Summary
Even with the multitude of new apps and processes being created through the rapid growth of QDivision, all of it was built on the foundation of a 50-year-old mainframe that couldn’t withstand the levels of new data being brought in. To remedy this, myself and the 3 other department leads created the strategic plans and processes for a new centralized platform that would adapt to any current or future business lines. Eventually, after a successful launch with one of the business lines, we were directed to pivot to migrating the Government Military business in order to help UniGroup & its new partnership win the DOD’s $7.2 billion Global Household Goods Contract. In the spring of 2020, the partnership was awarded the contract and by my departure from UniGroup in May 2021, Converge had migrated 5 business lines, saved $86 million in operating cost, and established itself as the backbone of all UniGroup IT solutions.
Service
Design
Competitive
Analysis
Process
Management
Change Management
Vision
Articulation
Conflict Resolution
Project Management
Storytelling
Saved
in operating cost
Teams
united on vision
Converted
business lines
5
Awarded
in contracts
Problem
During the year following the formation of QDivision, after the successful launches of Stride and Virtual Survey, dozens of departments began reaching out for assistance in evaluating their technology stacks and processes for inefficiencies. While this rapid growth was great, providing for the creation of an official UX Team with over a dozen members, the speed and impact groups began to expect from QDivision started to become a struggle. For all the shifts and innovations being made, these new apps were still shackled to a half-century-old mainframe system that stifled or rejected shipment data being gathered from its new counterparts.
Realizing that this issue was just going to compound with the more apps we made, myself and the 3 other team leads for product, development, and process began working on a strategic plan in our free time to present to QDivision executive leadership for when we would inevitably have to tackle this problem. We spent the next few months, a few hours a day in between meetings or over lunches, pouring over mountains of research data for UniGroup’s nearly dozen different business lines. The more we dug, it became evident the problems faced weren’t limited to data disconnects from the new apps.
Solution
Through this research, however, a light began to shine. We were realizing that while the business lines had different processes, terminology, and systems which they were fiercely proud of, the overarching jobs to be done were the same. With that philosophy in mind, we started to creating a new single service design map based around a central hub platform of a half-dozen apps focused around the phases of a shipment, rather than the business lines themselves. This system, which I began calling Converge, would not only allow the collection of any data points needed, but would be adaptable enough to accept any current or future forms of business.
However, we still needed a plan to prove Converge could work almost seamlessly with any business line. In order to cause as little disruption to revenue with the adoption as possible, we chose to focus on having the Office and Industrial line first due to its larger, but small number of shipments per year. With a strategic direction forward, we presented the concept of Converge to the QDivision executive leadership, who quickly agreed to begin forming teams around our vision.
To ensure everyone understood and rallied behind the same objective with Converge, we attended each team’s lift-off workshops and collaborated with them to align the platform accordingly. Additionally we provided weekly readouts, which we called Overwatch, to the CIO and his executive team’s bi-weekly meeting to ensure our strategic plans aligned with UniGroup’s executive leadership. Though there were a few obstacles along the roadmap that extended our deadline by a month, over the next 7 months progress was swift and the Converge launch for Office and Industrial began.
Outcome
As we began the migration of Office & Industrial over to Converge, our team was called into the CIO’s office for an emergency meeting. He wanted us to be aware that UniGroup was joining a partnership to bid on the DOD’s Global Household Goods contract worth $7.2 billion over 5 years and the board wanted to leverage Converge to become the primary provider for the partnership. This was an extraordinary opportunity, and so we gathered the product teams to discuss the change over. Fortunately, we were accustomed to quick pivots and the teams seemed less concerned by this adjustment due to the universal nature that Converge had been built around.
With an initial investment of $1 billion to begin the infrastructure setups for the contract, all focus was put toward the GHC. At the beginning of 2021, I handed off the majority of the day-to-day management of the GHC to my new Lead UX Designer in order to allow him to cultivate his leadership and the strategic planning skills that he desired. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to watch the first shipment flow through the system as by May 2021, after 14 years, I departed from UniGroup in order to continue to grow my career outside the organization. However by the time of my departure, we had migrated 5 different business lines, doubled UniGroup’s annual revenue with the GHC, and established Converge as the backbone of UniGroup’s digital solutions.
