Organizational Reporting Transformation

An extensive transformation of the way Equifax handles financial analytics throughout their organization by auditing and recommending enhancements to existing processes and technologies to improve workflows and data integrity

 

My Role

Experience Designer—Discovery, Research

Team

Organizational Effectiveness Consultant — Sabah H.

The Problem

As a part of a larger data migration effort, Equifax seeks to modernize the USIS financial analytics reporting environment to be compatible with and leverage the new capabilities in Big Query, enabling the team to create more cohesive and automated insights.

Background

 

Our team proposed an extensive design engagement to establish the roadmap for Implementation of the transformation and also provide quick wins for prioritized reporting.

Our larger team was organized to target areas of work strategically in order to provide quick wins :

  • Design a schedule for release communications aligned to roadmap dates and estimates

  • Transformation of essential reports to Tableau

  • Construct ETL scripts in Google BigQuery to enable ingestion of data in an agile, capacity-based delivery, as prioritized and approved by Equifax

Research

 

Our team conducted interviews with Equifax employees impacted by the upcoming migration to drive understanding of current state environment and future-state reporting needs.

We used these as input to support creation of user personas, journey maps, as well as a phased roadmap for the full implementation strategy. This allowed us to create an approach to upskilling end users on new data sources and the Tableau platform

We captured feedback from users using EasyRetro during a moderated session

Personas & Journey Maps

 

As the reporting transformation will have broad impact across many roles within the organization, User Personas and Journey Maps can help the organization in understanding and surfacing user specific needs as an integral part of the implementation strategy.

Drive engagement

We encourage Equifax to grant access to people who do the same activities, regardless of their title, facilitate persona-based events, meetings, training, and invite people to only those things that are most relevant to the work they do in order to maintain a high level of engagement throughout the transformation process


Deliver user centered products

Persona-based feature prioritization can help identify who might need a feature and how critical it is to the work at hand as well as well as determine development timelines

Inform organization design

Strategies can be developed to effectively align employees with similar needs within the organization utilizing personas which can help to identify and remove redundancies and silos


Establish Audiences

We utilized personas to document how communications will focus on high impacted personas and enable efficiency with compelling, tailored messages.

Encourage empathy for users

Persona document detailing key aspects for the user like current and desired levels of proficiency can serve as as great references for Equifax during migration to understand user needs as it relates to each aspect of migration

Communications & Training Plan

 

Change Management Methodology

We utilized the Ready, Willing, Able, Stable framework for our proposals around key communications objectives required to achieve sustainable change. This allows employees to smoothly and effectively transition through a phased approach with clear messaging.

Phase I: Ready

Purpose: Raise awareness of the vison and goals of reporting transformation, Provide roadmap overview and “what’s coming”

Key Messages: What is changing; upcoming roadmap activities and timelines, Why we are doing this and “what’s in it for me”

Phase II: Willing

Purpose: Build understanding of scope and change impacts to people, processes, culture, system, Build support and buy-in for the objectives of the change

Key Messages: Articulate how reporting transformation will change and improve ways of working to drive desired outcomes, where to find more info / ask questions

Phase III: Able

Purpose: Prepare impacted user groups for transition, Communicate training and support information

Key Messages: Reinforce changes to ways of working, Training, release and post release support, How to prepare for transition,

Phase IV: Stable

Purpose: Share and celebrate success stories, Encourage feedback from end users, Reinforce support resources and channels available

Key Messages: Recap of support resources post release, Summary of success stories

Communicating Key Messages to Employees

We provided detailed points on which Equifax can provide messaging to employees during the transformation in relation to key engagement activities

Outcomes & Next Steps

 

After completing the initial strategic scope of roadmap planning, our broader team continued to assist in the reporting transformation in various ways. This allowed Equifax to drive quick wins in their immediate migration needs

Additional efforts our team continued to assist with:

  • Assess data availability for required items by sales compensation process

  • Assess user ability to build and use reports

  • Assemble a rationalized backlog of reports to be transformed, consolidated or retired