“Will a robot take my job?”
Digital Transformation & Automation
How might we uncover and address the real needs and concerns of associates to align citizen development initiatives with their engagement and experience?
Lead UX Researcher, Designer, Workshop Facilitator and Instructional Designer.
Role
Investment Operations and Technology leadership knew the general issues around citizen development but lacked a holistic understanding of associates' perspectives to create an engaging solution. The challenge was to align automation efforts with associate engagement and experience.
Challenge
Identify areas in the business ready for robust automation tools.
Understand the real jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) of associates to challenge leadership assumptions.
Align business and Technology teams for a shared vision and clear strategy going forward.
Goals
Identifying gaps and assumptions.
Process
Conducted 1:1 interviews with leaders to uncover their fears, concerns, and assumptions about citizen development and automation.
Focused on teams with the highest ambiguity and technical uncertainty around citizen development.
Directed research efforts towards metrics like frequency, intensity, and density of pain points and ambiguity.
User research and validation.
Designed a prioritized interview backlog force-ranked into category tiers and tiered categories.
Interviewed multiple teams in Investment Operations, which invalidated the critical assumption that associates feared job loss due to automation.
Human-centered artifacts and quantitative data collection.
Created three personas and a critical user journey to improve new fund launches.
Piloted Timeular devices to collect data-driven, qualitative insights on associates' real-time activities.
Workshops and leadership buy-in.
Facilitated a two-part Design Thinking workshop with both business and Technology leaders.
Part 1 was a Socratic seminar on automation with a white-paper pre-read to discuss the problem space.
Part 2 was an empathy-driven session centered on: problem framing, solution generation and assumptions mapping.
Revealed that no associates feared automation would take their jobs; instead, they wanted low-value tasks automated to focus on high-value work.
Validation assumptions and insights.
Result
Achieved an 87% decrease in defects in new fund launches.
Designed and implemented an automation upskilling program - leveraging Alteryx, Python, UiPath and Blue Prism - resulting in 36 citizen developers across major departments within nine months.
Operational improvements.
Enhanced collaboration between the business and Technology.
Fostered better relationships between Operations and Technology, reducing friction and enhancing collaboration across departments.
The success of the pilot led to its recommendation as a path forward for marketing and sales associates when IT resources were limited.