The importance of roles in making meaningful project experiences

It’s a chicken and egg situation when it comes to securing funding for a large transformation program in government. On one hand, you need to submit a business case and, as part of that, you need to make early decisions about how you might approach and deliver the program of work. On the other hand, you need to know enough about the problem you are going to solve to ensure you have sufficient funding to understand the problem better, hire the right people, design the right service, and build it the right way. 

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Now imagine securing hundreds of millions of dollars to design and build a service, but not feeling confident about what the user needs are. What if you had the opportunity to change this common predicament and influence your leadership team to carry out alignment activities, all while successfully delivering within the committed time frames?

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Meera Pankhania, Design Director and Co-founder of Propel Design, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, on traceability and her learnings from delivering a $300 million Government program.

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In her talk, Meera helps us understand how to use service traceability techniques in our work and apply them to any environment - ensuring we design and build the best service possible, no matter the funding model.

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Background on Meera Pankhania

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As a design leader, Meera is all about working on complex, purpose-driven challenges. She helps organizations take a human-centric approach to service transformation and helps deliver impactful, pragmatic outcomes while building capability and leading teams through growth and change.

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Meera co-founded Propel Design, a strategic research, design, and delivery consultancy in late 2020. She has 15 years of experience in service design, inclusive design, and product management across the private, non-profit, and public sectors in both the UK and Australia. 

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Meera is particularly interested in policy and social design. After a stint in the Australian Public Service, Meera was appointed as a senior policy adviser to the NSW Minister for Customer Service, Hon. Victor Dominello MP. In this role, she played a part in NSW’s response to the COVID pandemic, flexing her design leadership skills in a new, challenging, and important context.

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Contact Details:

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Email address: meera@propeldesign.com.au

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Find Meera on LinkedIn  

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From funding to delivery: ensuring alignment from start to finish 🏁🎉👏

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Meera’s talk explores a fascinating case study within the Department of Employment Services (Australia) where a substantial funding investment of around $300 million set the stage for a transformative journey. This funding supported the delivery of a revamped Employment Services Model, which had the goal of delivering better services to job seekers and employers, and a better system for providers within this system. The project had a focus on aligning teams prior to delivery, which resulted in a huge amount of groundwork for Meera.

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Her journey involved engaging various stakeholders within the department, including executives, to understand the program as a whole and what exactly needed to be delivered. “Traceability” became the watchword for this project, which is laid out in three phases.

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• Phase 1: Aligning key deliverables
• Phase 2: Ensuring delivery readiness
• Phase 3: Building sustainable work practices

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Phase 1: Aligning key deliverables 🧮

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Research and discovery (pre-delivery)

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Meera’s work initially meant conducting extensive research and engagement with executives, product managers, researchers, designers, and policymakers. Through this process, a common theme was identified – the urgent (and perhaps misguided) need to start delivering! Often, organizations focus on obtaining funding without adequately understanding the complexities involved in delivering the right services to the right users, leading to half-baked delivery.

After this initial research, some general themes started to emerge:

1. Assumptions were made that still needed validation
2. Teams weren’t entirely sure that they understood the user’s needs
3. A lack of holistic understanding of how much research and design was needed

The conclusion of this phase was that “what” needed to be delivered wasn’t clearly defined. The same was true for “how” it would be delivered.

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Traceability

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Meera’s journey heavily revolved around the concept of "traceability” and sought to ensure that every step taken within the department was aligned with the ultimate goal of improving employment services. Traceability meant having a clear origin and development path for every decision and action taken. This is particularly important when spending taxpayer dollars!

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So, over the course of eight weeks (which turned out to be much longer), the team went through a process of combing through documents in an effort to bring everything together to make sense of the program as a whole. This involved some planning, user journey mapping, and testing and refinement. 

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Documenting Key Artifacts

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Numerous artifacts and documents played a crucial role in shaping decisions. Meera and her team gathered and organized these artifacts, including policy requirements, legislation, business cases, product and program roadmaps, service maps, and blueprints. The team also included prior research insights and vision documents which helped to shape a holistic view of the required output.

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After an effort of combing through the program documents and laying everything out, it became clear that there were a lot of gaps and a LOT to do.

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Prioritising tasks

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As a result of these gaps, a process of task prioritization was necessary. Tasks were categorized based on a series of factors and then mapped out based on things like user touch points, pain points, features, business policy, and technical capabilities.

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This then enabled Meera and the team to create Product Summary Tiles. These tiles meant that each product team had its own summary ahead of a series of planning sessions. It gave them as much context (provided by the traceability exercise) as possible to help with planning. Essentially, these tiles provided teams with a comprehensive overview of their projects i.e. what their user needs, what certain policies require them to deliver, etc.  

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Phase 2: Ensuring delivery readiness 🙌🏻

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Meera wanted every team to feel confident that we weren’t doing too much or too little in order to design and build the right service, the right way.

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Standard design and research check-ins were well adopted, which was a great start, but Meera and the team also built a Delivery Readiness Tool. It was used to assess a team's readiness to move forward with a project. This tool includes questions related to the development phase, user research, alignment with the business case, consideration of policy requirements, and more. Ultimately, it ensures that teams have considered all necessary factors before progressing further. 

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Phase 3: Building sustainable work practices 🍃

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As the program progressed, several sustainable work practices emerged which Government executives were keen to retain going forward.

Some of these included:

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• ResearchOps Practice: The team established a research operations practice, streamlining research efforts and ensuring that ongoing research was conducted efficiently and effectively.
• Consistent Design Artifacts: Templates and consistent design artifacts were created, reducing friction and ensuring that teams going forward started from a common baseline.
• Design Authority and Ways of Working: A design authority was established to elevate and share best practices across the program.
• Centralized and Decentralized Team Models: The program showcased the effectiveness of a combination of centralized and decentralized team models. A central design team provided guidance and support, while service design leads within specific service lines ensured alignment and consistency.

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Why it matters 🔥

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Meera's journey serves as a valuable resource for those working on complex design programs, emphasizing the significance of aligning diverse stakeholders and maintaining traceability. Alignment and traceability are critical to ensuring that programs never lose sight of the problem they’re trying to solve, both from the user and organization’s perspective. They’re also critical to delivering on time and within budget!

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Traceability key takeaways 🥡

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• Early Alignment Matters: While early alignment is ideal, it's never too late to embark on a traceability journey. It can uncover gaps, increase confidence in decision-making, and ensure that the right services are delivered.
• Identify and audit: You never know what artifacts will shape your journey. Identify everything early, and don’t be afraid to get clarity on things you’re not sure about.
• Conducting traceability is always worthwhile: Even if you don’t find many gaps in your program, you will at least gain a high level of confidence that your delivery is focused on the right things.

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Delivery readiness key takeaways 🥡

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• Skills Mix is Vital: Assess and adapt team member roles to match their skills and experiences, ensuring they are positioned optimally.
• Not Everyone Shares the Same Passion: Recognize that not everyone will share the same level of passion for design and research. Make the relevance of these practices clear to all team members.

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Sustainability key takeaways 🥡

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• One Size Doesn't Fit All: Tailor methodologies, templates, and practices to the specific needs of your organization.
• Collaboration is Key: Foster a sense of community and collective responsibility within teams, encouraging shared ownership of project outcomes.

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"Dear Optimal Workshop

How do you make a small link attractive to people (icon vs. text)?"

— Cassie

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Dear Cassie,

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I'm going to dive straight into this interesting question with a good old game of Pros and Cons, and then offer a resolution of sorts, with a meandering thought or two along the way. Let's kick things off with Team Icon.

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The good side of icons: A picture is worth a 1000 words

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When shopping online, the number above the little shopping trolley icon tells me how badly behaved I’ve been, and if I click on it, I know I’ll get to gleefully review all the shoes I've selected so far. There’s a whole heap of icons out there like this that people have absorbed and can use without thinking twice. Marli Mesibov wrote a fantastic article on the use of icons for UX Booth on the use of icons that is well worth a look. Marli discusses how they work well on small screens, which is a definite bonus when you’re on the go! Young children who aren’t yet literate can easily figure out how to open and play Angry Birds on their parent’s smartphones thanks to icons. And icons also have a great capacity for bridging language barriers.

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The not so good side of icons: We’re too old for guessing games

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On the flipside, there are some issues that may huff and puff and blow that cute little home icon down. Starting with there being no consistent standard for them. Sure, there are a handful that are universal like home and print, but beyond that it seems to be a free-for-all. Icons are very much in the hands of the designer and this leaves a lot of room for confusion to grow like bacteria in a badly maintained office refrigerator. Difficult to understand icons can also seriously hinder a user’s ability to learn how to use your website or application. When icons don't communicate what they intend, well, you can guess what happens. In a great piece advocating for text over icons, Joshua Porter writes about an experience he had:

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"I have used this UI now for a week and I still have do a double-take each time I want to navigate. I’m not learning what the icons mean. The folder icon represents 'Projects', which I can usually remember (but I think I remember it because it’s simply the first and default option). The second icon, a factory, is actually a link to the 'Manage' screen, where you manage people and projects. This trips me up every time."

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If people can't pick up the meaning of your icons quickly and intuitively, they may just stop trying altogether. And now, over to Team Label.

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The good side of text: What you see is what you get

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Sometimes language really is the fastest vehicle you've got for delivering a message. If you choose the right words to label your links, you'll leave the user with very little doubt as to what lies beneath. It’s that simple. Carefully-considered and well-written labels can cut through the noise and leave minimal ambiguity in their wake. Quoting Joshua Porter again: "Nothing says 'manage' like 'manage'. In other words, in the battle of clarity between icons and labels, labels always win."

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The not so good side of text: Your flat shoe is my ballet pump

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Text labels can get messy and be just as confusing as unfamiliar icons! Words and phrases sometimes don’t mean the same thing to different people. One person’s flat enclosed shoe may be another person’s ballet pump, and the next person may be left scratching their head because they thought pumps were heels and all they wanted was a ballet flat! Text only labels can also become problematic if there isn’t a clear hierarchy of information, and if you have multiple links on one page or screen.  Bombarding people with a page of short text links may make it difficult for them to find a starting point. And text may also hold back people who speak other languages.

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The compromise: Pair icons up with text labels

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Because things are always better when we work together! Capitalise on the combined force of text and icons to solve the dilemma. And I don’t mean you should rely on hovers — make both text and icon visible at all times. Two great examples are Google Apps (because nothing says storage like a weird geometric shape...) and the iPhone App store (because the compass and magnifying glass would pose an interesting challenge without text...):

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So what comes next? (You can probably guess what I'm going to say)

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Whatever you decide to run with, test it. Use whatever techniques you have on hand to test all three possibilities — icons only, text only, and icons and text — on real people. No Pros and Cons list, however wonderful, can beat that. And you know, the results will probably surprise you. I ran a quick study recently using Chalkmark to find out where people on the ASOS women's shoes page would click to get to the homepage (and yes, I can alway find ways to make shoe shopping an integral part of my job). 28 people responded, and...

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...a whopping 89% of them clicked the logo, just 7% clicked the home icon, and just one person (the remaining 4%) clicked the label 'Home'. Enough said. Thanks for your question Cassie. To finish, here's some on-topic (and well-earned) comic relief (via @TechnicallyRon)

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In this post, Daniel Szuc describes why it’s important to go beyond how we may see our roles traditionally when only focusing on job titles. By exploring other roles, as outlined in the post that follows, we can all play a part in helping to glue a team together, making project work easier for all and creating a more positive environment to help in making meaningful project experiences.

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Collaboration is hard and needs practice 🙂↔️

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“Collaboration” is a term that gets thrown around in workplaces to encourage people to work together better. Sometimes, though, the people using the term may not understand the range of skills required to make collaboration work well, including (but not limited to) listening, expression, empathy, and curiosity.

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‍Each of these skills requires practice.

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‍So asking people to simply collaborate, without understanding the skills required nor the necessary spaces to practice these skills, may well frustrate people more than it helps.

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Misalignment 😤

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As work hums along in a team, it’s easy for misalignment to creep in. Misalignments are caused by a lack of communication, limited time, poor project management, and micro/macro issues that are addressed too late, causing friction between people. If specific roles are not put in place, these frictions can create difficult work environments, making coming to work unpleasant.

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Teams may lack common artifacts to help them communicate with a shared language, which in turn helps connect a project and business narrative together. Importantly, this helps aggregate what a team learns together from customer interviews to help improve a product or service.In effect, there is no light leading the way, so people can get lost in details that have nothing to do with a common and well understood purpose.

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Roles beyond a job title 👔

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When we speak about roles, we are not referring to traditional job titles such as project manager, developer, and designer, for example. Rather, we mean roles that everyone can play at various points in a project, helping others do their job well and the team deliver on making meaningful experiences.Roles, beyond job titles or the tasks inherent in those titles, help people think in integrated and holistic ways beyond their official job title.

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At times, our work requires that we delve deeply into design details; in other situations, we are required to step back and see how all the elements of our work connect in delivering solutions that are part of a broader narrative.As members of teams, we can work more effectively – whether it’s by advancing ideas or in recognizing when it’s time to consider alternative approaches.

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Four roles for making meaningful experiences 🎢

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We have identified four roles to encourage making meaningful experiences for the team and customers, as well as to encourage integrated ways of working:

1. Facilitators can define approaches that guide the process of informing, sense-making, and evaluating. They can craft agendas for working sessions and identify what problems need attention. Facilitators can also manage interactions between functions, aggregate a team’s learnings, and map these learnings to shared artifacts. They identify themes that require further study and set goals for the team’s next sessions.

2. Mentors need to be aware of approaches and skills that require ongoing development and practice, and organize safe spaces in which people can practice, using them over and over during working sessions and across projects. Mentors should work closely with facilitators and custodians to identify the knowledge that the team has captured and map it to a learning program for team members, with a focus on informing, sense-making, and evaluating.

3. Connectors create artifacts that help bridge gaps and make interactions between people feel more fluid, connecting people’s skills and roles.

4. Custodians maintain the knowledge base that forms over time and leverage it in creating approaches and courses that help our project teammates to improve at what they do.

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Practicing shared skills within roles ⚙️

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Independent of whether a person works in management, engineering, product management, design, user research, or some other function, there is a common set of skills of which people need to remain aware: skills that help make our project teams’ collective efforts better.Because there is an intention to integrate ways of working, collective learning makes teamwork effective and results in more meaningful experiences. Working sessions, in which people from different teams or functions come together to solve a problem, provide a common space to focus on that problem, define approaches to help solve the problem, and work through issues together.

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A team can identify the skills they practice, reflect on any gaps that may require them to expand their practice, and aggregate their learnings in common artifacts. These then help form and guide a project narrative with which the team resonates or can critique.In understanding the ways in which we work together – in essence, developing empathy for each other – we may see other benefits in addition to the work we produce.One benefit could be to move away from a blind focus on just tools and processes towards a primary focus on how we approach our work together or how we think about problems within the context of a project.

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The ways in which we interact with each other suggest that we should look at the following roles, again independent of function or job title:

1. Informing a problem - What evidence or learnings have we gained to date? What outstanding questions do we need to answer? How would the answers inform the solution to a problem we’re solving now or over time?
2. Making sense of the data we have - How can we make sense of our learnings as they pertain to specific questions or larger themes that we need to understand and for which we need to design solutions over time?
3. Evaluating designs - How can we evaluate designs and iteratively improve a product or service and its positioning over time?

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Questions for future consideration 💭

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• What roles resonate with you more?
• What roles do you think are missing?
• What skills do you need to practice in order to help your team make more meaningful experiences?
• What skills do you think are missing?
• What gaps, if any, do you recognize between roles on project teams?
• What frictions exist on a team and why do you think they occur?
• How can customer interviews – as one approach to understanding customer stories – encourage constant cycles of informing, sense-making and learning in the spirit of the learning organisation, so to help glue team practices together and create integrated ways of work?

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Acknowledgements

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Thanks to Josephine Wong for contributing to this piece. For more, see Integrated Approaches to Constant Personal Learning, Improvement, and Maturity.