Virtual Requirements Gathering for a Distributed Organization
Summary:
A major international financial organization needed to quickly gather requirements from a diverse set of internal and customer-facing project stakeholders from around the globe. Their objective: replace an aging core business system while also streamlining complex branch processes.
Client Profile:
- An international financial institution with over $41.4 billion in assets and over 3.4 million members.
- Operations across 4 continents offering a wide range of products to members.
The Challenge:
A key differentiator for this organization was to become technically competitive while maintaining their high level of personal service. The client realized that it would require an in-depth investigation into the needs of their membership as well as into improvements to the infrastructure that would enable a superior customer experience. To redesign the customer experience they needed to elicit input from a large and distributed group of stakeholders, yet they couldn’t bring everyone to the same location. An equally important challenge was to leverage the investigation as an opportunity to build buy-in for this major change initiative, which would directly impact the daily work of one-third of the credit union’s employees.
The Solution:
Doreen Evans Associates designed a blended workshop format to elicit meaningful information from geographically dispersed subject matter experts. The participants from various locations represented one of three perspectives: Member, Branch Employee, and Enterprise.
DEA’s success on similar projects led the credit union to choose DEA as a trusted third party to facilitate a critical reflection and problem-solving process that would surface opportunities and a sense of impact or relative importance to the participants. DEA’s expert facilitators and proven requirements process (LINKProcess™) provided the means necessary to cut through existing corporate politics, organizational issues, and groupthink to elicit meaningful information and innovative ideas from a diverse and distributed group of participants.
DEA worked closely with the Client’s Core Project Team from the beginning to define the desired outcome, identify the right participants, and design an interactive process that gave a voice to those directly impacted by the project. Participants were given advance assignments as pre- work to engage their interest, getting participants “primed” for active and open participation in the real-time event. For example an, on-line survey framed current-state and future-focused questions that targeted the participants’ different perspectives, preparing the participants to consider new possibilities for the customer experience going forward.
With on-site facilitators at each location, the participants were able to share branch process issues and best practices face-to-face in concurrent breakout sessions, and then regroup with peers from across the country to draw conclusions together using the latest in virtual conferencing technology.
DEA resources delivered:
√ workshop design
√ facilitation services
√ work guides and templates used in the workshops
√ workshop deliverables
In addition, throughout the workshops DEA partnered on tasks with client team members, enabling them to conduct similar sessions in the future.
The workshops yielded positive feedback from participants, and enabled DEA facilitators to harvest hundreds of suggestions for improvements to business policy, logistics, training, services, equipment, and systems. All of this material was compiled into custom sets of deliverables which were presented to different groups throughout the credit union. The results provided functional requirements for an RFP and were used as the starting point for a comprehensive plan for improvements to the customer experience.
Feeling heard made tremendous inroads toward spreading buy-in and ownership to the front lines of the change initiative. Participants expressed genuine appreciation for being included and having their ideas solicited - a powerful force that will help drive this change forward.
