Employee Experience

Role

Lead

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Objective

Establish a new portfolio at a large government agency (100,000+ employees) focused on the user experience for employees.

Methodology

Through a series of workshops, strategy studios (my own take on the design studio, but focused on developing our portfolio strategy), and discovery research, I led the portfolio team in developing our future vision, methodology for research and design, user (employee) needs statements across the IRS, research roadmap, and identifying and answering knowledge gaps. An added challenge was working in the new to IRS ideology of proactively working with clients to determine their problem statements, needs, and outputs. Not only was I tasked with setting up the new portfolio with a very different focus than the existing portfolios, but I was also implementing a culture shift.

Impact

The team went from feeling lost and overwhelmed as to how to approach this new type of work, to having a mission and values, future visioning plans, research roadmap, storyboarding strategy, documented processes, and project management and intake tools and procedures. Other units in the IRS recognized the team for their excellent work regarding the employee experience, and other UX portfolio teams reached out for collaboration – bridging the gap between the employee and user experience.

Successful culture shifts take time. The project took approximately 6 months from start to research roadmap.

The greatest achievement was not the outputs, but the evolution of the team’s ability to evolve from getting caught up in what they might not know about potential projects to being able to think on a portfolio level about the employee experience future state and move forward effectively on project work.