Improving the Board Reporting Experience

“Board Reporting”
Fannie Mae // Spring 2019 - Spring 2020
Research, Service Design, Process Improvement, Facilitation

A chief-of-staff from an executive’s office had gone through our Design Education crash course, and coming out of that session had ideas for major changes in the way that our company handled top-level executive reporting. Being a decades-old, legacy process involving hundreds of people, he knew that there were lots of things that could be improved with the process, but it seemed like an overwhelming problem.

My Role

Over the course of the year-long project, I lead a team comprised at various times of two service designers, a design strategist, a design researcher, a content specialist, and a visual designer.

Constraints

The overall process is coordinated by a central authority, yet the process varies greatly from team to team. The entire universe of contributors to the reporting is not known definitively, and their visibility into the larger process is limited. The process is frenetic and the reporting cycles overlap, adding to the confusion.

Moreover, despite being the end-customer of the process, and repeated requests for interviews, our team was unable to secure time with the company’s top management. We instead had to rely on their proxies who were high-level managers in their own right. In addition to our own misgivings, a small handful of our collaborators expressed concern that we were running a project that didn’t literally put the customer at the center of our efforts.

The Process

After preliminary discussions with our partner we had a rough understanding of the problem. However, as this process involved so many people — “contributors” — at various levels across the company, we knew that we’d have to talk to a lot more stakeholders to even being to come up with solutions.

Our first step was to create an interview guide and stakeholder map. We dove right in gathering information from several executives with ownership over the high-level process, and quickly realized the backbone of this reporting process was made up of all the various chiefs-of-staff around the enterprise. We focused further interviews with them, and saw that this process had consistencies across the company as well as major differences. We developed a service blueprint and framed additional conversations with the stakeholders around this artifact, filling in gaps in our knowledge along the way.

We also developed a survey that we launched across as many contributors as we had collected on our stakeholder map. This was the first time the process had a baseline for understanding the sentiments of all the people contributing to the process.

From our service blueprint discussions and survey results, we now felt that we had a solid understanding of the landscape. We planned and delivered a series of half-day workshops where we worked with several dozens of the process contributors to further discuss their challenges, ideate solutions, and commit to improvements.

Outcomes

From a tactical perspective our team delivered a set of refreshed visuals and content for the reporting website so that the contributors could have improved self-service.

Strategically, we created a series of artifacts that visually documented the end-to-end process for the first time. Now all stakeholders would have the ability to see how their work rolled up to the bigger picture, and see who their work actually impacted. This enabled anyone to consider future inefficiencies in the process and set up a cadence of continuous improvement.

We realized that in a process involving hundreds of people, the end-customer is not the only customer to consider when creating solutions - nor are they the logical first customer to aim for. In this process, the report contributors were also a critical constituency and in this project the most important outcome was activating their own agency to create ongoing and lasting improvements to their own process. This set up a cycle of continuous improvement whereby the contributors themselves could see a process where they had the power to design improvements to their own process.