Institute of Design (ID) Academy is an executive educational platform that empowers organisations with design insights and practical applications. Through interactive courses and coaching, it promotes design integration in business strategies, driving value discovery and cultural transformation.
ID Academy has historically relied on ad-hoc procedures when engaging with its institutional partners like Ford, UChicago Medicine, Northwestern Mutual, etc. Over time, a set of recurring practices have emerged as best practices. The project aimed to document this knowledge to enhance transparency and institutional wisdom for collaborative work.
Objectives
The needs were to streamline partner engagement processes for efficiency & prepare for ID Academy's growth.
The project aimed to achieve the following strategic objectives:
Gain a comprehensive understanding of our current partner engagement processes and systems.
Streamline and optimize our existing processes and systems to boost efficiency.
Anticipate potential challenges associated with the scaling of ID Academy.
Constraints
The existing challenges were in documenting unrecorded processes, & difficulties in identifying relevant stakeholders due to unclear roles.
Project Scope
The project was focused on the journey of 'Bespoke courses'. This included the stages from contract setup with organizations to course material creation, delivery, and eventual evaluation.
Time-Intensive Descriptive Phase
A significant duration was spent understanding existing processes, hampered by the lack of documented procedures.
Stakeholder Ambiguity
The lack of documentation made it difficult to identifying the right stakeholders, necessitating multiple meetings to understand their role and contribution.
Desired Impact
The desired state was to achieve improved operational efficiency, stakeholder alignment and better financial management.
Efficiency in Operations: Streamlined processes from contract creation to course delivery.
Stakeholder Alignment: Ensuring all stakeholders are informed and synchronized.
Scalability Preparedness: Proactively identifying and addressing challenges.
Financial Management: Enhanced tracking for timely payments.
Diversification of Offerings: Introduction of open-school courses for individual learners.
Solution
We documented current processes, developed improved protocols and gave recommendations.
We developed a set of protocols and documented the entire Bespoke course journey. We also created a file structure and naming convention for a shared Google Drive space that all stakeholders could access.
impact
The created protocols helped clarify roles, a new Operations Manager was hired and onboarded.
This project is still in the implementation stage. A new operations head has been hired, new job descriptions are developed and there are talks of hiring a Director for the Academy. A calendar is set up to begin planning events in advance, the Google Drive space is being actively utilised and accounts are being tracked using the engagement tracker.
Process
Tools used: Service blueprint, ERAF diagram, swim-lane diagram, internal process protocols, folder architecture
Our journey with the ID Academy began with an extensive analysis to comprehend the existing state of its operations. Engaging with a wide range of stakeholders, we embarked on developing a service blueprint focused on the custom course journey. These courses, designed to meet the unique requirements of each client, based on their design maturity and specific needs, presented a complex challenge. Our initial blueprint was incomplete, raising numerous questions without straightforward answers due to stakeholder ambiguity.
To gain deeper insights into the system, we employed an Entities, Relationships, Attributes, and Flows (ERAF) mapping technique. This approach revealed significant gaps, such as the academy's isolation from the broader design community and our reliance on the IIT administration for handling payments. These findings prompted us to delve into the complexities of the system.
Realizing the limitations of our service blueprint in capturing individual stakeholder transactions, we shifted our focus to a swim lane diagram. This tool helped us delineate the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders more effectively.
Our analysis uncovered a lack of clarity and designated responsibility for numerous tasks. We noticed that stakeholder transitions often occurred without proper hand-offs or documentation, leading to information and process gaps. To address these issues, we dedicated time to refine our understanding and began to document streamlined process protocols aimed at minimizing hand-offs and enhancing communication clarity (protocol images above).
Furthermore, we established a shared Google Drive to foster ease of use and transparency among stakeholders, organizing the content into a structured folder system for better accessibility. We also built an engagement tracker on Excel for internal financial management.
Reflections
Thoughts about the project.
It is vital to demand concrete evidence when documenting protocols and procedures. Accepting information at face value can lead to overlooked discrepancies and gaps.
Lack of evidence is evidence itself - for the gaps we encountered and didn’t find answers to, we built a better version of the solution.
Designing flexible protocols is crucial. These should be easy to amend, akin to adjustments on a mural board rather than fixed in a slide deck. Such flexibility supports continuous optimization and adaptation to emerging needs.
A design's value is proven through its usability. See through some of the implementation at least, no design is complete without iterations.
Gallery
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