About The ProJect

Ford Motor Company redesigned its workforce in Summer 2019, reorganizing departments and emphasizing the importance of design thinking. The company had a two-fold challenge: connect the expertise that was spread across different silos globally and upskill everyone else to build a core competency across the enterprise. After a few reframes due to learning fast and changes in environment, a community of 1400+ Ford employees has been connected with visibly growing interactions.

Timing

August 2019-March 2021

Approach

Using Ford’s Design Thinking Model. we were focused on understanding both who was currently our base customer: those with the design expertise within the company, and reaching out to those who were motivated to learn. The goal was to form a grassroots effort to bring design thinking to all corners of the enterprise through those who were passionate about this way of working. Some specific methods this required were continued user research, ecosystem mapping, network building, and fast iteration to make to learn.

Process

Reframing

March 2020, as with the rest of the world, caused a major shift in all of our thinking. Our pilot project went on hold indefinitely as our partner team’s priorities had changed. This team’s and my own objectives also changed. But in September 2020, we retook up the torch, rescoping the project as a digital strategy. Reviewing and keeping in mind what we learned before the pandemic, we shifted to an agile model for project management purposes. I wrote a new project plan, coordinated with a Team Lead to write our iterations, and dove into research yet again- with a new central question.

Research

Prototype

Asynchronously with research, we were managing many of the process based activities: roadmapping, ecosystem mapping, and creating documentation for all of our platforms. These were consistently informed by the research being conducted as well co-created with key stakeholders of the project.

All of these above led to our MVP: a Themed Monthly Calendar. A small committee will choose a monthly theme around the topic of Design Thinking. This will be done in collaboration with other key partners who will inform of cross-promotional opportunities, 6-8 weeks in advance of the month in question. Each month will be have their own objectives, and be broken down by week to what gets shared on what channel on each specific day and by who. All of these materials will be packaged at the end of the month for easy review.

We have also curated a Voice for Design Thinking: a specific whimsical tone in which posts from the committee will post with a focus on specifically tying each post and event to the monthly theme and calling for action.

Results

While the project is still in progress, the current model has been extremely successful. As of February 2020, we have seen an increase of 89% of active members on our channels. This correlates to about an average of 200 more visits to our internal site a day. Digging deeper into our interaction with our community, in the past month we have had an increase of 106% read messages and 252% reaction and response rate to the material we post. In our research, we had already started to receive positive feedback from the changes we had started to make.