Syngenta IT Simplification
Identify the key areas that cause complexity within Syngenta's platforms and overall experience by speaking to key team members across all teams. Analyze our findings and build out actionable recommendations to support the team in addressing these complexities and streamlining their IT + internal experiences.
Tools
My Role
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AGENCY PROJECT
As the primary UX Strategist/Designer on this project, I supported the project lead by conducting over 35 stakeholder interviews across six business areas. I organized and analyzed the insights, identifying key complexities. I then led the presentation build and storytelling for our recommendations, utilizing my strategy background.
Project Overview
Syngenta's North America team had concerns with how the complexity with their IT ecosystem was potentially impacting business and overall experience. They brought in our team to help identify the key elements that are making their systems so complex and provide them recommendations on how they can tackle such a massive initiative.
Timeline | 4 months duration
September 2023 - January 2024
KEY ACTIVITIES
01.
STAKEHOLDER
INTERVIEWS
02.
SYNTHESIZE + ANALYZE
03.
PRESENT
SOLUTIONS
OUR FOCUS + MY RESPONSIBILITIES
USERS AND AUDIENCE
In this project our users were Syngenta's own stakeholders, ranging from C Suite level executives to Management of various business divisions. The key was to get a wide range of feedback to get a better view into what and how complexities were felt across the company. Syngenta is a company with a complex integration of various back end data connections, this. has created inefficiencies in day to day operations and has impacted ability to efficiently expand. The 35 stakeholder interviews were foundational for this project as it gave us details into indirect effects that should be considered in our simplification recommendations.
MY ROLE + RESPONSIBILITIES
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Collaborate on execution of 35 stakeholder interviews
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Synthesize all data collected from interviews and analyze
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Uncover opportunities for simplification/optimization, enhancements, or net new suggestions
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Support our recommendations with qualitative and quantitative data
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Develop a clear presentation that illustrates. our ideas and emphasizes the impact on business
CHALLENGES
POOR DATA QUALITY + INTEGRITY
From previous work with Syngenta, I knew of some specific complexities that they face as an organization coming into this engagement. A lot of these needed to be considered for it was likely impacting this area of their business as well and we were hoping to draw the thread of these considerations in our final read out.
SILOED TEAMS + PROCESSES
RESISTENCE TO CHANGE
01.
Stakeholder Interviews
STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS
The project lead and I began by working together on questions for our stakeholder interviews, our approach would be to ask a set of standard questions regardless of role/responsibilities as well as craft specific questions depending on which area of the business they primarily were focused. The high volume was key to not only get a sampling of every business area but also every level, since many of the inefficiencies were not just technology related, but also internal process inconsistency. My project lead was the main interviewer while I took in depth notes and began organizing the data from interviews to be able to do an in depth analysis when completed.
ANALYSIS
As we finished the final few interviews I was already taking all the notes gathered and organizing them in a Miro board to help drawing initial insights. In total we collected 371 quotes from our stakeholder interviews that were able to give us a clearer view into the main themes and factors that caused the complexities within the organization. First step was to begin to tag these quotes with which areas of the business they were specifically referring to, this would later enable me to easily drill down to key areas and draw different qualitative data to support our recommendations. While I tagged quotes I also was considering and categorizing the key themes I continued to see, ultimately helping us identify what makes Syngenta so complex. This became a key question in our process, it would enable us to better approach the findings and produce succinct suggestions.
I created a spreadsheet to better organize the tagged quotes, this enabled me to easily filter through tags and pull out more specific insights from all the information we gathered. This also made for a great artifact to provide the team at the end of the engagement to be able to easily see what informed our recommendations. Below you can see an example of my final spreadsheet, including a cleaned up version of the quote, all tags, the key related insight, and if we identified them as a top insight.
WHAT MAKES SYNGENTA SO COMPLEX?
Data Quality and Integration
Prioritization and Governance
Engineering Challenges
Design System an UX Standards
SOLVING FOR COMPANY COMPLEXITIES
Our research and analysis was complete, and supported our identification of 4 key elements that made Syngenta so complex and ultimately causing most of their internal challenges. These were the guided us in the development of our solutions, each of which would directly alleviate these complexities and ultimately encourage lasting change. Based off our analysis and findings we elaborated on what exactly was driving these complexities. With each, we also included a quote and a number that showed how many times this issue was mentioned to emphasize significance.
THE SOLUTIONS
Our solutions were not only addressing these critical areas, but I needed our team to consider the difficulty and resistance I've experienced in the past with Syngenta implementing large organizational change. This prompted us to propose Change Enablement as a separate initiative, and emphasize to the client that this is foundational to truly making the impact they want to see.
Event-Driven Arthitecture
Persona-Based Data Domains
Design System
FOUNDATIONAL
Change Enablement
Given the potential amount of organizational change, Change Enablement is going to be a key driver in our recommendations. We see it as vital for success in Syngenta's simplification initiative.
TRACKING IMPACT + PROGRESS
We also wanted to highlight to our client that Metrics and KPIs chosen with purpose and supports product success. With each solution we have recommended specific metrics to enable a quick view into how change is progressing and where to adjust. Bringing it back to metrics was to remind the teams it's not only utilized measure product success but in addition
PRESENTING CONTEXT AND APPROACH
Through our process, we had collected a lot of evidence to support our findings as well as an extensive explanation of recommended approach. This was a common thread throughout the final presentation I built, providing industry metrics examples to provide a confident justification for the solutions we proposed.
It helped the team tell Syngenta the full story—the what, why, and how of their IT simplification issues and resolutions. I crafted an organizational approach to our deck: focusing on the solution as the sections, and each section providing details on Syngenta's current progress status, which complexities would be resolved, the outcome on operations, a step-by-step recommended approach, and finally how it will impact for the business.
EXAMPLE
OUTCOMES
Our analysis provided us strong foundation for our recommended approaches and ample support for each. But we also wanted to emphasize for our client that although each of these separate initiatives could positively impact business, collectively executing them is where the long-lasting and true change will occur.
The conclusion of the presentation focused on implementation, and I developed this slide to the left to emphasize the above point: To see the opportunity areas 100% solved for, it requires all 4 recommendations working together. It was key to understand with these transformations was that implementing one or a combination of them may only partially solve the problems. This was a visual that the client loved and felt it really told the story in its entirety.
Syngenta was extremely impressed with our findings and especially receptive to our final presentation and immediately began structuring teams and plans to prepare the business for implementing change.
