Academic medical centers, like Northwestern, often have difficulty fostering collaboration due to staff & clinician time constraints, limited resources, and a decentralized organizational structure. This often leads to project delays, solutions that are not user-centered, decreased employee satisfaction, and stifled innovation.
In order to pivot to a user-centered professional development model, I leveraged my academic background in Design Thinking within complex organizations. The first step was to identify the constraints of our stakeholders and the unique needs of our users through surveys, interviews, and focus groups. Concurrently, I fostered a culture of rapid-iteration and “thinking with our eyes” which emphasized deliverables & prototypes as opposed to abstract discussions. Finally, implementation plans and feedback cycles were designed knowing the environmental constraints as opposed to adopting models from other organizational settings which bear little resemblance to an academic medical center.
Prior to the overhaul, the biggest barrier to project completion was stakeholder feedback turn-around time. With my leadership, turnaround times decreased by 50%. A focus on iterative processes and user-facing renderings also resulted in employees reporting higher productivity in meetings and increased satisfaction with project-based work. The amount of content produced dramatically increased in all areas including static, on-demand resources which went from a handful of documents to 150+ linked resources hosted on an intuitive, easy-to-navigate website.