As organizations grow, they struggle with effective ways to promote collaboration between people and departments. McAfee was entering into a new era for the company, and bringing together teams from across the company to work collaboratively, some for the first time ever. We needed to help McAfee to create a system that removed barriers, allowed for clear communication and status updates and opened communication channels across the company. Our work was focused on one critical team particularly, the legal team.
An incredible amount of information has to flow back and forth between the legal team and various other departments. While there were multiple existing team portals, McAfee was still seeing a significant amount of time and resources being spent on communication. We conducted extensive interviews with the legal team and were able to surface this insight:
When users are not able to to find the information they need quickly, they consult with multiple people which uses more company time and resources than is necessary.
While the existing solution did make some information available and some communication possible, the experience was confusing to most users, many of whom would simply give up and start contacting people directly. In addition to not using the system, users would contact several people to try and get the needed information which distracted people and locked up resourced. One user said it was not unusual to receive 200 or more emails in a single day related to this.
It became clear to us that we needed to focus on designing a system that did a better job of connecting people with the information they needed as quickly and easily as possible. It had to be very easy to use and friendly, yet direct users to only the the necessary people and resources. The portal would also need to serve as a communication hub between not just employees, but the company management and employees. In order to ensure the communication felt like a two way street, it needed to build trust between all in involved. Lastly, it needed to make the complex processes of the legal team feel easy and effortless.
