DXC Technology is a global consulting and IT services company in 70+ countries with 130k employees, that helps large organisations modernise their technology, optimise business processes, and drive digital transformation. They provide services such as cloud migration, IT outsourcing, cybersecurity, data analytics, and application management, with a strong emphasis on enterprise AI, including generative AI solutions, private AI services, internal AI tools and digital twins to help clients automate operations, enhance decision-making, and create measurable business value and design AI solutions to real world and client problems.
DXC work in many secure clearance environments, across industries including healthcare, finance, government, and manufacturing. Their focus is on enabling enterprises to run mission-critical systems efficiently while adopting new technologies to stay ahead of the competition.
Challenge:
This was a massive role in requirements, skills, experience, breadth and depth – far too big to cover fully here, but here’s a focussed overview.
Define, deliver, standardise and execute a full end to end UX and Service Design process, tools, deliverables and training.
Lead on client pitch work, pre-discovery, estimates, discovery, research, UX/SD-led projects, functional design, prototyping and usability testing across client projects that go from high security government to international logistics, finance and healthcare sectors.
Build UK UX/SD team, train juniors, standardise our global process, define and lead UX/SD strategy, present to senior leadership, manage dept. budget, hire/fire staff, promote the value of UX/SD within the organisation to various teams and leaders. Design, budget and build our UX lab.
AI: evaluate it’s value and inclusion in solutions and as a work-support tool for UX, Service Design and DXC’s clients and processes. Internally (DXC) research and design tools and processes that increase DXC’s efficiency and competitive edge. That included helping streamline and de-duplicate DXC’s systems, databases, project resourcing, pitching and on-boarding processes. Externally, advise clients where and how AI would power up their solutions.
Work on the Neurodiversity leadership board to streamline the employment and inclusion of ND individuals on projects where their unique strengths would give DXC a market advantage.
Approach:
I standardised our UX & Service Design process, tools and deliverables.
I ensured all my team had a working knowledge of all three organisation and problem domains: Business, Technology & Users.
I ensured all team members attained security clearance (SC, DV etc).
I trained new and existing team members – on-boarding, rapid domain knowledge acquisition and continual UX/SD training. I also sent them for specific NN/g training and certifications
I set up a DXC UX/SD user group and ran weekly presentations and training for all team members globally – up to 70 team members at a time.
I interviewed and hired all team members.
Designed, budgeted and helped build our UX lab.
I worked on pitches, attended and presented at initial client meetings to win work for DXC.
I led UX and Service Design on client projects, across every sector, carrying out all the hands on work of Problem Statement refinement, discovery, research, value metric measurement, SD blueprinting, Use case/user journey definition, functional prototyping and usability testing to ensure usability and utility, feasibility and optimisation.
I worked with and maintained a healthy and collaborative working relationship with stakeholders, SMEs, third party suppliers, team leads and project leads, ensuring they all had live insights and data useful to their discipline or position – building trust and camaraderie, not suspicion and conflict.
Created standard documents and online resources to give guidance and clarity on UX/SD services and project insights/data, for organisation and project leadership, the project and development teams, sales and accounts.
Method Overview:
Outcomes and Value:
The UX & SD team were trained and capable of understanding the business (DXC’s and any client’s), the technology landscape (existing reference architecture and new opportunities) and the users (needs, pain points, psychology etc) rapidly and to a high level.
The standardisations in UX and Service Design methods, training, deliverables and tools yielded not only more valuable results but also increased our service efficiency and consistency, allowing us to share project work across global teams to follow-the-sun, or to simply share the load and guarantee resource availability. It also ensured that sales and accounts teams had consistent and complete expectations of our skillset and values.
Project development costs were reduced, as early collaboration and visibility of research insights led to a clear understanding of requirements, greater comparative lead times, more reliable estimations and negligible iteration requirements in development – speeding up the Agile process significantly.
Phase two was to replace old, not fit-for-purpose software and centralise databases and security protocols on the backend. The orchestration layer made this invisible to the users, increased the efficiency and utility of the current services and added the remaining 10% or services, all without having to make changes to the front ends (only adding a few additional functions). The service remained intuitive, as tested, and simply offered more utility, automation and/or speed.
- Designed and helped create internal DXC AI tools
- Project development costs were reduced, on average, by 30% across all projects
- Trust based client relationships across all projects
- Delivered standardised training and process steps for DXC’s global UX and Service Design teams, increasing efficacy and redundancy
*customer supplied data
AI Designs
Testimonial
Sean consistently went above and beyond the expectations of his role and skill set. His team were expert problem solvers in any client environment – nothing seemed to overwhelm them, and they rose to every challenge for every client. Some of the user experience documents Sean delivered were foundational in helping us deliver solutions to the client that really worked and he seemed to build trust with clients without trying. Time and time again I received positive feedback on Sean (and his team’s) professional and effective presence on client projects and sites, at every level from CEO to front of office workers. Even the usually hard to impress development team were always happy to work with Sean and his team because they gave them the data they needed to do their work right first time.
Accounts Lead – David Manning