Business Situation
Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc. (MMC) is a global professional services firm headquartered in New York City with businesses in risk insurance brokerage, reinsurance services, talent management and management consulting. Grown by acquisition, MMC currently has four businesses with over 75,000 employees globally.
Over time, MMC’s operating companies have developed more than 12 disparate intranet systems. This has resulted in its global workforce being unable to smoothly collaborate, share knowledge and best practices, and perform administrative tasks efficiently. With so many systems involved, our research with employees revealed that completing even simple tasks was overly challenging.
Solution
To address these challenges, MMC worked with Avanade on a 16-week strategic envisioning engagement to set a vision to achieve the following key goals:
- Deeply understand the unmet needs of employees around the world
- Define what measurable success would look like for the initiative
- Ideate a best-in class user experience
- Recommend the right technologies to bring the vision to life
To embark on this journey, MMC worked with Avanade on a 16-week strategic envisioning engagement to define the next-generation employee experience. As part of this process, Avanade’s multidisciplinary strategy team interviewed many employees and executive stakeholders, conducted a series of design thinking workshops at MMC's NYC and London offices, and executed a targeted colleague survey.
This research and discovery led to the development of a comprehensive strategy, which included current challenges and common themes across organizations, colleague personas, future state user journeys, prioritized features, and an implementation roadmap. The document further defined the core definition of a “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP) and what subsequent phases may look like.
In order to make this strategy and roadmap come alive, Avanade’s Digital Innovation Studio designed a comprehensive click-path prototype that illustrated a series of workplace scenarios.
“The concept of ‘putting the colleague first’ served as the central point of this partnership. With this in mind, Avanade focused on how to develop digital workplace solutions that can impact transformation across the enterprise.”
Results
As a result of this engagement, MMC’s executive management finally had the chance to see what a differentiated employee experience could be like, and to understand the specifics of what it would take to deliver it.
The proposed solution integrates multiple systems, including Microsoft 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, LinkedIn, Workday and other external APIs into one unified experience. The strategy also proposed several AI-related elements, such as automating key tasks, user-friendly bots and virtual assistants, and comprehensive company and employee-level personalization of content.
Through the envisioning method, Avanade was able to deliver not only an ambitious vision, but operational specifics and next steps for how to execute at scale.
Learn more about how to deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences.