INROADS Digital Transformation
Redefining the end-to-end experience for INROADS through research, service design, and strategic roadmapping to help prepare them for an influx of students impacted by recent sociopolitical headwinds.
01 Overview
INROADS is a non-profit organization that creates career pathways for underserved high schoolers, college students, and young professionals through renowned career placement programs.
However, their current tools and processes were limiting INROADS’ ability to properly retain and support the rising number of program enrollees. As Lead Strategist, I lead a small team — in collaboration with INROADS – through Design Thinking methodologies to uncovering critical experience gaps and define a roadmap for maximizing impact.
02 Research & Analysis
We conducted primary and secondary research to build a deep understanding of external and internal needs and a holistic, future state vision.
We used our findings to identify current capability gaps and prioritize strategic recommendations across people, process, and technology improvements.
Research Approach
Knowledge Transfer
We immersed ourselves in existing INROADS strategy plans and synthesized recent results from a comprehensive survey.
Primary Research
Conducted several interviews and focus groups with INROADS business leaders, current students, and alumni.
Secondary Research
Synthesized third-party research to understand emerging behavioral trends for both Millennials and Gen Z.
Benchmarking
Conducted our own market analysis, mapped the competitive landscape, and benchmarked relevant adjacent experiences to identify best practice patterns and inspire new ways of thinking.
Current State Assessments
Audited existing INROADS technologies and experiences.
User Segmentation
From our research, we extracted four key user segments and documented major pain points to solve for:
High Schoolers: Need for a central program hub to access curriculum, register for events, and track progress. Current transition into INROADS college programs is a rocky and unclear experience.
Post Secondary Students: Desires a clearer understanding of processes and consistent points of contact. Lack of clarity and communication makes them feel out of the loop, behind, or forgotten by INROADS.
Young Professionals / Alumni: Need a stronger sense of community and better access to INROADS’ resources.
Business Users: Current processes and tools rely on historical knowledge and manual workarounds. Program managers lack any golden record of enrollees.
Co-Creation
To expedite efforts, I led a two-day workshop in Chicago to review research findings and map the future state experience for program enrollees and INROADS alumni.
Together with INROADS, my team and I iterated on service blueprint drafts, mapped an initial technical architecture for INROADS to adopt, and began to define deeper success metrics and data needs for implementation.
Guiding Principles
Established design principles, derived from research.
Increase Impact
Greaten INROADS’ impact by reducing friction across all points of the student journey:
Enable self-service capabilities for enrollees
Increase touchpoints and communications
Establish clear points of contact
Data & Business Enablement
Establish a holistic view of program enrollees and professional clients to drive business decisions.
Connect data across all channels and interactions
Automate program progress tracking
Enable data-driven demand prediction
Scalable Foundation
Plan beyond immediate needs and develop a future-focused ecosystem scale with rapid shifts in market, legislation, and human needs.
Gain efficiencies through automation
Define processes and responsibilities
Align on a plan for sustainable growth
03 Solution & Design
We translated findings into several strategic tactics and documented features and technologies to necessary to minimize pain points and close major gaps in experience.
Strategic tactics were documented as part of a larger implementation playbook and illustrated across three, interconnecting service blueprints. We also roadmapped a phased approach that prioritized implementation steps based on our user research and even assisted INROADS with vendor selections, as needed.
Service Design
Working with a junior strategist, we created three service blueprints that documented future state people, process, and technology interactions across the core phases of a program: awareness, enrollment, professional development, recruitment & staffing, retention, and loyalty.
Each blueprint reflected respective improvements for high school, post-secondary, and young professional / alumni program experiences.
03 Outcomes
Along with the service blueprints and implementation roadmap, we also created an executive summary and business case that was presented to the National Board of Directors at INROADS.
Our work helped INROADS to understand the urgency for improvement and make an informed investment in the future of their organization. Our roadmap and future state service blueprints continue to guide the implementation of new technologies and process improvements, with the first phase planned for completion by Q4 of 2023.