Teck Resources – Product Strategy Engagement
Teck is Canada’s largest diversified mining and resource company which has major business units in copper, coal, zinc and energy. Our client was in need of product strategy for the redesign of their company’s intranet. Their current intranet was launched in 2013 and is a traditional intranet offering one-way communication, serving as a central source of news and employee resources such as forms, policies and procedures. Five years had passed and our client was looking to modernize it by incorporate new features, updating the look and feel, improving accessibility and integrate with other features and disparate intranets…
MY ROLE
My role on this project was UX Lead. I was to lead the design thinking workshops with the client, facilitate the user/stakeholder interviews, plan all discovery activities with the team and client, and essentially synthesize all of my findings into a strategy readout for the client at project end. Design concepts were also created as part of the engagement, but my role on the concepts was to distill insights from the discovery phase to the design team creating the concepts.
THE PROBLEM
The key problem that Teck was facing was that they have dozens of disparate intranets across the company that don’t “talk” to one another. They don’t look the same, function the same and data and information is duplicated. For example: The corporate headquarters intranet looked and functioned very differently than the intranet out in Santiago, Chile or even other parts of BC.
Teck had all of these disparate hubs of information, which ended up causing a huge disconnect between their employees and essentially, the entire company. What was happening was that this was causing a disruption in their culture, communication breakdowns became the norm between teams and regions and overall the companies efficiency and unity began to suffer. It’s quite the complex issue. I mean, how would front-line workers who work at mining sites in Chile, who don’t have ‘good’ signal and/or wifi access be able to receive the same mobile intranet experience that workers in Vancouver, BC would get?
Part of the challenge of this project was aligning the vision of executives and employees at the ground level. How could we deliver a solution that was inclusive for both parties? With such a divide in the business, it was our job to come up with a strategy and way forward for the company.
SOLUTION APPROACH
The solution was not to offer a new, shiny and pretty-looking intranet to solve all of their problems; far from it actually. The business loved the way the corporate intranet looked, but what they were looking for was platform and product strategy that they could take to executives for buy-in at Teck before investing more heavily in it moving forward.
Our approach was to outline a strategy that would instill a “One Teck” intranet experience by migrating standalone intranet sites to a common platform and framework, while establishing governance models for maintenance and growth. The hypothesis was that if the entire company has one hub, regardless of the region, that could help shift the inconsistencies and miscommunication between the company and it’s intranet data. It was clearly articulated that what would make this project a success was to provide a) platform strategy b) align stakeholders and users c) identify pain points, but most of all, what would make this project successful would be to create a strategy that business executives couldn’t refuse.
RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY
The plan was to start with some basic research and move to design thinking workshops, user/stakeholder interviews, user testing and eventually synthesize all of the insights into a strategy readout that would also include what the business should focus on and a roadmap for success. It also included design concepts, and a clickable prototype that Teck could use to help secure funding, and give developers something to work from moving forward.
In this case study, I’ll focus on the Design Thinking Workshop and User/Stakeholder Interviews.
DESIGN THINKING WORKSHOPS
I led and facilitated design thinking workshops with the client in Vancouver, BC. The main objective for these design thinking workshops was to problem solve in a collaborative space. For this project, we wanted to explore the purpose of the project, align on priorities, define scope and come up with new ideas through a series of design thinking methods that would improve their intranet experience and solve their problem of having a jagged and broken intranet experience across regions and the company.
At a high level, the statement that was listed for everyone in the room to see was… “How might we design an intranet that benefits both our employees and business?” This was the theme for the participants and available for all to see, at all times. I took the participants through various exercises including stakeholder mapping, abstraction laddering, affinity clustering, creative matrix etc… to essentially come up with ways to creative solve this problem. The outcome of these workshops was part of a larger strategy document that I had created. I synthesized the findings and added it as a section the readout. The readout has all research activities, bundled into a vision and strategy for where the company should go with the project.
STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS
I was also responsible for leading and conducting user and stakeholder interviews. There were 12 participants interview over the course of a few days while out in Vancouver, BC. The goal of the interviews were to understand the current state, identify dependancies, user/stakeholder frustrations and pain points and to dive deeper into why there is such a cultural shift and difference in the disparate intranets across all of the regions at Teck. I wanted to uncover what can be done to address the current state, what’s not working well and what is, and hear out employees, users and stakeholders at Teck.
View the Interview Output Document
DESIGN CONCEPTS
This project was a huge success. The company did receive buy-in for funding for the project, and our efforts on strategy were received well from Teck, and within our company. Our hypothesis of having one hub or a “One Teck” experience and everything it includes hit the nail on the mark. All of the research activities that I had led combined with market research and subject matter experts scoping out details of a future platform that could host the solution all proved to be huge.
Impacts and learnings
This project was a huge success. The company did receive buy-in for funding for the project, and our efforts on strategy were well received from Teck. Our hypothesis of having one hub or a “One Teck” experience and everything it includes hit the nail on the mark. All of the research activities that I had led combined with market research and subject matter experts scoping out details of a future platform that could host the solution all proved to be huge.
In terms of my learnings…this project was quite complex in nature because it involved so many different parties. How do you change the way one region treats and uses their intranet when they’re entirely fine with the way it works today? How do you solve such large-scale projects like communication and culture within a company? How do you align everyone to be on the same page?
This project reiterated to me that sometimes what’s best for the business isn’t best for users’, and vice-versa. Business objectives are often very different than users’ objectives, but that doesn’t mean one is more-or-less important than the other. As a designer, it is our objective to balance the needs of the business while working with the constraints we’re given and creating the best possible experience for the end user.