IBM Design

Role

Lead Design Facilitator

Date

October 2013 - Present

Client

Various Clients

Delivered

30+ Design Workshops

Project Overview

At IBM, design facilitation is a large, and super fun part of my job. I’ve facilitated many design workshops with internal teams as well as with clients. When I was a product designer on Watson Discovery Advisor we had limited access to target users, so we decided to hold a design thinking workshop which helped us build trust with these users and opened the door to site visits and additional interviews. As a designer in the Watson organization I’ve collaborated with other designers, business specialists, and solution architects to develop an AI flavor of design thinking. The AI design workshop incorporates a user-centered, problem solving approach with AI expertise. I’ve facilitated these AI design workshops to clients all over the world with great results. I’ve also facilitated design workshops with internal IBM teams. IBM is a massive company with hundreds of disparate teams, many of the legacy teams especially struggle with outdated technologies and processes. Internally, I’ve worked with these teams to examine their workflow and redesign their internal system.

Description

One particular design workshop I facilitated in 2016 stands out due to the great group dynamics and the subject matter. This workshop was a three-way collaboration between IBM Watson, Welltok (a wellness company), and Magellan (a company for veterans health). The problem statement we focused on for this workshop was to create a cognitive system to prevent veteran suicides. That is a big problem! The target users that we focused on during the workshop were the veterans, their close relationships, and their medical care team. We examined the difficulty veterans have leaving active duty and returning home without job despite being skilled, and often times returning with medical and/or psychological issues. We constructed empathy maps, current user scenarios, identified pain points, brainstormed solutions, examined how Watson could enhance the ideas, and created a detailed task plan and roadmap. At the end of the workshop we walked away with a detailed solution concept for a tool that enables a veteran to find the right medical team, a job that works for their special skill set, and connects them to a support network of other veterans.