Rethink resource management for the Swiss Federal Railways
Our project vision:
The Job: Digitization of the resource planning of rolling stock and personnel towards an integrated production planning. More efficient, flexible and robust.
Northstar: We want to create a holistic new way of working so that employees can achieve the required outcomes and have enough mental capacity and time to continuously reflect and improve the way of working. We always look at process, tool and culture holistically to get there. (To be honest, this is not yet the vision that SBB promotes, but I am in the process of convincing the relevant stakeholders of this more outcome oriented vision)
Why this is necessary: The planning of trains and staff is done today with a very complex process and unsuitable tools. In the future, we will have even more demanding framework conditions in Switzerland due to increased traffic and the need for flexibility. It is foreseeable that we will no longer be able to act with the current approach.
How to approach this: SBB has set up a team (IPP "integrated production planning" program) to optimize the areas of process, tool and people. It is defined, that the new tool has to be a standard software purchased externally.
User Research: Problem analysis of current tools, processes and needs of the 700 employees
Workshops with four potential providers for the tool, to learn how we could become better and learn what we need in the future
Continuously developing a new possible core process, designed from the learnings
Requirements engineering for the procurement process
Continuous cultural and process transformation by actively integrating the affected employees into the design of the new process and ways of working (human centered design)
Biggest challenge: There have been many changes and reorganisations within the last years at SBB. You can feel easily that the employees are fed up with badly managed changes. Also we have a very bad learning culture, bad feedback culture and also strongly defended silos. So, let’s change this ;)
My achievements in the role UX Architect and Transformation Coach
Implemented and continuously improved the way we follow the human centred design mindset (integrating Lean UX and Design Thinking aspects). The management was barely aware of it and it is today a common way of acting in our team.
Promoted and set the mindset of looking holistically on process, tool and culture and this way also enhanced the way we work collaboratively together.
Designed and facilitated a workshop series (problem analysis) with which we gained an understanding for the problems of the current state and identified the action points.
Developed the functional and non functional UX criterias as part of the procurement process of our new tool, by analyzing our future user needs
Designed and facilitated workshop series to develop our future core process and northstar to guide the work of our team and also integrated other departments to make our vision even more holistically.
Assessed the change impacts of our new processes to understand early what this means for the employees and what actions e.g. training we need to design with our transformation team.
My powers are a mixture of hands on ux and workshop skills to understand and solve problems but also creating concepts and big visions that change the way we work.
How I work:
In the following post I focus on the aspect of the problem analysis, which I initiated and carried out. On the basis of this work, various follow-up work was then created, such as user tests with the providers of the standard software, requirements engineering for the tender, activities for the business transformation, etc.
User Research
UX was asked at the beginning of the IPP program if we could do a problem analysis. Nevertheless, we had heard from all directions: "Don't invest too much time, we've worked through the problems many times. We know what we need to change." etc.
In order to be able to better assess the situation and what we should take into account for the problem analysis, we used desk research to analyze the existing processes and collect existing knowledge.
But it quickly became clear that the documented processes do not correspond to reality and that there is definitely still a lot to learn. We also looked for models and ideas for customer journeys that are particularly suitable for a complex process with several user groups. In our case, we have to consider the work of about twenty user groups. Since the process is very complex and extensive, we decided to start the research at a higher altitude first and only later delve into the details in individual areas.
We decided to work out the process and the most important pain points with the help of a workshop series together with the experts, i.e. the users.
For two months, we held a workshop with the technical experts once a week to collect information. This was followed by a synthesis workshop with the project team to evaluate and visualize the information so that we could validate it again with the experts at the next workshop.
We have worked out all the puzzle pieces step by step. In this way, we were always able to remain specific on the individual topic, which promotes the sharing of real and valuable impressions from everyday life. In the synthesis, we transferred it to an abstract level in a customer journey map.
With this approach, we were able for the first time to provide an understandable overall overview of the process of planning, control, classification and steering. Contrary to the initial statements "We already know the problems", we were able to uncover and, above all, make visible many topics that had been discussed in the corridor but which had not been actively tackled.
Conclusion: everyone involved in the program understands the current process. The most important pain points have been identified and measures derived. Thanks to the fact that some users are already involved, we were able to start the transformation of the business.
The challenge of user research is to pass on what the participants have experienced and learned to the team and other important stakeholders. That's why we decided to invite all these people to the last workshop and do the last evaluation together with an affinity diagram. Thanks to this approach, everyone was involved in the process and was able to understand the findings much better.
Since we categorized the identified pain points according to the three categories of tools, processes and people, it also became clear that simply using a new tool does not make us more capable of acting. The user research underlined that we also have to question our processes and our culture and pointed out valuable starting points.
