Insights
Establishing Human-Centred Design at Insights Learning & Development.
Background
Insights is a global market leader in workplace Learning & Development, providing courses in team effectiveness, employee engagement and leadership development through individual self-awareness. Over its 30 year history Insights has provided those courses through facillitated in-person workshops and events, delivered by a global network of accredited practitioners.
I came on board to advise on digital strategy and to help create a vision of a digital future for Insights, supporting a newly formed and rapidly growing department of developers and product owners.
Approach
A phased approach allowed us to grab quick wins that gave leadership confidence as we progressed and showed the strategic breadth Research and Design could offer.
Initial engagements were fundamental in building trust for Design and UX across Insights, resulting in a number of outputs and outcomes that helped prove the effectiveness of UX and Design methods and shift the perception of Design as a delivery function of Marketing and Comms.
Outputs
End to end service blueprints, customer and user journeys.
A digital vision for Insights’ core business
Wireframes and hi-fidelity UI designs
Working software
Outcomes
Increased understanding and awareness of Strategic Design through Service Design coaching of leaders and managers.
Accellerated decision making through passive facilitation.
By offering to be ‘the scribe’ or notetaker in early meetings I coached colleagues in using visual-thinking practices to help visualise and bring structure to complexity.
Positive impact on Product Development velocity.
Gradual reduction in BAU and progressive alignment of Designers with strategic programmes of work.
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Prove the need for Design at a strategic level through various interventions including:
Demonstrating how research and co-design can de-risk decision making.
Accelerating development by introducing rapid prototyping and evaluative research.
Visualising complex customer journeys and business processes for colleagues.
Develop centralised company-wide design systems incorporating brand assets, marketing collateral, document repositories, guidelines and documentation, as well as providing technical guidance for designers, developers and product managers.
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Formally establish Design as a strategic partner at a functional level:
Define org structure and hierarchy for design teams.
Formalise cross-functional partnerships.
Develop and define working models and processes.
Create role profiles and job descriptions.
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Build out Design capabilities to meet current and future business needs:
Measuring and communicating impact of early initiatives.
Hiring and training design leads and managers.
Supporting emerging initiatives and programmes of work.
Single line of design leadership reporting directly to exec’.
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Adapt and iterate as design evolves and matures as a strategic partner:
Empower ICs and managers to develop their own working practices.
Adapt / flatten structure as teams build new partnerships.
Cross-functional peers begin adopting working practices.
Aligning with Sales and Marketing
As a design function we established the classic ‘Triad’ as a working group for product development, but it quickly became apparent that this was inadequate within a traditional, sales-led company with low digital maturity.
The simple answer was to foster stronger working relationships with Sales, Marketing and Change functions, and make them additional partners in ongoing product development.
This built trust between departments that often fall into conflict, and allowed for greater transparency and understanding of the importance of each other’s functions.
This…
Became this…
Process improvements
A common point of tension and conflict in sales-led companies is between sales and ‘delivery’ teams like design and fulfilment. Working in partnership with our Sales colleagues we developed Operations functions in both Sales and Design, and reimagined the working process between the 3 key groups involved, including our fulfilment partners.
Re-laying the foundation
Innovation and service development (i.e. ‘change’) initiatives required real world processes and would not be well served by using generic, idealised frameworks out of the box.
Purely Agile or Lean approaches weren’t suited to all programmes of work or initiatives requiring high levels of governance. Our final development processes aligned more with contemporary SDLC methodologies.
Above: Insights’ previous ‘Idea approval’ process involved 10 stages of sign off and approval from 7 different teams before ideas could move into discovery or exploration. Average time to delivery on IT projects of any scale was 2.5 years, including purchasing software as a service.
Above top: Our final development process focussed on continuous learning.
Above bottom: Process diagram from John Cutler’s North Star Playbook
Scaling R&D
Teams went through a number of structural changes, taking different shapes until organisational needs were understood and working partnerships agreed and ratified.
The final org structure for R&D reflected the skillsets Insights required in its vision to be a modern, human-centred business.
Taking Insights online
The global Coronavirus pandemic forced our hand in terms of bring Insights’ traditional, in-person business online, and teams rapidly delivered V1 of the platform in order to bring online learning experiences to Insights’ partners and customers around the world.
Employing a ‘Just Enough’ philosophy allowed us to build out practical systems for design that enabled development squads to deliver and iterate quickly in response to emerging customer needs.
Learnings & Observations
Change is ~always~ about people, not technology
Improving processes and tools won’t make a difference if nobody uses them, so winning over hearts and minds is critical. Change agents cannot afford to burn social currency in pursuit of outcomes.
Design doesn’t have a monopoly on speaking for the customer
Design and Product Development teams ignore or exclude Sales and Customer Service teams at their peril. Sales teams at Insights had highly developed processes and methods for understanding customer feedback and interactions, and by developing working partnerships with those teams, they became a proxy into our Research teams, allowing us to consider a separate ResearchOps function.
Change is not for idealists
Change, and scaling change, has to be about mutually understanding, adapting and compromising.
Dogmatic voices that favoured their own discipline (e.g. ‘Design should always lead’ - ‘Research can only be done by researchers’ - ‘Engineers should be fully autonomous’) were ultimately met with opposition or indifference.
The ‘right’ thing + The wrong time = The wrong thing
By way of example, if you want to scale your product, you’ll need a reasonably comprehensive design system.
But in the first stages of developing a product, focussing on large sprawling design systems will quickly become a blocker and hinder progress.
Similarly research might need to be lean or even light touch in early stages in order to allow development teams to get moving with confidence.
It all depends on the available context.
We learned to assess where the need was and adapt to the circumstances, and over time we developed and expanded those practices until we were doing the ‘right’ thing at the right time, all the time.