An employee digital service that helps a leading Software and Technology Consultancy grow sustainably by aligning employees’ individual growth and the organisations’ growth.
Type
Design Strategy
User Research
Speculative Design
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Duration
10 Weeks
Team
5 People
Area
Adaptable Organisations
Organisational Design
Platform Economy
Governance and Accountability
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An Expectation Management Tool for Consultancies
Roobiks
Roobiks ensures a two-way interaction between senior management, project managers, and employees by making use of digital tools, as well as physical artifacts as conversation starters and means to provide the necessary information.
Roobiks identifies employees’ career trajectory and interests to provide them with the most suitable projects while also assisting senior managers and project managers to make better informed decisions when sourcing new projects.
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Roobiks is designed for senior management, project managers, as well as employees of all levels.
Main Features
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Capturing Interest
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While waiting to be deployed onto their next client project, employees are encouraged to type in their personal interest, professional capability and professional interest and to print out and stick this sticker onto their devices.
This sticker works as a conversation starter and enhances knowledge exchange between employees. Every time an employee prints out a sticker, the data captured across these 3 areas is automatically fed into the 'employee interests overview' of project sourcing teams, enable them to make better-informed decisions.
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Informed demand
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Project sourcing teams can now see employees' interests and strategically source projects based on this information.
When finishing working on a client project, employees estimate the impact the project had across the already existing key company values. Project sourcing teams can then access a collective impact estimation of each project and evaluate the disparity.
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Types of Projects​
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With the available data, project sourcing teams can now diagnose projects based on Market Demand, Capability, and Employee Interest. Within Roobiks we are focussing on
2 kinds of projects :-
Performance projects : These are the projects that ThoughtWorks's existing capability can do and there is a Market Demand, however, employees are not interested.
Learning Projects : Interesting for employees and there is a Market Demand but ThoughtWorks currently doesn’t have the capability to execute it. For eg: 10 ThoughtWorkers, one or more ThoughtWorkers that are not billed to the client will be added with the intention of learning. Employees are encouraged to develop new capabilities to eventually perform as a billable individual in the future.
Context
Mapping the Landscape
Future Trends
We dived into the consultancy ecosystem and through our research, we detected the following key trends that we believed would impact the future of professional services.
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Adaptable organisations - Quick to detect shifts in the operating environment, and flex appropriately.
Governance & accountability - Policies such as IR35 are changing how freelance consultants work.
Ways of working - With new technologies, there’s a constant need to learn and adapt ways of working.
Tailored solutions - White label solutions just don’t work.
Boundaries of an organisation - Leveraging external partnerships.
Sprints
Planning sprints and execution
In this project, we wanted to experiment with our methodology to execute a project of this complexity and magnitude in the best way possible.
We adopted ThoughtWorks’ way of working which is influenced by software development. We ran design sprints across 3 areas we believed we could realistically make a difference.
At the end of each sprint, we designed a broad design direction specific to ThoughtWorks.
Sprint 1 : Research & Innovation
How might we rethink growth models through insights to deliver tailored professional services to remain competitive in a platform economy?
Discover : Within the innovation landscape we raised questions like: How the needs of clients was changing in response to changes in technology and their customer behaviour? We conducted interviews with experts in the topic. We found attending events and talking to people there (“Digital Transformation Expo” and “Beta Business Maker’s Meet” hosted by Idean) also very insightful.
Define : During our ideation we broke down innovation into three phases: source, develop and deliver. We grouped the ideas that came out of the exercise. We dug deeper into the essence of the ideas and extracted the underlying ideas. It was a starting point for developing a service concept.