ISM: Scaling Survey Insights for Educational Organizations

Stage 1: Streamlining Manual Workflows (8 Weeks)

Task 1: Understanding the Current Service Process & Pressing Needs - For years, ISM leadership was happy with the performance of the survey product line, but had begun to notice the limitations of their current system.

Regularly forced to turn away customers due to a lack of capacity, this was increasingly cutting into revenue and causing customers to look elsewhere for their needs. Additionally, the stress of ever increasing workloads was causing rapid turnover within the team, making talent retention very difficult and costly.

Identifying Pain-Points & Opportunities: Discovery & Project Scoping

  • Understanding the holistic experience of both clients and the survey team was key to understanding the current process.
  • I was very surprised to discover how often friction points for both the team and clients had roots in the same structural workflow issues.
  • To maximize value, the survey team was forced to prioritize larger projects, leaving a completely unmet demand for smaller initiatives; this was causing frustration and a slow erosion of confidence in ISM’s client base.

Balancing Front & Back-Stage Dependencies: Service Blueprinting

  • Understanding the multi-faceted environment where clients and the survey team came together was key, and provided a clear view of the business challenge we faced.
  • I was very surprised to discover how often friction points for both the Survey Team and clients had roots in the same (often simple) structural workflow issues.
  • With this overview in hand, I began prioritizing pain-points and ideating potential solutions; this surfaced the exciting opportunity of streamlining manual survey production.

Task 2: Streamlining the Existing Process - With any complex service design project, changes need to be applied with care for success to be achieved as non-destructively as possible.

To this end, my initial efforts focused on enhancing a key aspect of the current process by examining legacy tools and techniques. The key goal here was to introduce a limited, but significant, change in the hope that initial results would encourage trust in both the Leadership and Survey Teams.

Eliminating Legacy Inefficiencies: Desired Outcomes & System Requirements

  • With a clear set of issues to solve for, I needed to understand what possibilities were available to determine how feasible a given approach was.
  • Focusing on survey production, I undertook a comprehensive audit of available solutions with associated benefits and costs.
  • Reviewing my findings with the team, I drafted a service-design recommendation for leadership review.

Winning Support with a Feasible Approach: Stakeholder Demonstration & Training Plan

  • While intrigued with my initial recommendation, my biggest takeaway was that leadership needed to see the proposed solution in action to build confidence and alignment.
  • Leveraging my own expertise with InDesign, I worked with subject-matter experts to build the prototype demonstration for a live presentation/Q&A with company leadership.
  • To address any feasibility concerns, I also produced a training outline to up-skill the Survey Team without disrupting current delivery to clients.

Stage 2: Scaling with Automation (6 Weeks)

Task 1: Designing the New Automation Concept - By streamlining manual workflows, we had taken our first significant step. However, while the survey team was handling far more in-depth projects with less production time, there was still a significant unmet demand for smaller “pulse check” projects that provided follow-up for the larger initiatives.

This situation presented an enticing opportunity: Since these smaller projects typically measured predetermined indicators, I championed the use of automation to serve this unmet market need, all without burdening the Survey Team with extra work.

Exploring New Capabilities: Automated Survey Concept & Planning

  • Having previously mapped out the service-process for the Survey Team, this model helped identify where automation could be used.
  • Each “pulse check” topic and its constituent variables were identified in-detail, providing precise system requirements for back-end system flows.

Task 2: Building Out the New Solution - With all of our planning and components mapped out, it was time to bring everything together into a system that customers could actually use.

Comprised of differing functionalities that would serve different audiences (i.e. school professionals deploying surveys, survey recipients completing them, and members of the ISM Survey Team referencing them on occasion), the service ecosystem needed to present all of these capabilities in a simple front-end interface that was powerful and easy to use.

Tying the New Ecosystem Together: Service-Design Architecture & Front-End Design

  • With a clear understanding of how we could create a new automated product category, a front-end interface was needed to make things accessible and convenient.
  • Rapid design sprints and usability-testing were used to establish learnability and ease-of-use, with any issues being prioritized to meet release targets.
  • For a final optimization push, a private “beta” release elicited detailed feedback, addressing both front and back-end refinements while generating word-of-mouth.

© 2016 David Service

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