Day 3 Session Notes–How to Create Change

— Excited to talk about favorite topic of change

• Real life example from Cigna to embrace innovation transformation and provide value
• Will end with practical tips for change leadership in your org

— An alarming fact is that almost of all organizational changes fail

• Would you feel leaving project success to coin flip?

 

— Got me thinking as to why is change so hard?

• Let’s step back

 

— Well, change is messy, and uncomfortable

• Change is like baking bread

— When I first started baking bread, felt intimidating and hard to imagine going from A to B

— Change is

• Mysterious— Give latitude to fail and learn along the way
• Meandering—Path to vision won’t be straight line and embrace flexibility with discomfort
• Management— Change needs someone to lead the way
• Shout out to Deanna Smith’s talk on this topic

— Let’s dive in

 

— Cigna Healthcare had DesignOps team supporting ExpressScripts digital communication

 

— Facing problem of doing more with less, a common problem, and stressful to experience

— Additional context

• Half a billion communications sent out by ExpressScripts
• Increase in surprise ad-hoc projects that popped out of nowhere
  • Projects came in and design team needed to react
• Desire to increase innovation in products and services, but this required time and commitment
• Limited number of team members

 

— Created self-service solution for team members

 

—Previously, there was one way flow of work with product and business to design team

 

— Self service reimagined workflow and asked if product and business managed and designed digital products in certain use cases, to reduce workload and increase capacity

— Design elevated to governance practicioner of role for branding and design

 

— Did self-service solve problem of doing more with less

 

— Self-service was solution and tackled product and innovation phase and working model

• Brought people to workshops and analyzed current state of process

— Where to go in the future and asked the following— where does the design team invest its time

 

— Asked where to invest time, but with upward arrow had higher and lower value work for projects

• Categorized work in several groupings

— May-Do Bucket

• Can do based on availability like ad-hoc project

— Must-Do Bucket

• Work that required full time design support

— Desire-to-Do

• Innovative projects to push products and services forward
• Don’t reflect percentage of products

— Percentage breakdown as

• 20% May-Do, 67% Must-Do, 13% Desire-To-Do

— Wanted desire to switch things around, and rerouting may-do work elsewhere

• Re-routing product was enticing

 

— If could reroute requests could save headaches and increase efficiencies

• Off-ramp delivery method for business partners

 

— Came up with three operating models

• Hybrid of 50% split — But didn’t free up enough time
• Vendor Outsource— Risk of overhead
• Self-Service— Too much model and biggest unknowns and biggest rewards

— Discuss each of models with criteria on left and each pros and cons

• Reservations on previous experiences with other people writing content for communication and bursting pre-conceived notions

— Went to workflows to figure out how self-service worked

• Service blueprints to touch points risks to systems and data, and reviewing how model would operate

 

— Change Leadership came with execution

— Prior to this DesignOps led innovation workshops

• Had chance to be change leader and lead new way of working

— Establish controls, strategies and help people adapt to change

 

— Risk mitigation and change controls were top-of-mind due to novel nature of ask

— Start

• Entrance Qualifiers and intake forms to see who was going in, and building governance model around it
• Attestation Agreement to sign on dotted line that teams would acknowledge responsibility

— While in self-service, included:

• Design checkpoint team
• Content guidelines for team and how to speak to customers
• Checklist and critical steps to go through like design, dev, and QA
• Reusable templates to jump start adoption

— End of Self-Service

• Release documentation
• Retrospectives and surveys to integrate feedback

 

— Thought about tools in control and existing best practices to stand-up self-service platform and capitalize what worked with team

• Optimization measurement and efficiency

— Here’s how info was centralized

• Intake form led to online tracking sheet for all project info related to self-service and letting them know about flags in process
• Tons of cell and sheet linking, to integrate everything into master spreadsheet

— Data capturing framework and what data we need to know to make judgments in future and pull data from online tools used into summary sheet, and pulled into data dashboard

— Perfect well of info to share with leadership and upper management

— Efficiency was as follows:

• Asynchronous communication through certain info and execute hand-offs with team to stay away from email chart and another meeting, to capitalize on free capacity

 

— Now let’s talk on Adoption

• Change control, platform strategy, and where people come in and shoes of stakeholders and well thinking about self-service, and what we needed to show

— Confluence to create accessible online overview of what model looked like, and sample form to start

— Starting process?

• Started pilot program to introduce to tools like SmartSheets, CheetahDigital, and Confluence, in intimate settings to empower people and let them be successful in self-service

— Mechanism for feedback

• Retros and SmartSheets, and surveys for official feedback capturing
• Constantly asked along the way what was going on, and co-designed with stakeholders

 

— Now everything came together with mixing tiny ingredients

• Right conditions and approach with change leadership driving similar magic and strategies leading the way

— Inspiring teams to trust us and follow us a new path

 

— So did self-service work?

 

— Capacity increase redirected ad-hoc requests

 

— Revenue Gains, several million in revenue with pilot launches

 

— 86% increase in speed to delivery

— Feedback from stakeholders

• Ability to respond to time-sensitive communications in response to market forces and strong-level of governance and comfort guardrails

— Improving QA and very good feedback

 

— When going from and creating changes

• Big Picture: Grasp org, problem and people
• Vision: Have a clear understanding of today vs tomorrow and where you want to go
• Controls: Change requires controls to mitigate risk
• Pilot and Partner: Engage people early in process and test drive
• Iterate: Change never ends to ask for feedback and continuously improve

 

— Thank you, and hope it inspired you

Q&A

1. Does change fail because it doesn’t happen fast enough for business?
   1. No, in our case, went back to business several times to share progress and solved two problems of business response to market forces, and our problem was ad-hoc requests consuming us relative to high-value projects
      1. Common ground where business problems solved then win-win
   2. Let us come to table and solve problem together
   3. Team had totally brand new admiration of design process from stakeholders
      1. Self-service was education in design process
2. Was choice of self-service specific to conditions in org? Where would self-service not work?
   1. Business advocated for self-service, but design was worried about giving too much power to stakeholders— based on previous experiences of poor communications
   2. When not right solution
      1. Has to do with problem solving, and maturity of org
      2. Analysis is required— and designops tool should be applied early on
         1. Being strategic and metrics with you and have DesignOps be more strategic in leadership
3. Biggest issue is awareness? How did you reach all of org to establish model?
   1. Began with one line of business and started small
   2. Successful changes start small, with one line of business and demonstrate success, and other lines of business will want in action
      1. Big impactful win for business and new model that design created and had someone to lead change
      2. Show you can succeed in one line of business people will be eager to find out