It’s a tale as old as corporations… you show up to the office and your laptop is dead. This is already stressful enough without your boss asking about updates to the slide deck. And now you’ve been told it may take days to get a new laptop?? What gives?! What am I supposed to do in the meantime?!

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Or what about the all too familiar: “Hey neighbor, any idea how to get access to XYZ?” only to find out that none of the FIVE help desks you called have any idea how to get you the access you need

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Or my personal favorite: It’s your first day on the job, and you need to call the Helpdesk to get access to the corporate network. But since you're not yet in the system, the agent has to call your manager to verify your identity. So far, so good—until the agent asks your manager to answer their own security questions, while you're still on the line. Now you know the answers to your boss’ security questions. Great start.

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and so much more…

As the department UX Subject Matter Expert (SME) I led the entire corporate-wide initiative to align & unify the frustrating technical help experience for employees

This included the following:

• Conducting contextual inquiry interviews to understand the daily experience of both employees seeking help AND the support staff providing the help

• Planning all activities of an exploratory design thinking workshop to uncover pain points throughout the technical help journey on both the help seeking side and the help providing side

• Securing the logistics and participants of the initial design thinking engagement

• Facilitating the design thinking workshop while simultaneously actively guiding the exploration process to maximize the time we had with various corporate SMEs

• Synthesizing and delivering executive-level insights to obtain buy-in to move forward with the next stage of the process (making changes based on feedback collected)

• Creating service maps for our primary 3 personas’ technical-help journeys to align all stakeholders on actual current state / source of truth

• Strategizing / Conceptualizing all required initiatives to satisfy the real-world requirements of the semi-fictitious personas

• Forming and leading the corporate-wide Task Force of many teams and departments to address the pain points plaguing employees in all areas of the company

• Driving alignment & project managing the multi-year Employee Experience (EX) strategy

• Creating all deliverables owed from my own team (including documentation, intranet websites, executive pitch decks, change management strategies, data gathering, data analysis, KPI monitoring, cross-functional departmental interface, road-shows, and so much more

There were many results from this effort, for the most significant of the overall results, please see the next section

However the initial project deliverables were the following:

• Executive pitch deck outlining the insights from the workshop

• A proposed list of improvement initiatives for adoption and execution

• Polished service maps of the journey

• Standing up a Task Force to coordinate the execution of the improvement initiatives and ensure alignment with the initial findings

• Socialize these findings with the department and relevant departments & teams

There were many advancements and optimizations that were directly and indirectly made from this project. However the most impactful changes that I oversaw were the following:

• Unifying the support documentation of 7+ separately managed help desks into one location on the corporate intranet (became #1 visited intranet site within 3 months of launch)

• Permanent in-office technical support areas for walk-up support

• Creation of a prioritization system to handle tickets based in severity instead of simply when they were received

• Updating hundreds of support documents to current technology and practices

• New types of training for help desk staff

• Implementation of self-service tools to reduce ticket bloat to the primary help desk

• Deployment of lockers so employees could pick up laptops & peripherals at their leisure from the in-office tech support areas

• Deployment of employee vending machines so peripheral devices (and the like) could be done entirely self-service

• Ability to “make an appointment” with the help desk vs. all tickets happening ad-hoc

• Spurred the adjacent large-scale initiative of unifying the 5 separate internal software portals into a single point of entry

• Informed changes to the new employee portal for data and access requests

• Many back-end process changes with the help desk staff

• and so much more…

• Executive-level buy-in is the difference between being able to get on people’s calendars vs. hearing crickets (in other words, name-dropping moves the needle)

• Even when you have the appropriate executive buy-in most departments and teams won’t understand why this project is their problem

• People will try to defend their jobs by poking holes in your methodologies

• Having project management support makes all the difference

• Everything is more complicated when functions are outsourced to a vendor

• At this point in time I had been an employee of Mastercard for about 11 years, and these frustrations had been top of mind for me since my first day. It felt great knowing that I had helped solve problems that not only myself, but 30k+ other people were experiencing as well

• It was my first project making systematic organization-wide changes to a company

• For the first time ever, UX & Design Thinking had been introduced to a team that touches the whole company and had the opportunity to benefit every day from said methodologies