Project Overview
Since the onset of COVID-19, organizations globally have embarked on a journey to redefine work in a highly digitized and interconnected world.
Hybrid working has emerged as a predominant model with EY employees spending an average of 49% of their time working remotely in FY24 compared to 10% in FY19. This shift has presented opportunities and challenges related to productivity, talent attraction and retention, employee wellbeing, organizational culture, and brand equity. As the prevalence of hybrid working continues, the virtual dimension of the "EY experience" has become more significant, making the tools and technology enabling this experience critical for success.
Current State Problems
Cost Optimization:
Proliferation of localized customization in device lifecycle management results in inefficiencies and inflated total cost of ownership. Conversely, rigid and highly standardized approaches may not fully address NPS.
Attracting and Retaining Talent:
- Poor device performance leads to extended working hours, impacting employee stress, frustration, and overall wellbeing. It hinders engagement with the EY employer brand.
- Disparities in device access between home and office spaces create challenges for employees, affecting wellbeing and limiting flexibility in work choices.
- Suboptimal device setups impede productivity, requiring a shift from a one-size-fits-all approach to accommodate varied role and personal context needs.
Brand Equity:
Client expectations for quality align with EY's brand, requiring devices that reinforce, not undermine, the EY image.
Approach: Empower Employees by Addressing Device Needs
Technology's Impact on Employee Engagement, Satisfaction, and Productivity:
Seamless workflow, or 'flow,' is achieved when technology is purpose-fit, frictionless, and unobtrusive – the core of the Device Needs Strategy. In this state, employees can fully engage with the EY employer brand, find satisfaction in their technology and broader EY experience, and enhance their productivity.
The Device Needs strategy consists of three pillars, each playing a pivotal role in enhancing the employee experience, optimizing operational efficiency, and contributing to the overall success of EY Member Firms.
- Elevated Acquisition Experience:Enhance device acquisition process, meeting consumer-grade expectations to strengthen the brand, engage employees, and retain top talent in EY Member Firms.
- Guided and Informed Decision-Making: Present a curated consumer-grade menu aligned with unique performance needs for an intuitive end-to-end experience.
- Refined standard model specifications for laptops
- The Right Menu: Tailor laptops based on role-driven, unique performance needs.
- The Right Match: Leverage segmentation to understand employee populations, enabling the provision of the right laptops, and offer choice for individual preferences.
- Data-driven, Performance-based Refresh: Proactively address poor-performing laptops before user impact, improving NPS and increasing productivity. Realizing cost savings by extending the typical asset lifecycle when possible.
The Consumer Grade Experience
The Consumer Grade Experience Layer serves as the linchpin, with the Segmentation Model and Telemetry-Driven Refresh acting as integral components, collectively shaping and enhancing the overall user experience. Through this integration, users experience the full spectrum of benefits, resulting in an easy-to-use and enjoyable overall device journey.
Leading the charge in this transformative initiative, I curated a comprehensive work package consisting of a Service Blueprint, Experience Audit, Visioning Workshop, Near-term Enhancements, and a Target State framework to deliver immediate value while laying the groundwork for future opportunities. This work package serves as a template for other device acquisition use cases, providing a scalable and adaptable model for achieving excellence in user experience.
Work Package Components
Service Blueprint
The first phase of the process entails the creation of a visual service blueprint, meticulously detailing the end-to-end user experience. This comprehensive illustration focuses on every facet of user interactions, touchpoints, and processes, providing a clear and holistic view of the user journey. Its primary purpose is to assist designers and stakeholders in gaining a profound understanding of the use case from its initiation to completion, showcasing how it impacts users at each crucial touchpoint. By offering this panoramic insight, the blueprint becomes a valuable tool to identify and optimize processes, enhance the overall user experience, and pinpoint specific areas for improvement and refinement.
Experience Audit
In the subsequent phase, research and data insights are seamlessly integrated into the service blueprint, shaping the comprehensive view of the user experience. This integration enables the transformation of complex design findings into a format easily understood by non-design professionals. The goal is to provide internal teams and stakeholders with a clear grasp of the current state of the experience, aiding them in understanding the use case intricacies from start to finish. The culmination of this process results in the generation of high-level recommendations, carefully informed by an experience priority framework. These recommendations serve as strategic insights, guiding decision-making processes for the subsequent steps in the design journey.
Visioning Workshop
Once a comprehensive understanding of the current experience has been captured and shared, a series of collaborative visioning workshops begins with the goal of surfacing key themes and insights. The primary objective is to articulate the north star or the ideal vision that will profoundly shape the strategic direction.
This workshop is structured by identifying key experience moments outlined in the experience audit. Participants are given time for each key moment to outline their ideal vision. After this session, a synthesis is performed, and discussion points are identified for further exploration in the next session. Additionally, success criteria are defined for each key moment.
Following the collaborative workshops, high-level recommendations emerge, informing the roadmap for the target state of the use case. The outputs of the visioning workshops are summarized, emphasizing key themes and insights that guide the strategic direction..
Workshop Summary
Workshop Artifacts
Near-term Experience Enhancements
Considering budget, resourcing, and large-scale solution planning timelines is crucial in our delivery. To meet the immediate need for experience improvement while longer-term efforts are initiated, I developed a near-term, low-lift approach that yields significant enhancements. In this phase, I systematically assess the current user experience, identifying opportunities for immediate improvement. The focus is on improving low-lift, user-facing touchpoints without finalizing end-state designs.
Target State
As a concluding element of the work package, a high-level strategic roadmap for the target state is presented. This initiative outlines key pillars and guides future design efforts, particularly emphasizing user experience, telemetry-driven refresh, and segmentation modeling as fundamental elements of the strategic framework. This roadmap acts as a guide for upcoming design endeavors with the objective of identifying opportunities to advocate for the larger-scale solution. It succinctly summarizes the holistic target state, underscoring the Devices core strategic pillars, including user experience, telemetry-driven refresh, and segmentation modeling as pivotal components of the target state's strategic framework.
