Hybrid Cloud Management Incubator
Design Research | Enterprise Design Thinking | Service Design
Role: Design Researcher
Team: Development, Architecture, Offering Management
Methods: Interviews, Scenario Mapping, Surveys, MVP Development
Through co-creation with clients, I drove user-focused innovation of a hybrid cloud management experience which allows cloud administrators to consistently establish workload environments regardless of Z skills. This work not only improved development experience, but introduced them to the benefits of Enterprise Design Thinking and encouraged further engagement with IBM’s design program.
The incubator takes place at the beginning of the product lifecycle to gauge interest, uncover needs, and generate support.
Overview:
The Z Design Council (ZDC) convenes each Spring and Fall as a community for Z clients and creators to discuss the future of the Mainframe. Incubator projects are IBM-led, client-driven explorations of opportunities and problem spaces using principles of co-creation.
The Hybrid Cloud Management incubator focused on creating a simple out-of-the-box stack to help clients get a secure hybrid cloud environment up and running in just a few steps. We worked with 9 clients from 6 primarily financial and security organizations over the course of 10 weeks, clocking approximately 60 user hours. I engaged clients in interviews, surveys, and design thinking activities in order to find key insights and drive forward a user-centered product.
Objective:
As clients transition to cloud-based infrastructure, it is imperative to bridge the knowledge and skills gap experienced by nearly all stakeholders in the environment. As a continuation of an earlier incubator project, my goal during these 3 months was to validate the problem and understand users’ expectations for the solution. I worked to align clients on the problem space, understand their use cases, facilitate education about various aspects of the problem, and determine key insights from these conversations that we could bring into our solution.
Our problem statement:
A cloud admin can deploy a cost effective, secure, scalable on-prem cloud environment out of the box with speed and agility without Z specific skills.
Work:
The structure of this project fell somewhere between a rapid sprint and long-term, budgeted project. The limited timeline helped me to be concise with my client interactions and synthesize and iterate rapidly. The following is a list of the major items I tackled during the project:
Created a research plan to align product team around goals and figure out how best to identify key insights
Identified knowledge gaps on key topic areas necessary for product development. These topics were expanded on by IBM Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in order to align clients on their value to the offering. Some topics: Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Security; Storage and Networking; Scalability, etc.
Assembled weekly surveys for client design partners based on research goals and SME topic presentations
Synthesized client insights from surveys and weekly discussions to identify trends in operational needs that the team could bring forward into a minimum viable product
Validated insights with clients on a regular basis in order to ensure continued user focus
I organized all survey results in one Mural workspace to easily compare between topics and generate final insights.
Insight validation session — I tried to keep things informal to encourage honest feedback and creative thinking,
One of our topic sessions (on Security) with some embedded survey questions.
Client insights organized by topic and feasibility.
To-be scenario that aligns with both client insights and the original problem statement.
Outcome:
Two major outcomes surfaced from this project. The team was able to assemble a minimum viable product for our Z Design Council presentation in April 2020, which was key in gaining future support. The MVP consisted of an infrastructure blueprint and to-be scenario outline that emerged from the user insights I collected over the course of the project. I worked with the Architecture and Offering Management to ensure that the to-be scenario adhered to the problem statement we had been working with throughout the project. Architecture and development teams are currently working to build out this infrastructure, and hands-on user testing is the next step in the research plan.
Additionally, based on client insights and conversations, the team was able to determine that a shift in persona focus is necessary to get a more accurate picture of use cases and user behaviors. We had focused on Z and LinuxOne clients (companies working on the mainframe), but the problem statement is really geared towards clients that are cloud-based or are working with more of a hybrid platform. When the incubator transitions into hands-on research, the team is focused on capturing capturing feedback from cloud-native personas as well as Z personas.
Last Thoughts:
This incubator was a great experience in rapid design in an enterprise setting. Managing client needs and expectations alongside technological feasibility was key to the success of this project, and continued alignment allowed all stakeholders to feel that our three month endeavor was a success. During my next incubator, I’d like to incorporate more design thinking activities into client conversations in order to truly co-create solutions rather than just collecting insights and incorporating them down the line.
As a result of this project, I am now comfortable:
Facilitating remote group interviews with clients of varying topic knowledge and skill sets
Synthesizing complex and disparate qualitative data, and uncovering common insights between varied stakeholders
Recommending design outcomes and incorporating design thinking into a technical project