Strategic tooling

Company: NatWest (Commercial & Institute Digital Design)

Work stream: Digital Experience Design

Skills: Agile delivery, process assessment

Introduction

I led a software trial across the C&I Digital Design team to determine whether Figma would be a viable replacement for current design tools (Sketch/Abstract). This information was fed into a larger bank-wide business case for a proposed change in software.

Aim

The key aim of the trial was to determine functionality constraints/improvements for Figma in comparison to our existing software suite. It was important that feedback was clearly collated and from all areas of a multi-disciplinary team.

Approach

As Lead on this trial, I adopted an Agile approach. I specifically chose Kanban as we had very limited time and resource to undertake the trial and this method ensures real-time communication of capacity and full transparency of work. I limited tickets in progress (WIP) by ensuring additional support was given to delayed tickets and where needed, driving the progress forwards by utilising weekly team meetings as working groups and having the team swarm and work on tickets together. This approach not only ensured all tickets were closed in a timely manner, but also that the whole team were engaged and contributing to the trial.

I identified key areas of work that would need to feed into the trial (UI, UX, Content Strategy etc) and then broke down these areas into common tasks which I defined on a Kanban board in Microsoft Teams. I identified existing resources that could be utilised to speed the trial process (existing projects, libraries etc). I then presented the trial aim, expected methodology and the working Kanban board for feedback and development to the team. At weekly working group sessions we assigned tickets to appropriate people, gave playbacks and swarmed WIP tickets when needed.

Following completion of the trial, the Kanban board was restructured into specific groupings to enable easy collation of information into the wider bank initiative.The trial was very comprehensive and ensured that there was buy-in to the new software from the whole team. The output from the trial has successfully been fed into a bank-wide analysis and business case.