Global Engineering Firm's Intranet Optimization Research

TL;DR:

I conducted extensive qualitative and quantitative research to discover pain points, create user archetypes, and prioritize opportunities to optimize an international engineering corporation’s internal tools and systems.

Goals:

I was a major contributor to the research planning, execution, and synthesis process for this in-depth intranet research project. Our goals were:

• Discover the client’s organizational goals for the future of their company’s intranet.
• Uncover employee's key motivations and pain points when utilizing internal tools and systems.
• Distill a diverse and distributed workforce into meaningful archetypes.
• Envision a more connected, cohesive employee experience.

Process:

INTERVIEWS

My team and I began by creating a series of tailored interview guides, first for stakeholders and then followed by users:

• Conducted 17 qualitative stakeholder interviews to understand the problem space and the client's expectations for deliverables and outcomes.
• Generated a list of hypotheses to test with users—primary software engineers and their managers.
• Interviewed 18 engineering employees across North America, Latin America, India, and Europe.
• Cataloged existing pain points across +15 internal tools and systems.

SURVEY 

Informed by our qualitative investigation, we worked with data scientists to develop a quantitative survey to validate our findings at scale. Our survey focused on:

• Validating existing pain points.
• Identifying key tasks distinguished by role.
• Understanding behavioral differences based on region and culture.
• Ranking concepts for the future state intranet

The survey was created in Qualtrics and sent to engineers and engineering managers across the client's organization. After gathering over 2,300 responses from employees around the world, we analyzed the survey responses to generate insights and prioritize users’ pain points and tasks. 

PRIORITIZATION

I then synthesized the information analyzed by the data science team it into several prioritization charts and presented them in a prioritization session with the client's CIO:

ARCHETYPES

I also spearheaded the effort to create data-driven user archetypes based on the survey results:

• Worked with our senior data scientist to elicit patterns from the survey based on polarizing questions.
• Used a matrix approach to differentiate the users by their behaviors and preferences related to the intranet.
• Created 4 divergent employee archetypes to guide the future state design process.

Impact:

Our insights were well-received by the client's CIO and other C-Suite executives. They included:

• Engineering managers are affected much more than non-managers by intranet issues.
• Managers created complicated workarounds to bypass difficult to use or redundant tools. 
• Non-managers frequently asked their managers for help in resolving problems with internal tools and systems, further reducing managers' efficiency.
• 3 of the 6 most difficult to execute tasks for managers were crucial for organizational success and revenue generation.
• Many issues can be solved not only by streamlining tools but also by how those tools are used, i.e. the client's processes.

Most importantly, this work impressed our client's parent organization, a large Japanese corporation—and led to a continuation of the project and even more revenue!