What Business Ops can learn from UX Principles

All organisations, regardless of size, have some sort of internal process that facilitates the running of the business. The design of these departments and systems depends entirely on the requirements of the business. A start-up may only need a few simple spreadsheets while a global company with 1000's of employees will have multi-disciplined departments covering everything from finance to HR. However, the aim of these functions is the same: to facilitate the effective running of the business and allow it to be as productive (and profitable) as possible.

Before I started working with Webcredible I had never had any exposure to UX (User Experience for those who still haven't) or the principles that are associated with the discipline. What Webcredible does for its clients is to essentially understand their business, their problems and their users and then work with them to improve the experience that user has when they interact with the business. It has become apparent to me that anyone who is part of or runs an internal team could gain insights from applying UX principles.

Understand your user

Any UXer worth anything will be at pains to explain to you that it is ALL about the user. Understanding that user is key to designing a product or service that will be successful, this is no different when designing or fulfilling business support services.

My users, typically, are the employees that work for the company I am helping. The requirements of people who work at a traditional financial services company with 100's of years of heritage will be very different to those in a comparatively young tech start-up. The tools and processes they need to ensure the business runs will be very different. It is important to recognise that, as in UX, there is no one size fits all approach.

Engage your stakeholders

Stakeholders will vary depending on the organisation you work in, it's important to understand who they are and what it is that they want. Stakeholders will generally include direct line managers, senior management or C-Suite (the people who are paying your wages mainly). Developing a good understanding of what they are trying to achieve will help you. Making your stakeholders look good and supporting them with addressing their own issues will help you get buy in and support for what you are trying to achieve, which will, at a high level be the same thing - cost effective and productive business functions. It will also make them love you!

Do your research

Speak to your user. Reach out to people across the business and make time to understand where their pain points are. Don't presume that your stakeholders and your users are necessarily aligned in what that is. Little will be achieved by diving into defining new business process for performance management when actually, no one has a computer that works and there is no internet connection! Ensuring that you understand your users' needs is key to success.

Feeding this back into your stakeholders will help to ensure that you all understand where the priorities are and are aligned in what to tackle first.