GlaxoSmithKline
A World Class Financial Planning & Analysis Service (SaaS)
Supporting the transformation of global accounting practices
The mission
GSK is going through an ambitious and challenging digital transformation journey to create a world class financial planning and analysis service.
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Introduce a new cloud technology service to replace or enhance existing systems and tools.
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Establish common financial processes, inline with industry best practice, across the 4 company divisions: Commercial, R&D, Supply Chain & Corporate.
Known issues & challenges
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Data sources, tools & methods vary across divisions, from region to region, and even person to person.
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Restricted to offline tools and manual processes for the creation, distribution, storage and approval of data, files & reports.
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Resistance to adopting the new technology due to concerns about job displacement, unfamiliarity with the technology, the perceived difficulty of adapting to change, or even the chance that it does not offer improvements to previous tools & methods.
Overview
I was engaged by GSK as a service designer to ensure that user experience was a primary consideration in all decision making.
But… until I joined, the programme team had limited exposure to user experience, so I first had to educate them about the benefits of UX and design thinking, and in some cases what UX actually is.
It was also perceived that, due to established working practices (especially within engineering), my efforts or input would not add any tangible value.
Design contribution(s)
Research
Business analysis
Process maps
Service blueprints
Workshops
Role, duration & client
Service manager
6 months (2023)
GlaxoSmithKline
Tools
Word, Excel, Mural
Phase 1: Selecting a software partner
Two final vendors competed to win the business. Each was challenged with producing a working proof of concept that covered the most common processes and integrated with existing systems and data.
Challenge
Review each vendor's products and services to assess their ability to provide a great user experience.
Vendor product heuristic evaluation tool (*see contribution 3)
Contribution 1
Manage the creation and processing of an internal usability survey where internal users were asked to review and provide feedback on each POC.
Outcome
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Survey data and most relevant (pos & neg) verbatim comments where extracted for inclusion in the vendor assessment report.
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Thematic analysis used to generate an evidence-based set of prioritized improvements for future consideration.
Initial discovery steerco presentation
Contribution 2
Engaged each vendor directly and had detailed discussions to understand more about their products from a user experience perspective. The objective was to understand the limitations and scope for influence on the product and to assess their design capabilities and practices as a future partner of GSK.
Outcome
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Produced a report about each vendor’s willingness, capability & scope for change in response to suggested UX improvements.
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Although not included in the final assessment my feedback did contribute to the final decision by providing additional insight and/or confidence.
Contribution 3
Created a bespoke Excel usability heuristic evaluation tool based on the 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design to personally assess each POC *(main image above)
Outcome
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The tool provided grading with a 5 point likert scale, and prioritised recommendations, against the 10 NN usability heuristics over 106 data points.
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The result also provided an unbiased usability scorecard which was included in the final assessment report.
Phase 2: Common processes & practices
Understand how planning and analysis were currently performed across all regions and divisions and define a common set of practices.
Challenge
Baseline the as-is experience & define the to-be state for common use cases
Contribution 4
In the previous phase I performed explorative research & process mapping, which I’d played back to the programme, primarily to show value and encourage acceptance.One aspect in particular - capturing user pain points & frustrations, caused a step change within the programe and specifically the engineers: They had never felt the need to ask users why change was required, and therefore had no measurable way to prove solutions targeted existing problems or even alleviated user frustrations.
Outcome
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Pain point capture is now standard practice and is included in all requirements gathering processes & templates (at least amongst that engineering team, for now).
Current state single experience map
Contribution 5
The project now entered the official process mapping & requirements gathering stage, for which each business unit was held responsible. I knew the business units would struggle with the request so I facilitated a series of workshops and undertook the mapping process itself to ensure deadlines & deliverables would be met.
Outcome
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Focusing on this single division (Commercial) I engaged 4 regional teams mapped YY common processes and revealed ZZ variants.
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Refined each process into a desired state (aligned with GSK’s quest for commonality).
Contribution 6
I wanted to use all the insight and user feedback captured from previous user research as the validation criteria for measuring the success of any proposed solutions.
Outcome
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Formulated 3 experience measures, derived from the key areas of frustration and complaint expressed by users.
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Each measure could be used to quantify any proposal, and included a simple formula for testing the proposal in comparison to the original problem.
Experience measures & guidelines
Key learnings
I became so deeply involved with supporting the business and mapping the processes (which was crucial) I lost sight of the need to produce a plan for the senior business stakeholder to show how I would contribute to the next phase.