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Setting the foundations for increased efficiency and team collaboration and ensuring external users can complete their tasks with minimal assistance.
Context & objective
The Teachers Registration Board of Tasmania (TRBT) sought to improve their approach to managing Teacher Registrations. They used the need to upgrade their outdated CRM as an opportunity to review their direction and strategy.
An HCD-led approach moved the scope beyond a technology upgrade to a broader digital transformation, changing the objective from tech upgrade to improving operational efficiency, ensuring platform stability, managing operational risk, as well as reviewing processes and interactions between teams and technologies to enhance the user experience for the TRB team, teachers, and schools.
My role
As Design Lead, I engaged with users to map user flows, identify pain points and needs, and turn them into high-level functional requirements. These requirements were then prioritised to inform a transformation roadmap.
The approach
A brainwriting session helped identify needs and pain points.
An analysis of the current user-system interaction led to the identification of user pain points and needs, which were as follows:
I need control and customisation. Users need to know the state of each process and be able to adapt the system's functionalities to their specific needs.
I need to prevent errors when possible and quickly recover from them: users need to ensure data is of high quality and access learning resources and how-to guides to help them optimise their efficiency.
I need integration and automation: users need one system only to minimise manual tasks and rework.
I need governance: secure information, shared information, preserved knowledge, and shared processes.
Interviews with internal staff and teachers allowed me to draft 'AS IS' user journeys for nine user types, including what they do, think and how they feel. Ideation workshops led to drafting user journeys 'TO BE', which informed the high-level requirements.
I mapped several user flows for TRB staff (example above) and teachers.
A solution health-check determined the following areas for improvement:
Consolidation: Multiple processes happened outside the CRM, reducing the ability to form a 360-degree view of teachers/individuals. These processes were identified and addressed through simplified process flows.
Lack of Automation: We pinpointed and addressed several manual processes within the CRM that we were able to automate through new technology and simplified process flows.
Application Lifecycle: The current version of the CRM was out of support and should be upgraded.
Identity: The process of managing accounts for teachers/individuals was far from optimal. We reviewed the process to streamline the account creation and allow for self-service account management (such as resetting passwords).
Portal Interface: The portal met current needs, but we recommended redesigning it to support the streamlined process flows.
Portal Structure: The CRM tightly couples with the current portal. We needed to decouple them to support the upgrade process by creating an integration layer between the CRM and the portal instead of maintaining a direct connection.
A co-creation workshop allowed us to review the findings of the discovery phase and refine a list of high-level user requirements, which were prioritised utilising an importance-effort matrix, thus defining what an MVP would be from a user need standpoint.
Involving users in co-creation workshops avoids the risk of 'design-by-committee'.
System requirements are prioritised on an importance-effort matrix.
The outcome
Thanks to a thorough discovery process, we had grounds to recommend a holistic solution that considered systems, processes, and mindset rather than simply a platform.
Systems: The new CRM is only one pillar of a more comprehensive system architecture, including—but not limited to—the website and the teachers' portal. These must be integrated to fully benefit users.
Processes: The user journeys describing current experiences highlighted how most processes require manual intervention, extensive QA and data rework and the use of workarounds to achieve the desired outcome, leading to inefficiencies and user frustration.
The new system will provide the opportunity to redesign and simplify all current processes. The To-Be user journeys provide a high-level snapshot of the ideal user experience.
Mindset: To successfully achieve change, users should wholly adopt the new systems and processes. This adoption requires a mindset shift.
Sometimes, the new flows are shorter, and sometimes, they involve the same number of steps but are optimised through automation and using a smaller number of systems.
A mindset shift is crucial in change management: it helps individuals and organisations embrace new ways of thinking, which is essential for adapting to and sustaining change.
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