FIS

Design capability immersion and organization readiness assessment. 

The Challenge

As part of an organizational effort to become more innovative, agile, and responsive to market needs, FIS committed to transforming how they approach software design and development. This meant building teams with strong user-centered design capabilities, increasingly collaborating with users, and scaling an agile process across the product domains. The ask was to simultaneously teach and assess an existing product design team while also taking a look at the entire organzation's readiness across four main pillars – people, process, tools, and environtment.      

The Process

Seven FIS team members were relocated to New York for seven weeks to be immersed in a design thinking course to help reshape the way they approach software design and development. Over the course of the program, we worked closely with executive leadership overseeing FIS transformation to help them understand their team’s current capabilities, individual skill growth throughout the program, and any gaps that would need to be filled as they scale design.

In order to expose FIS to the frog “learn by doing” process, we developed a custom design thinking toolkit to facilitate the design and development of one of FIS’ core banking software products. A variety of workshops were conducted in order to build design capabilities and support our efforts to accurately assess the client’s current design readiness as well as create a viable action plan to prepare them for detailed design sprints. 

Critical to the process, was building tremendous trust with the embedded team, while carefully communicating back to leadership the emotional and cultural challenges transformation can have on an organization.

Over the course of the program, we discovered that individual confidence scores were diminishing rapidly as their company asked them to stretch their skills greatly. Fortunately, through collaborative workshopping, communication training, iterative design cycles, and empathetic leadership, our team was able to drive confidence back up.

Delivery and Results

The end deliverable included a robust design thinking toolkit intended to scale across a variety of design challenges within the organization,  a detailed assessment of the team’s current capabilities, a strategic readiness plan outlining the critical exit criteria for an official Sprint 1, and a 4-week series of onsite workshops to provide agile design coaching.

Moreover, the framework and curriculum created on this project helped spearhead the development of frog’s Org Activation practice, and offers a scalable model that has been leveraged globally.