Business Need

It was the beginning of the pandemic. The retail industry got hit by shutdowns and uncertainty. In order to stay competitive Gap, Inc. had to quickly innovate its e-commerce capabilities. More features needed to be released, resulting in 6X more workload and 4X increased team size for product engineering teams. That included the team responsible for the Design System.

Challenge

1. The Design System was pivotal in enabling other 7 e-commerce and marketing UI teams to be more efficient by creating high quality re-usable components.

2. They had unique creative culture and working styles. Brenda had to strike a balance between enabling them for predictable delivery while respecting self-determination.

3. The 25+ members of the team preferred to work with minimal structure and processes. One of the reasons, they had to service to other teams with unplanned work and also respond to ad-hoc requests from various brands. However, such dynamic led to carryovers of user stories iteration after iteration and there was more pressure from the business for accountability; to deliver more and on timely manner.

Approach

• Observation.The very first step was to get to know the team members and observe their workflow.

• Propose small but impactful changes for prioritization and planning when the time was right. The recommendation was to move most valuable user stories to the top of the backlog as a new way to plan and help them keep focused.

• Share the benefits of new approaches. Brenda gathered performance metrics every two weeks and feedback from the team members, product owners and tech leads.

• Once they got comfortable with the new workflows, the next step was to present the advantages of using their average capacity per iteration to plan and prioritize.

Results

After a couple of weeks the team fully welcomed the new ways of working as something that was not in conflict with their values. With better prioritization the Design team enjoyed more time to focus on their development work as meetings got faster and goals more clear.

Improved performance and trust, as shown in the following metrics: from less than 50% up to 100% of committed vs resolved user stories and average cycle times of 3 days faster than the rest of the organization. Less time taken away from team members communicating back and forth on feature status to program managers and leadership.

Gap, Inc. benefited from new e-commerce capabilities just in time for the peak season. Black Friday that year broke all time record for total of orders in the USA.

Business Need

Peoples Health, a Medicare Advantage health insurance organization, wanted to achieve a "Five Star” plan rating. This is the highest quality and performance standard from the federal government that demonstrates excellence in customer satisfaction and quality of care. This rating has a direct relationship with the monetary incentives a Medicare organization receives from the government.

Complex strategic programs were underway with CEO visibility and under tight regulatory timeframes.

Brenda joined the organization to develop a new consultative PMO with the purpose of providing guidance to leadership, vice presidents, functional directors and managers in the planning and implementation of those projects.

Challenges

1. Directors and functional managers were stretched too thin between project management responsibilities and daily operations. This prevented them from focusing on more detailed work required to effectively initiate, plan, execute, monitor progress and close projects, and delayed approvals, starts, completions and synchronization of projects.

2. User adoption of project management tool was almost non-existent. The application of methodology in real life was also absent despite 80 employees having attended various trainings provided by the organization.

3. Poor visibility of the amount of company-wide projects underway, their complexity, size, business value, cross-department dependencies or alignment with organizational strategy.

4. The PMO was recently created and had no staff to fulfill its goals.

Approach

• People: Brenda interviewed 30 directors, managers and their staff to learn about their needs, wants and context in which they were operating. Her goal was to have a realistic understanding of project management methods from their point of view to design the type of support that the PMO will provide.

• Process: Customized coaching with hands-on support from concept to delivery. This allowed for establishing trust and letting executive and management staff see the benefits of applying best practices, standardizing processes and taking advantage of the services of the PMO.

• Tools: Partnered with the Education and Training department to assess how many of the employees took the training on the project management tool, when, and their roles. Planned and led usability testing as a prototype with 7 users for standalone and enterprise versions.

Results

Strategic programs and projects were delivered within scope, schedule and budget. Peoples Health achieved the Five Star rating, which represented $10M in revenue.

A successful working model for operations was validated; built from the user experience rather than administrative top down. Three tool prototypes helped to identify blockers, non-value-added tasks, and gaps in the effective planning, execution and monitoring of projects.

Transparency and alignment with enterprise-wide inventory and analysis of 100 projects. Recommendations for continuous improvements and PMO user-centered roadmap.

PMO staff; new project coordinators were hired, trained and mentored with the knowledge about project management and understanding of the organization's user needs.

Business Need

Banco Popular North America launched its new online banking solutions for small business owners. A year passed and existing customers were still using the personal banking platform instead of the business. The bank was unable to meet its enrollment goals. Brenda joined to help the VP of Corporate Treasury Product Management implement the changes and improve the customer experience and conversion to the new product offerings.

Challenge

1. Potential customers were not aware of the new B2B solutions.The existing customers were hesitant to switch from a personal account to a business account. Those who demonstrated interest faced roadblocks with the application, registration and authentication process. This represented a lost opportunity of $8K per month.

2. Internally, bank representatives did not have the tools to adequately support the customers in the sales funnel. The misalignment among various corporate departments was also causing high rate of rejected applications due to lack of awareness about the new process and required documentation.

Approach

• Held discussions to better understand the customer journey and pain points with Customer Service, Branch Managers, Product Managers, Operations, Information Technology, and Creative Services.

• Mapped the internal workflows with customer touch points to give visibility to the application approval processes. Created a visual matrix for internal staff with required documents by solution package. These efforts were intended to be used by branch managers, customer relationship managers and cash management officers as a tool to facilitate a more efficient cross-functional flow.

• Partnered with Creative Services and Product Managers to create marketing communication materials as educational resources for 800 representatives and customers. Security communications from Operations and IT were reformatted to make the customer feel comfortable as they moved to the next steps.

• Designed an online training for customers and representatives with a walk-through for the new platform navigation.

• Assessed the quality of existing customer feedback surveys. Identified and corrected 20 discrepancies between the original English version and the Spanish version.

Results

Customers were able to seamlessly continue to the end of the sales funnel and enrollments to the business platform increased by 150% across its 5 markets, with revenues of $600K per year.

Staff from local branches and various departments benefited from a smoother flow of documentation and approvals.

Business Need

For a worldwide hi-tech leader in Silicon Valley, innovation means to be at the forefront with enterprise product offerings for its customers. There was a need to create spaces for generating new product ideas from the ground up. A Senior Director of Engineering at Cisco Systems wanted to begin a series of workshops to foster a culture of continuous innovation. Brenda was already an embedded Agile consultant and gladly accepted the invitation to pioneer the design and execution of the first workshop of that kind.

Challenges

1. Technically centered. Steering the mindset of an enterprise engineering organization from purely technical to include the customer needs as part of the brainstorming.

2. Time productivity. The workshop design had to accommodate for considerations of limited time and labor costs implications, as engineers were going to be taken away from their daily responsibilities. Activities had to be strategic to produce tangible outcomes in a specific timeframe.

3. Size of cross-functional groups. To create productive environment for collaboration, we needed to get a well balanced ratio of participants; Product Managers, Technical Marketing Engineers, Software and Field Engineers, from the areas  of Wireless , Switching, Routing, and Internet-of-Things.

4. Top-down approaches. The organizational culture valued directive approaches. Brenda needed to advocate for a bottom-up strategy to ensure smoothness and effectiveness in ideation process and participant engagement.

Approach

• User-centered Personas. Designed the workshop to have each group of participants create Personas as a starting point. This technique of having a fictional character representing a customer, his/her needs, experiences and behaviors helped to focus the workshop’s ideation on the customers and not only the technical aspects of the products.

• Lean and Kanban methodologies to maximize time and value. Designed all the workshop activities based on the Lean and Kanban principles: visualization of the work using post-it notes, white boards, dot voting for prioritization and discussion, with personas and customer needs, management of the Work-In-Progress to prevent waste (or going off tangent), and continuous process improvement with a group Retrospective activity.

• Recommended total number of invitees and group sizes for effective collaboration. Partnered with stakeholders (VPs and directors) in advance to keep groups small enough between 3 to 5 participants each. The list of invitees was reviewed to ensure a well balanced mix of cross-functional roles (engineers and product managers).

• Championed a shift to a bottom-up approach. Explicitly communicated expectations about what it meant to act in a non-directive and non-judgmental way. Created and shared guidelines to foster the inclusive of ideas, and self-organizing to empower to everyone to feel comfortable and do their best in creating collectively.

Results

40 new customer-centered product ideas were generated within the half-day workshop.

Top 3 ideas were identified by self-organization and cross-functional consensus among 20 participants. Met the needs of the organization, stakeholders, and participants.

Documented in new Innovation Portal as input for Proof of Concepts, Hack-a-thons, and further Research and Development.

Introduced new approaches for ideation, workshop design, and execution that engineers found very productive and fun.