“Will a robot take my job?”

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION | AUTOMATION | OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY | EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT | IN-PERSON WORKSHOP FACILITATION

How might we uncover and address the real needs and concerns of employees to align citizen development initiatives with their engagement and experience?”

Role.

Lead UX Researcher | Process Designer | Workshop Facilitator | Instructional Designer

Challenge.

Investment Operations and Technology leadership knew the general issues around citizen development but lacked a holistic understanding of employees' perspectives to create an engaging solution. The challenge was to align automation efforts with employee engagement and experience.

Goals.

Identify areas in the business ready for robust automation tools.

Understand the real jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) of employees to challenge leadership assumptions.

Align business and Technology departments for a shared vision and clear strategy going forward.

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.

  • 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.

  • 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 to eliminate memory bias.

  • 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.

Results.

A bias for human-centered action produced validated learning and operational efficiencies.

Employee Engagement. Not a single employee was scared automation would take their jobs. In fact, everyone wanted all of their low-value work automated so they could do high-value work.

Cross-Department Leadership Alignment. Leaders knew their assumptions weren’t true, which meant cross-department leadership could act quickly and have the will of all employees fully behind their actions.

Defect Reduction. Achieved an 87% decrease in defects in new fund launches.

Upskilling Success. All leaders were 100% aligned to the automation upskilling roadmap, which started with 0 citizen developers and, in less than 9 months, there were 36 across every major department in Operations.