool.  Also,  we  have  complete  control  over  the

admin   features   -   Creating   of   workspace,   creating   and   managing   access   groups   etc.

● The  UI  of  Confluence  is  quite  simple  and  provides  multiple  inbuilt  templates  for

various   kinds   of   updates

Application

We  wanted  to  perform  a  “Learning  launch”  of  Confluence  tool  in  one  of  our  tracks  (we

chose  our  Business  Intelligence  Reporting  tools  track)  to  quickly  put  all  our  track

updates   in   this   tool   and   test   its   effectiveness   in   meeting   our   stated   objectives.     We  first  put  together  a  framework  of  how  we  would  organize  the  work  space  (a  section

in  Confluence  that  is  like  the  root  directory)  and  created  a  page  for  each  of  the  projects

that  the  team  was  working  on.  In  each  of  the  project  pages,  we  put  a  clear  ownership

matrix  with  a  “Primary  owner”  and  a  “Secondary  owner”.  The  update  of  the  project  page

was  the  responsibility  of  these  two  owners  and  they  had  to  ensure  that  the  page  had  the

latest  information  from  all  the  other  team  mates.  In  discussion  with  our  client  manager,

we  fixed  the  frequency  of  update  to  each  of  these  project  pages,  and  set  internal

reminders   to   these   owners,   well   in   advance   to   be   able   to   provide   the   latest   status.     With  this  new  solution,  team  started  to  spend  relatively  less  effort  in  updating  the  page

and  the  owners  devised  some  of  the  sections  in  the  page  to  be  updated  by  other  team

members  directly.  As  Confluence  allows  parallel  updates,  there  was  no  “document

already  opened  by  another  user”  issue,  which  we  typically  faced  in  updating

presentation  across  the  globe.  Another  cool  feature  of  Confluence  is  the  ability  to  set  up

email  alerts  by  “Watching”  a  page,  which  enables  anyone  subscribed  to  the  page  to  get

an  email  alert  clearly  showing  what  was  the  update  made  to  the  page.  This  helped  us

reduce   email   volume   since   we   didn’t   have   to   “send”   any   report   to   a   set   of   users.     Within  two  weeks  of  usage,  we  received  positive  feedback  from  the  stakeholders  and

they  were  expressing  happiness  about  knowing  the  status  of  the  project  milestones  in

real  time.  This  is  a  good  example  of “What  wows” and  a  leading  indicator  that  it  would

turn   out   to   be    “What   works” .   We   plan   to   expand   this   roll   out   to   all   other   tracks.      As  part  of  our  second  “Learning  launch”,  we  have  decided  to  start  using  Confluence  even

to   publish   our   weekly   “ticket   SLA   metrics”.

Insight

The  biggest  insight  that  I  gained  from  this  new  approach  was  to  look  at  a  process  that

was  not  yielding  desired  outcome  from  my  client’s  perspective,  and  not  jump  into

“correcting  a  few  team  members”  to  fix  them.  We  normally  have  this  habit  of  trying  to

“improve  the  team  member”  instead  of  redesigning  the  process  that  focuses  the  solution

away  from  the  individual.  By  engaging  the  team  in  the  brainstorming  sessions,  I  was

able  to  get  my  team  to  come  up  with  multiple  suggestions  on  what  could  help  to  address

the  challenge  we  selected  to  address.  As  Ed  Hess  pointed  out  in  the  video,  we  were

focused  on  our  identifying  both  “Confirming”  and  “Disconfirming”  facts.  It  was  only

after   we   went   through   these,   we   decided   to   adopt   Confluence   tool   as   our   solution.     I  was  also  able  to  sell  the  concept  of  “Learning  launch”  to  my  clients  without  too  much

effort,  by  walking  them  through  some  of  the  key  concepts  of  it.  This  new  learning  also

made  our  client  manager  agree  to  try  something  new  for  a  short  period,  instead  of  the

prior   approach,   without   any   resistance.

Approach

In  addition  to  Confluence,  we  evaluated  and  did  not  pursue  these  two  other  tools  for  the

following   reasons:

● We  discarded  SharePoint  as  a  solution  since  it  involves  access  management  for

every  individual  who  needs  to  access  our  site  and  also  it  is  more  conducive  for

items   with   lists/   tables   and   not   for   free   text.

● We  could  have  used  “Collaborate”  for  its  features,  but  in  our  organization  it  is

essentially  a  knowledge  sharing  repository  and  is  not  meant  to  be  used  by  a

program   as   a   project   status   tracking   tool.

With  the  quick  success  we  got  by  rolling  out  Confluence  for  project  status  updates,  we

are  now  evaluating  how  we  can  use  this  tool  to  keep  track  of  and  communicate  with  a

larger  audience  on  the  “Critical  issues”  that  have  a  big  impact  on  some  of  our  key

financially   critical   applications.

