My Facilitation Work

Planned and conducted a multi-day workshop with executives from organizations involved in a merger. Leveraged a Joint Application Design approach to create a vision of a new organization, and then facilitated conversations to establish basic teams, roles and responsibilities that the client could then use to further outline their new organizational structure and KPI's.

Planned and facilitated team-based workshop for client's multiple UX teams to align around a reorganization that put all of the teams in a single organization. This multi-day session focused on identification of core skills and capabilities needed with plans for gap closure. The group then moved into identification and planning of key processes and approaches to meet organizational needs while remaining true to user experience best practices.

I planned and facilitated a highly sensitive executive conversation around the new brand strategy for a hotel brand's loyalty program after a major acquisition during the acquisition silence period. Given that the executives had limited availability and the sensitivity around the topic, the session had to be compact, well planned and tightly executed. The group came away with agreement on key areas of contention around brand messaging and an initial approach to move forward with implementation.

I was the lead facilitator for dozens of these workshops with clients of varying sizes around the world. I conducted them live or remotely. During these sessions I worked in real time with a prototyper and business analyst.

My role as facilitator was to walk the group of stakeholders through the process of identifying core user needs, key process or navigational flows, must-have requirements, and desired outputs in the span of a 4-hour workshop. My peers captured requirements and produced a working visualization during the workshop, and the attendees left with a collection of user stories or requirements and a working visualization that could then be shared with others in the organization to generate interest, or continue into deeper definition activities prior to software development.

Some of the more interesting facilitation efforts I performed:

• A training department leader for a major aircraft producer wanted to unite the various enterprise training tools into a single portal. I facilitated a session to create a future state portal whereby all training tools were displayed. He then used this visualization to sell it to department lead colleagues in order to secure their budget to create customized portal views for their teams.
• I facilitated a round of workshops for Veterans and their caregivers to define the first version of the tool that would become My Healthevet.com, which remains in existence today.
• I facilitated international sessions with business leaders of an FinTech organization seeking to create a new service portal. We had conducted JAM sessions with the core business team in the US based on their requirements backlog and had the prototype to a level of functionality that allowed international users to understand the purpose and direction of this portal. The international sessions were intended to drive key stakeholder buy-in and capture/refine any remaining requirements or design changes. In the end, the portal prototype was accepted globally by users at multiple levels of the organization.

The organization wanted to become more human-centered. The COO requested my recommendation for how to infuse user-oriented thinking. I proposed a design thinking workshop and competition in which a select group of team members would live the design experience for the week with intensive coaching, and then carry this information and approach back to their teams.

Dozens of people applied for this program; attendees were selected on the basis of the creativity of their application as well as their potential to influence peers. Each day of the weeklong workshop, attendees received direct instruction in design thinking principles and then had the chance to meet with their teams to step through the principle applied to solving real employee experience challenges. At the end of the week, the teams pitched their well-formed ideas to a panel of executives.

The winning team's idea was funded and was eventually included in the organization's digital transformation roadmap. The attendees continued to evangelize and teach user-centered approaches to their teammates and peers. They described the experience as "Transformative."