Project phoenix and the art of collaboration — Part I
By: Jenny Price
Tags: Remote Working, Design Thinking, Collaboration

It started with a provocation

We all must be obsessed with continually delighting our clients. At every interaction, we must strive to offer them the best experience and value. The only way to lead in today’s ever-changing marketplace is to constantly innovate according to what our clients want and need.

- Arvind Krishna, first day as IBM CEO, April 6, 2020

This provocation sparked an idea that turned into a proposal for the IBM Design Patterns Program.

IBM.com is our corporate flagship website and main channel for our customers across the entire portfolio and through all stages of their journeys. It is a place where our customers come to conduct all pre- and some level of post-purchase activities. It also serves as the main digital channel for sharing corporate information and news.

The Digital Growth & Commerce design team drives innovation at IBM, one of the enterprise digital information technology leaders in the world, by creating the next generation IBM.com experiences to help users while delivering enterprise-wide business results. Given this project encompasses the entire IBM.com platform, it will cover the various industries for all of IBM’s portfolio — B2B products and services.

As part of the Digital Growth & Commerce mission, our primary users are distributed teams of content publishers, who use our digital platforms to create and author website content to IBM.com. These globally distributed teams need tools and frameworks that allow them to design and build their own IBM.com experiences effectively and efficiently. These tools and frameworks are essential in maintaining an alignment to the larger scope of IBM.com as a whole, so that the resulting experiences are consistent and coherent.

IBM.com is a collection of individual, bespoke journeys, serving multiple business units and internal teams. By creating an experience model, which includes aspects that encompass a broad range of dimensions such as journey, interaction models, stylistic perspectives and brand consideration, we will enable our distributed publishing teams to maintain an understanding of and alignment to the larger scope of IBM.com. The result is an IBM.com that is not only consistent and coherent, but increasingly performant across all of our highly prioritized journeys.

IBM Design Project Phoenix Team from L — R: Oscar Dumlao, Mauricio Monroy Andrade, Delaney Rundell, Olivia Bowman, Stephanie Boyls, William Ryan

Enter the IBM Design Patterns Program

Remote collaboration can be daunting. Whether it’s across multiple groups of stakeholders or a smaller subset, strategic program coordination, communication, and alignment best practices need to be established. Though remote work is familiar to IBMers given we are distributed across studios around the globe, we are continually reassessing and reinventing ways of working collaboratively.

Now more than ever, communicating effectively and navigating IBM’s large, complex enterprise-wide ecosystem continues to be essential to our daily work. Project Phoenix formed as part of the IBM Design Patterns Program. This program is an accelerated incubator that gives early career professionals the ability to jump feet-first, with some support, into a real project for a stakeholder group at IBM. Patternites leave the program with a foundation in IBM Enterprise Design Thinking principles, a new-found confidence in their abilities, and a network they can rely on as they grow in their careers.

The team included five sponsoring team members, five sponsor users, and 10 stakeholders located in the United States. The six Patterns team members were also scattered across time zones, with locations outside of the United States as well. While managing multiple schedules across several time zones, we were able to gather essential insights and consensus through several best practices outlined below, which informed this incubator project’s transformational journey and outcomes.

Key practices that the DGC Sponsoring Team implemented to ensure the collaboration between the Patterns design team, sponsor adopters, and stakeholders could be as effective as possible included:

Introduction. Provided proper access to learn more about the sponsor users and stakeholders beforehand. This guidance assisted the Patterns team in being able to ask the right research questions.

Provided proper access to learn more about the sponsor users and stakeholders beforehand. This guidance assisted the Patterns team in being able to ask the right research questions. Preparation. Provided project summary materials and domain context readily available, so the sponsor adopters and stakeholders could learn who the target users are and what user pain points they are solving for. A list of the questions were prepared by the sponsoring team to help kick off the interviews.

Provided project summary materials and domain context readily available, so the sponsor adopters and stakeholders could learn who the target users are and what user pain points they are solving for. A list of the questions were prepared by the sponsoring team to help kick off the interviews. Communication. Provided consistent communication between everyone involved as a priority. From daily Slack check-ins to question, and discussion follow-ups, to shared links for resources and recording for playbacks.

Provided consistent communication between everyone involved as a priority. From daily Slack check-ins to question, and discussion follow-ups, to shared links for resources and recording for playbacks. Transparency. Provided proper feedback and clear expectations. It can be challenging to arrive to a solution that meets the users’ needs and solves the correct problem if the team is not aligned. Throughout, the sponsoring team led with honesty and transparency while creating a safe space for everyone to communicate so we could align on direction.

Discovering “The Newcomer”

From the beginning of our project, Team Phoenix was tasked with a problem statement that felt equal parts vague and broad. With just a five week window to absorb, research, and produce a high-fidelity solution, we were presented with the challenge of designing “a delightful B2B website while maintaining consistency and coherence in 40 million pages owned by various business units and teams across the globe, each with slightly different contexts and objectives, while also serve the corporate level missions.”

Even digesting the scope of this project took time. How could we deliver a unified design solution for end users and business units alike with 40 million pages already laid out? The countless angles of potential approach were daunting, and our methods shifted almost constantly throughout the project.