Organizational Design Archives - Natalie Kuhn https://www.nataliekuhn.com/portfolio_categories/organizational-design/ Service Designer | Human centered design founded on research. Thu, 08 Feb 2024 17:55:03 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 Associate Empowerment Plan https://www.nataliekuhn.com/portfolio/associate-empowerment-plan/ Sun, 12 Sep 2021 00:00:03 +0000 http://www.nataliekuhn.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=6209 The post Associate Empowerment Plan appeared first on Natalie Kuhn.

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How Might We

Help our leadership team positively impact associate morale, through what they work on and how they work, so that associates are happier, more effective and highly successful

How Might We

Help our leadership team positively impact associate morale, through what they work on and how they work, so that associates are happier, more effective and highly successful

ASSOCIATE EMPOWERMENT PLAN
 
CATEGORY

Organizational Design

CLIENT

Capital One Commercial Bank

MY ROLE & SCOPE
Design & Research Leader
Oversaw design team
Impact across line of business
Never been done before

ACTIVITY OVERVIEW
– Primary Research
– Empathy Interviews
– Themes & Insights
– Leadership Work Sessions
– Design Strategy
– Opportunity Prioritization
– Change Implementation
– Testing & Learning

OPPORTUNITY

Capital One regularly receives accolades for being a great place to work. They are constantly one-upping themselves in regard to creating a safe and nurturing workplace–so how do they do it? They never allow stagnation to take hold of their approach. They try new things like leveraging research and service design within HR. 

APPROACH

Leverage Service Design within their effrts toward continued cultural evolution. Bring Human Resources and Service Design together in close partnership to dive even deeper into what makes associates successful. The team utilized interviews, co-creation, and prioritization in order to pivot their approach to associate empowerment. 

OUTCOME

Six research themes that guided the definition of a series of incredibly intentional initiatives as well as a toolkit to teach other teams how to use this approach. Initiatives touched processes, organizational structure, communication patterns, and training programs. Work continues today in applying this approach and learnings.

Scroll down for a detailed look at the process and assets created throughout the project including :

RESEARCH
THEMES & INSIGHTS
OPPORTUNITY PRIORITIZATION
CHANGE IMPLEMENTATION
TESTING & LEARNING
RESEARCH

I drove the effort to conduct associate research with the goal of understanding the nuance in response metrics collected from a quarterly associate survey: interpretation of questions, contributors to positive vs. negative sentiment, pain points, and specific barriers. 

I sold the value of empathy interviews, created a research guide, interview tracker, and worked with leadership to schedule 41 empathy interviews within 11 teams.

Associate disciplines included: Product, Tech, Design, Commercial Real Estate (CRE) Sales, US Corp Sales, Middle Market Sales, Sales Specialty, Go to Market (GTM), Platform (TM Core), and Government Banking.

Interviews were conducted over the period of 4 weeks with debriefing and synthesis throughout – with one lengthier synthesis session at the end. 

Interview Guide, Survey Prompts

Processing Interview Notes (Keeping Confidential)

Affinity Mapping

THEMES & INSIGHTS

We took great care in reviewing our notes from each associate. We went through everything we heard with a fine tooth comb so that we really got to the root of struggles associates were facing and better understood where our biggest opportunities were.

We identified overarching themes across the line of business as well as insight statements per group. We shared our findings with our HR project management teammates along the way and then finally with our Leadership Team to determine actions to take. 

Synthesis Process

  • Debriefing: reflection together after each session and / or filled out a debrief sheet
  • Anonymizing Participants: to help us remove our own biases, see face value
  • Affinity Map of Notes: transcription of key context, quotes to post-its to observe patterns across teams, across TM as a whole
  • Face Value First, Insights Second: phased approach of focusing on what we heard first to see real patterns (multiple people noted something) THEN what we thought it meant

Identifying Themes and Insights

Bringing Key Stakeholders Into the Synthesis Process

Creating Insight Statements

An insight statement is a meaningful observation about a situation, it goes deeper than the initial topics and themes we uncovered. 

Themes & Insights Shared with Leadership

OPPORTUNITY PRIORITIZATION

I planned activities for, and facilitated, a working session for our leadership team to begin to address the opportunities identified through research. We spent time continuing to process what we heard, identifying areas we could approach from a more tactical perspective, identifying key tasks to start with along with owners of driving those tasks forward.

The session was meant to be 4 hours, but due to how productive the conversation was the leadership team canceled some afternoon meetings. We ended up working together for 6 hours.

Outcomes

– Alignment on biggest opportunities
– Identification of tactical next steps
– Owners of next steps activities
– Time slated for further discussion

CHANGE IMPLEMENTATION

To help us see the connection to the research and the activities we were doing to take the work forward we mapped tasks we were doing back to insight statements and opportunities.

Mapping Tactical Work to Insights & Opportunities

TESTING & LEARNING

As a team we identified key levers to positively impact associate experience. One of them included implementing a new communications strategy based around “moments” – based on the scenario this is how we communicate.

I owned the scorecard and feedback loop element. I designed a way that we could consistently check in to see how our new approach was succeeding or failing.

EXPANDING OUTWARD

In 2020 we found ourselves, once again, in need of more deeply understanding our associates and their needs. I worked with a small team to make sense of how the pandemic had exacerbated existing issues. 

Separately I was also involved in a research project dedicated to understanding associate perspective around talent management for end of year calibrations. 

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]]> Operations Design Practice https://www.nataliekuhn.com/portfolio/operations-design-practice/ Fri, 10 Sep 2021 00:00:24 +0000 http://www.nataliekuhn.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=7041 The post Operations Design Practice appeared first on Natalie Kuhn.

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How Might We

Develop a design practice from scratch to support our operations group, with their many processes and systems, so that we enable better associate and customer experiences

How Might We

Allow accounts recievable and payable associates more easily and efficiently manage their transactions so that they can focus on more strategic activities that impact the business

DESIGN OPERATIONS PRACTICE
CATEGORY

Organizational Design

CLIENT

Capital One Commercial Bank

MY ROLE & SCOPE
Design Leader
Oversaw design team
Impact across entire line of business
No prior or existing design team

ACTIVITY SNAPSHOT
– Observational Research
– Service Blueprint
– Co-Creation
– Refinement of POV
– Forming a Team
– Socialization
– Continued Testing

OPPORTUNITY

Design and research as disciplines were new to the Commercial Bank overall and added immediate value wherever they were placed. During my work on special projects work for Commercial I had seen potential in dedicating designers to partnership within our operations teams. So much of customer experience is driven by or closely tied to associate facing products and services. It seemed obvious to me to place a team, but I needed to build a case for leadership across Commercial Bank. 

APPROACH

I gathered mappings (customer journey, associate journey, blueprints etc.) from across our design teams within Commercial in order to provide deeper evidence in the need for designers within operations. The mappings were based on research conducted for various services and products. I then drove efforts to put this evidence into an official proposal and presented it to various accountable executives and leaders to buy in and ultimately sign off on resource reallocation and further hiring. 

OUTCOME

The Commercial Bank now maintains a six person Operations Design Practice–the team has since grown from the diagram above since I left. There are even additional worstreams dedicated to associate experience products and services which was something I was pushing for prior to my move. I had deemed associate experience critical to the success of anything we wanted to shift from a customer experience perspective. I feel both validated and thrilled for continued efforts here.

Scroll down for a detailed look at the process and assets created throughout the project including :

RESEARCH
SERVICE BLUEPRINT
CO-CREATION
IMPLEMENTATION
TESTING & LEARNING
RESEARCH

From leading a Commercial Bank Onboarding Agile Train, founding the OneExperience Enablement Team, leading an associate experience group, and constantly advocating for change from an associate perspective. I pooled all that knowledge as well as surveyed teammates for all their maps for further context and data in relation to the space.

VARIOUS MAPPINGS,
INCLUDING SERVICE BLUEPRINTS

Over the years I have created many maps that depicted the importance of our associates, particularly our Operations Team. Most recently I had worked with our research team to refine the opportunity we had from a recent reorganization toward merging two lines of business.

Once again, it was clear that our Operations team would be fundamental in deep, foundational impact across our products and ultimately the customer experience.

Initial Working Session Looking for Product, Service Overlap

More Refined Map Used to Co-Create with Key Subject Matter Experts

CO-CREATION

Myself and a design teammate worked closely together, pulling in our respective experiences, research, and data within the associate experience space. We identified two operations lead areas in which we believed that our efforts and resources should be prioritized.

We looked at business value, levers to impact change, priorities across the space, our own design resourcing – levels and talent, and how to consolidate all this into crisp talking points with not only our leadership but our product and tech partners.

REFINED POINT OF VIEW

Coming out of our collaborations and sharing with our design leadership, myself and design colleague came up with a single paragraph (left) that outlined all our work – depicting the value in an associate experience team and how to make it possible.

We further outlined how we would organize a design team to support this model. We looked at organizing around products versus experiences. 

Business Case Development

Engagement Model Brainstorm

LAUNCHING THE PRACTICE

Associates, particularly within the Operations Team, are the backbone of customer experience and I was thrilled to be able to pull together work I had done over the years alongside my design colleague and manager to make the case for an Operations Design Practice made up of three designers to start–the team has since grown.

INFLUENCING LARGER STRATEGY

I worked closely with the head of operations to refine vision, strategic priorities, principles, and foundational elements from input gathering across her leadership team. This lead us to a conversation about implementation and progress toward these goals–we had to reassess how we were currently working and change our engagement models to be successful. 

REDEFINING ROUTINES

I also worked closely with the head of operations to evolve each operation leader’s team ceremonies and routines in order to effectively reach their goals. In parallel I worked with the individual workstream leaders to understand what they needed given their unique team work and refine engagement models as needed.

Separately I coordinated routines for the brand new Operations Design Practice to connect in order to exchange our notes around how we can support on another and our team’s efforts. We regularly looked at business opportunities that we could empower with the support of our brand new team. 

Routine Schedule, Definitions for Bandwidth & Sense Assessment

FIRST MAJOR PRODUCT MIGRATION

I worked alongside our operations leadership team to transition 500 clients with over 1000 boxes to a brand new, evolved product for their checking needs. We called the project “Lockbox Modernization” and worked over a few months to: plan, communicate, and ultimately move all clients and their boxes with care.

We transitioned clients in waves according to the level of complexity within their setup. 

I acted as a strategist in how we could use design to provide the best customer and associate experience possible, and service design thought leader in how we could use that methodology to manage the entire ecosystem of processes, people, and systems involved. This was a highly complex migration.

I also mapped out feedback loop planning for both associates and clients in the form of surveys and interviews so that we could learn from this experience. It was one of the most extensive product overhauls to date. 

Wave Planning Based on Complexity

Service Blueprints for Communications Planning

EXTENDING LEARNINGS

As the Commercial Bank design team continued to grow and evolve, yet remain stretched thin across the space, I began conversations with our leadership team around a new engagement model overall. A great opportunity to bring to light the many models and thoughts that came up through the conversation of launching a design practice within Commercial Operations.

I created various boards to represent my thinking as well as bring together notes from the larger team. These were used to redesign our design organization.

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]]> Risk Vision, Strategy & Approach https://www.nataliekuhn.com/portfolio/risk-vision-strategy-approach/ Tue, 07 Sep 2021 00:00:26 +0000 https://www.nataliekuhn.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=7210 The post Risk Vision, Strategy & Approach appeared first on Natalie Kuhn.

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How Might We

Redefine, realign, and reorganize risk innovation teams so that we are focused on a single vision, resourced appropriately, and moving effectively toward the risk office of the future

How Might We

Allow accounts recievable and payable associates more easily and efficiently manage their transactions so that they can focus on more strategic activities that impact the business

RISK VISION, STRATEGY & APPROACH
CATEGORY

Organizational Design

CLIENT

Capital One Enterprise

MY ROLE & SCOPE
Design Portfolio Leader
Oversaw design team
Impact across entire enterprise
No prior aligned vision or strategy

ACTIVITY SNAPSHOT

– Vision Co-Creation
– Current Product Audit
– Executive Sell & Buy In
– Empathy Interviews
– Workstream Definition
– Design Organizational Chart
– “How We Work” Redefinition
– New Approach Socialization
– Team Re-Organization
– Ceremony & Routine Revamp
– Continuous Monitoring

OPPORTUNITY

Risk mitigation and management is core to the success of a financial institution. Within Capital One there are there risk offices dedicated to each line of business, and there are a handful of horizontal groups dedicated to risk–in this example the Enterprise Services Risk team, or innovation arm, was looking to reassess and scale their efforts to better impact change within the organization. 

APPROACH

A design and research leader, myself, drive this work alongside product and tech partners within the space. I kicked off the engagement by having the cross-disciplinary team identify what they believed was the vision of the team–since the team was still only 2 years old this had not been done. From there I drove research, and a variety of alignment activities to refocus our work. 

OUTCOME

Alongside my product and tech leaders and partners I helped to re-align and re-organize the Enterprise Risk Services team to more effectively work together in the vision of “Risk Intelligence. Made Simple”–meaning their efforts to democratize risk and drive innovation within the space to help Capital One strive to remove risk from the system, or at least proactively manage it more seamlessly. 

Scroll down for a detailed look at the process and assets created throughout the project including

VISION ALIGNMENT
CURRENT STATE AUDIT
TEAM SOCIALIZATION
CHANGE IMPLEMENTATION
TESTING & LEARNING
ALIGNING TO A SINGLE VISION

As I joined the team, I realized right away how disjoined the team had been working due to where they were within their evolution. 

I brought my product and tech leadership partners together in a full day session I coordinated and facilitated to help us align to a single vision across Enterprise Risk Services. At the end of the day we had a vision statement, mission, and high level workstreams that we planned to flesh out in the coming weeks. 

I setup a weekly meeting in order to continue our partnership. 

CURRENT ENGAGEMENT MODEL

It was clear that as a team we needed to more deeply assess where we were in order to come together around a roadmap toward our vision. 

Due to extreme growth as a team, we were experiencing evolutionary pains–I pushed for further reflection on our “how we work” or general engagement model because it seemed we needed to iron out organizational structure and process prior to continuing to attempt to automate and digitize services. 

Current State of ES Risk

CURRENT PRODUCTS AUDIT

I collaborated with my product leadership partners to clearly visualize and articulate where were versus where we wanted to go for executive buy-in on resources. Through that process I helped refine a matrix to assess existing products in order to more clearly understand what we had today and what we didn’t. From there we could decide what to combine, pause on, and start from a product perspective. 

ES Risk Product Audit Matrix – Tech Side

ES Risk Product Audit Matrix – Product/Design Side

FUTURE STATE DEFINITION

From an organizational perspective I worked closely with my product and tech leadership partners to identify an ideal state working model across risk. 

There was still more refinement needed around out target audiences and specificity around each workstream but we were making headway around re-aligning ourselves to a more effective and sustainable approach. 

We also reflected on our opportunity to influence and impact across risk at large looking at all of the different groups and customers we support. 

Future State of ES Risk: Process, Data Governance

Future State of ES Risk: Opportunity to Influence

EMPATHY INTERVIEWS

I drove the research effort that would run in parallel to our product and tech realignment around products we would combine or pause on. The research was to more deeply understand each of our internal customer groups–from business risk officers, to chiefs of staff, to a listing of other subject matter experts who desperately needed better tools to do their jobs. 

Ultimately the research across 23 associates working within a smattering of risk roles would help us: get crisp on our audience and their overlapping vs. unique needs, more deeply understand our highest leverage opportunities, prioritize initiatives around clear near and long-term objectives and key results, as well as continue to help us hone in on strategic levers that help us truly innovate within Risk.  I lead strategy, coordination of stakeholders, synthesis, and socialization efforts–guiding 4 other designers and researchers through supporting this effort.

Research Approach – Teaching Moment for Team

Research Synthesis – Teaching Moment for Team

Research Insights Socialized Across the Risk Organization

SINGLE ROADMAP CO-CREATION

Alongside my product and tech partners we continue to come together around more detailed bodies of work and a single roadmap in order to move toward out vision together as a cross-functional team. 

Aligning to Priorities Across Portfolios

“HOW WE WORK” REALINMENT

Prior to joining this team the two product organizations and three tech pods worked in a very disjointed way–ultimately as two separate organizations sharing technology resources. It was less effective than it could be and there was an opportunity to reconfigure how we approached our work. 

I drove conversation and activities around aligning the product and tech teams given my past experience with re-organizations. I also outlined how the design team should look in partnership with product and tech as well as alongside refined priorities. 

Design Organization Mapping

Ongoing Design Health Assessment through Shifts

SOCIALIZATION WITH TEAMS

As a leadership team, we created a deck to socialize how ES Risk would be working from here on out. I drove the creation of a straw man and facilitated conversation across my partners in order to fill in the messaging to inform teams. 

RE-ORGANIZATION

In close partnership with my tech and product leadership team we are still coaching teams through a re-alignment and re-shuffling. 

I drove work around a revamp of all Agile ceremonies and team routines in order to better suite our new approach to working given my prior experience in this space. 

FIRST PRODUCT INTEGRATIONS

I worked alongside product and tech leadership to coordinate an innovation sprint, essentially a week long hackathon, to bring together three of our risk controls-based products: one for search, one for creation/editing, and one for monitoring.

Coming out of the hackathon we had a proof of concept and starter roadmap to take the work further. 

This was an incredible first start at showing the value of aligning our strategy not only across product teams within ES Risk but in partnering with strategists from Enterprise Risk Management, our partner portfolio. 

CONTINUED REFINEMENT

I have driven the work to identify where we can put in place feedback loops–surveys, people manager prompts, team check-ins–in order to continuously measure the effectiveness of our decisions to merge our roadmaps, strategy, and highlight progress across.

This will help us keep refining how we are working and make sure our teammates all have what they need to be successful. 

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]]> Team Engagement Model https://www.nataliekuhn.com/portfolio/team-engagement-model/ Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:00:40 +0000 http://www.nataliekuhn.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=5536 The post Team Engagement Model appeared first on Natalie Kuhn.

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How Might We

Help a team change the way that they work with one another, and their partners, so that they are enabled to work more efficiently, effectively and improve how they are perceived

How Might We

Help a team change the way that they work with one another, and their partners, so that they are enabled to work more efficiently, effectively and improve how they are perceived

TEAM ENGAGEMENT MODEL
CATEGORY

Organizational Design

CLIENT

Accenture Legal

MY ROLE & SCOPE
Design & Research Co-Lead
Collaborated on cross-functional team
Impact across all of Accenture Legal
Never been done before with design

ACTIVITY OVERVIEW
– Empathy Interviews
– Observation Sessions
– Co-Creation Sessions
– Personas, Persona Focus
– Service Blueprint
– Experience Principles
– Concept Sketches
– Product Demos
– Industry Trends Analysis
– Concepts Recommendation

OPPORTUNITY

Our internal legal team was struggling with their partnership with other teammates and teams altogether. Their processes and tools were  not only complex but had little to no standardization. Often there was even lack of ownership and confusion on next steps altogether. Their team was ripe for a fresh approach–particularly from an engagement model perspective and as a small team we were excited to jump in and figure this out. 

APPROACH

As a small team we took turns leading different activities throughout the research, synthesis, concepting, and refinement processes. We kept the legal team in close connecting with everything we were doing and even brought them in for three different double workshop day sessions. We were careful to bring data from research into every conversation and be mindful of how we approached broken areas of their existing approach. 

OUTCOME

In our final workshop together we prioritized a listing of concepts for a new engagement model as well as refined them as best we could given the time alotted. We depicted the prioritzed and refined concepts within a mapping indicating how all these initiatives could come together as a larger system. Really we provided them with an ecosystem map detailing out everything we had created together across our working team.

Scroll down for a detailed look at the process and assets created throughout the project including :

RESEARCH
PERSONAS
SERVICE BLUEPRINT
EXPERIENCE PRINCIPLES
CONCEPT SKETCHES
RESEARCH

On this project we had a discovery phase in which we became engrossed in the space. We interviewed two types of people: Legal and Client team members. We studied their processes, pain points and what they liked about their current interaction between one another. We used research to inform our personas, experience principles, service blueprint, and concepts. Our research was interwoven throughout all work.

We conducted primary, secondary, and co-creation research together. Primary: 24 Client Team Members, 17 Legal Team Members, 2 CIO Members, 3 Observation Sessions, and ACES, CRT Demos. Secondary: Legal Trends Assessment, 360 CM Interviews, and Lawgeek Demo.  Co-Creation: 1 workshop, 5 collaborative progress update sessions. 

Inputs Leveraged

Initial Poll on Perception

Diverging Points of View

Making Sense of Meaningful Insights

PERSONAS

We often hosted what we call client “rumbles” – essentially they are workshops. They are used to gather research and perspective from the client. We run a variety of different activities to gather this information. It is a very collaborative experience. Rumbles usually last 1-2 days depending on client availability and activities necessary for our understanding. We found that the entire group leaves mentally and physically exhausted yet energized at the same time. We come out of them with a great deal of “ah-ha!” moments.

Our rumble synthesis often uncovers areas and issues that the client team was blindsided by because of their closeness to the space. For this project we ran a couple client rumbles at the beginning of the project to kick it off and toward the end to finalize concepts. In this first one we talked about personas.

Persona Development

SERVICE BLUEPRINT

In our second rumble, or workshop, we worked with our legal team in person to refine and iterate on the blueprint we had been working on from our research to date. It was helpful to have them in the room with us to write directly onto the work in progress document we had. It was much easier for them to interact with us in person for this phase given the density of the material

Collaborative Blueprinting

Key Themes & Insights

EXPERIENCE PRINCIPLES

Experience principles are derived from research. They give us rules to abide by as we design. They keep our work in line with our user’s key needs. Four experience principles were developed for this project. We looked at our experience principles as a requirements checklist. Does this part of the design meet all of these requirements? If it did not we would modify.

1
SHOW TO TELL
Create mutual understanding by working transparently where the process impacts the Client team most. 

+ Eliminate ignorance about what you do so that your’re better utilized
+ Identify the right moments to work transparently so that the internal client knows what to expect

3
BRIDGE THE GAP
Articulate your work through a business lens to build common ground. 

+ Consider business needs and goals to create a balanced perspective
+ Provide rationale when communicating to the internal client team to keep things moving
+ Avoid legalese to make communications clearer and easier to consume

2
FLEX TO FIT
Work creatively within the current process to get what you need. 

+ Complement rather than disrupt process to achieve stronger outcomes
+ Avoid solutions that rely on changing behavior to achieve better adoption
+ Mitigate risks upfront to avoid rework

4
BE-ONEDERFUL
Streamline your efforts to work more effectively as one team.

+ Reduce redundant, siloed work so that you can focus on higher-impact activities
+ Create a culture of knowledge sharing to encourage growth as a cohesive single team.

CONCEPT SKETCHES

We, individually and then as a team, sketched what we would idealistically like to see within the new processes, products and services we were creating. We leveraged our interviews with users, as well as competitive and design pattern analyses findings. We sketched individually and then as a team to make sure that we captured all potential solutions.

Rapid Concepting Board

Internal Studio Feedback Session

FINAL CLIENT RUMBLE

This was the third of three rumbles. While the first rumble acted as more of a kickoff. This rumble was focused on potential solutions. Both our team and the client team attempted to solve their client’s largest pain points.

We came up with solutions, poked holes in those solutions and then patched them back up again. We prioritized solutions that could logistically be implemented. We recorded more long term vision solutions. We left the rumble with specific direction and an enthusiasm to get into the details of developing many of the solutions.

Kickoff, Participant Kits

Concepting, Sharing, Affinity Mapping

Concept Ranking & Prioritization

Cleaned Up Prioritization

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