Discover: excavating beyond the symptoms and understanding the lived experience of end users.

This initial phase was delivered by a series of 7 full day workshops open to anyone within the university and focused on understanding the lived experience across three core experiences – students and learning, researching and professional services.

Workshops focusing on building empathy for our primary end users and our fellow Curtin colleagues as well as building a greater understanding our common digital ambitions. A primary mechanism for uncovering the common themes and experiences was through the collaborative development of user stories.

The facilitation group comprised of 3 strategic designers, 9 business analysts and 2 Digital Champions. Digital Champions were selected as representatives from each business area to play a key role in facilitating conversations and playing back outcomes with their respective areas. The facilitation group were taken through design and facilitation training ahead of the workshops so as to support generative conversations and open sharing.

In order to share power within the room, participants were asked to rank user stories according to impact value. With typically fewer end users in the room in comparison to operational staff the votes of end users were weighted so to elevate their voice and vote. Over 450 stakeholders (students, academic staff, and professional staff) participated in the workshops resulting in over 800 user stories and 15 digital themes. Key executive members were also invited to participate in the workshops so as to provide them with the opportunity to hear directly from staff and end users.

User stories were aggregated into 200 collective user stories and reframed the original 3 experiences into 6 unique digital experiences.  Insights were synthesised in a detailed Opportunities Report that was circulated to all participants from the workshops, with full workings of aggregated user stories and 27 unique intervention opportunities identified.

In parallel to the collection of feedback from participants, a roadshow of presentations to key executives was conducted to socialise the insights and maintain engagement with the HCD approach.

Define: crystalising the collective intelligence and identifying high leverage points within the system.

Following on from the opportunities report, the insights identified were then contextualised by mapping them against the 6 digital experiences. A series of online workshops were conducted with the end users of each experience to firstly map the activities of each experience and then map the themes and intervention points across these experiences.

Workshops were run in a 100% online capacity due to the COVID19 pandemic. To ensure diverse and equitable participation, the participation list was co-designed in partnership with the Digital Champions.

The layering of the themes and intervention opportunities against the stages of each experience offered a rich understanding of the day-to-day experience for both the end user and the staff responsible for delivering core activities for the end user. Insights from this layering provided detailed design principals for each intervention opportunity which could be used as input into the ideation process of the next stage.

Insights from the workshop were published in the format of a journey map which included a breakdown of all of the design principals and a heat map of difficultly across each activity. In order to connect the live experience of users to key business objectives, a commercial analysis of the critical moments was layered onto the experience maps. Critical moments were defined by their impact on key strategic imperatives and supported the contextualisation of the lived experiences of students and staff in terms of commercial opportunities.

The final experience maps and critical moments analysis report was published to all who participated in the workshops to date and feedback was captured and integrated. A second roadshow with key executives was also conducted to share insights and continue momentum.

Develop: codesigning future state opportunities and visualising the desired future state experience.

Due to the technical complexity translating the opportunities and design principals into technical solution concepts, not all stakeholders from the previous phases were engaged in a full co-design ideation process. A core strategy team of designers, architects and technical business analysis were engaged in a product design ideation approach to developing future state conceptual designs. These concepts were then iterated on with the Digital Champions and core target groups of end users to refine the list of options down to 4 core platform-based experiences.

As the core strategy team had never developed strategic conceptual designs as part of a strategy process of this scale, expertise from leading technical consultants Gartner and local product design agencies were utilised to bolster the team’s capability. Simultaneously, the core team conducted a technical health assessment using a business architecture approach so that ideas could be evaluated in the realities of the technical landscape.

Decide: testing strategy concepts and defining delivery partnerships for implementation.

Once a series of high-fidelity conceptual designs had been defined, a third and final roadshow was conducted with key executives to share the concepts and collect ideas on options for delivery and partnership. Senior leaders were then invited to share the final concepts with their departments to collect feedback and ensure authenticity to the original needs and opportunities.

The roadshows informed a series of engagements with key executives following the roadshow to refine the priorities of the conceptual designs and decide on deliver pathways. Simultaneously, conceptual architectures were developed to inform the implementation scope needed to submit a strategic funding business case to Council.

The final business case included clear links to how the proposed strategy would solve the key business problems, meet the growing demands of customers and showed a positive ROI.