Bringing Together Stakeholders on our Service Corps Journey
The IBM Service Corps Digital Transformation Collaborative project team has been working alongside a consortium through our six-week engagement, intended to help them achieve their engagement objectives through a human-centred approach by applying Enterprise Design Thinking. This growing coalition of concerned corporate and public sector partners have come together to accelerate the digital transformation of the Not For Profit sector. Our ultimate vision is to work together to enable a rejuvenated and more resilient sector that is positioned to support social and economic recovery & rejuvenation efforts across Canada.
Relevant designs start with understanding the user.
The team began the next phase of our journey with user research. We interviewed stakeholders from across the sector to better understand the current pain points and identify new opportunities.
Through our interviews we uncovered 5 key takeaways:
Measuring success: Showing value at the end of the process and providing some clear & concise measurements for success is important. However, all felt that it’s currently difficult to get data and there is no clear way to measure success.
Funding: There was a shared understanding that funding has to go to digital, and there is a need for this to become long-term and sustainable. Technology requires support over multiple years.
Sustainability: There is a need for solutions to be long term and sustainable. There is a current need to support NPOs pivot quickly to digital. However solutions need to help long term recovery. We can’t go back to the way it was, but rebuild for the future.
Collaboration: There’s a need for everyone to collaborate across sectors. Everyone agreed that sharing information, lessons learned and success stories will benefit all and enable a faster transformation.
Technical Skills: Many NPOs can’t afford to hire technical staff, and those that do don’t know how to share what they know with others. There are many digital and technological pain points including the digital divide.
“If I could change anything it would be to ensure people understand digital technology to be just as important as funding or finance at NPOs” (research participant)
Bring stakeholders together for the journey.
The next step in our journey was to run a virtual Design Thinking Workshop to better understand social purpose sector needs, assets, and to identify potential interventions. We wanted to validate what our research uncovered, and understand where there still may be gaps. Due to impact that COVID-19 it wasn’t possible for us to do an in-person workshop, but even in a virtual world workshops can be a powerful tool in a team’s human-centred way of working. These collaborative sessions brought together over 30 stakeholders from across the sector over 3 days.
Day 1 began with validating our 3 target personas. These personas were created based upon our research in order to represent the different user types that will be involved in the final solution. They will be used to create empathy throughout the process and help us to identify with the user we are designing for.
Day 2 had us reviewing our personas pain points and needs statements in order to begin brainstorming big ideas. This is when we got to move from discussing the issue to brainstorming on solutions. Everyone has ideas and everyone has a unique perspective on the user and the problem, so this was a great chance for everyone to contribute ideas for solutions.
On Day 3 we started to prioritize those big ideas and develop them into more mature concepts and created storyboards: a low-fidelity narrative that focuses on people and their actions, thoughts, goals, emotions, and relationships. Doing this virtually allowed us to use additional media like images and icons to craft our stories.
Feedback and learning moments.
At the end of each day we gathered feedback from participants and stakeholders on what went well, what could change and ideas to try. These discussions led us to some key learning moments:
Keep the workshop participant list small. Getting the right amount of participants in a workshop is a balancing act. It’s important to have enough engaged participants in order to gather enough different perspectives and hear the point of view from a variety of stakeholders. In physical workshops often the size and configuration of the space limits who you can invite. Since you aren’t constrained by the same limitations in virtual workshops, it’s possible to invite anyone and everyone. But having too many participants can lead to some tuning out, and limits the ability to have meaningful group conversations.
Test your technology. In physical workshops we tell everyone to put their laptops down for the session, and don’t need to spend time teaching everyone how to use a pen and post it! In virtual workshops you will most likely have participants that have never used virtual collaboration technology like mural or aren’t as used to joining web conferencing calls. Taking the time to provide some training and trouble shooting tips before the workshop begins can go a long way to helping your participants feel more comfortable during the session. Providing accessibility options to everyone also allows those who aren’t as comfortable with technology participate at the same pace as those who are tech experts. This can mean having facilitators ready to scribe notes, or do the moving/clustering for participants while they give verbal direction.
Ensure alignment before the workshop kicks off. Schedule sessions well in advance and set the stage for the workshop in the weeks before it starts. Explain to participants why they are invited, what the goal of the session will be, who is running the sessions, and what types of exercises they will be doing. This will help to get everyone on the same page before the initial kick off and remove some ambiguity at the start. Running a hopes and fears exercise at the start of the session, or even before, can help align participants understanding of the workshop and let you mitigate any fears before it begins.
Next up, we will be working with a smaller group of sponsor users to refine some of the findings from the workshop and move towards developing an action plan and written recommendations for the Digital Transformation Collaborative consortium.
