Delivered a future-state service blueprint defining how to simplify and standardize finance data collection across regions.
Blueprint became the reference map for the technology transformation program and scoped its next phase, which our team was retained to lead.
Introduction
Low standardization of local processes across regions, and poor data harmonization between platforms, meant the organization couldn't reliably collect and map its financial data into a single global system. Teams struggled to get the right figures, at the right time, with the right level of detail, and spent most of each cycle on manual, offline work to compensate.
Business Goal
The goal was to identify process simplifications and standardizations that made it easier to collect the right insights for resource planning. That meant addressing the painful data-collection experience finance teams faced across forecasting cycles, and resolving the technical limitations that drove hard-to-trace, hard-to-audit offline work.
The Work
Researching the Current State
Over about two weeks, a design colleague and I interviewed eight team leads across six regional sectors to understand what the lack of standardized, integrated data meant in practice. We documented the roles and activities involved, and I mapped the current state from our interview notes.
Presenting the map confirmed what stakeholders already knew, and they expected the readout to move toward designing the simplified process. But this was still early-stage research, and the map wasn't a strong enough basis to design from. The process couldn't be redesigned well without the domain knowledge employees had built over years: why teams worked the way they did, and where the process had grown painful enough to force workarounds. We proposed a second phase of research.
Planning the Next Stage of Research
We aligned with two sponsors to secure buy-in, then planned an on-site study. Learning the organization intended to consolidate all data collection into a single region, we met with that region's lead to set priorities around how requests were received, validated, approved, and integrated across systems.
Out in the Field
The study spanned two regional sectors, so we scaled the team to run on-site interviews and observation alongside off-site synthesis. Between sessions, I mapped the end-to-end process to prepare for status presentations.
Employee Experience
Each finance unit processed data demands manually, so the pain concentrated in meeting deadlines to move data through to the end-point team, which performs the final mapping into the global system. Given the volume, business units absorbed requests with limited scope and domain knowledge, which made errors hard to catch and, in some cases, hard to process correctly. When the end-point team did catch an error, it had to return the request to the business unit to fix, delaying delivery into the global system.
Redesigning the Future
With the pain points clear, the design team proposed adopting the centralized intake process one region already used. As a first-come, first-served service, it would give requestors the status visibility they lacked and, more importantly, require them to submit scope and other details up front, reducing the back-and-forth that had been inflating processing time and forcing rushed error handling.
I turned the current-state experience map into a future-state blueprint, my deliverable for the final workshop and design review that closed the engagement.
Final Review
The Design Principal and I presented the future-state blueprint, grounded in our research findings. It was a lot for stakeholders to absorb in one sitting, and its clearest immediate value was for technology stakeholders, who could now plan their systems around it. The work led to our team taking on the centralized intake surface and a second research phase covering the finance team's role in the end-to-end data collection process.
Current State: Mapping of processes and technology behind each regional sector
End-to-end process map I built from the research data
Final service blueprint deliverd, incorporating stakeholders’ final comments