ORG 727 Week 6 Design and Technology in Interventions Example

Designing the Two-Hour Welcome: Applying Process Design, Job Design and Technology to a Credit Union Intervention

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

ORG/727: Organizational Diagnosis and Intervention

Week 6 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Saguaro Federal Credit Union, its people, designs and figures are composites written for a model paper.

Week 5 selected a combined intervention for Saguaro, centered on redesigning the path from conditional loan approval to membership. This paper describes how the intervention was designed, what the new process and roles look like, what technology supports them and how a prototype tested the design.

Three Design Approaches

Davenport and Short (1990) described business process redesign as the analysis and design of workflows within and between organizations and argued that information technology and process redesign have a recursive relationship: technology enables new processes, and process thinking should guide how technology is used. They recommended identifying processes for redesign, understanding current processes, identifying technology levers and designing and prototyping new processes.

Liedtka (2015) examined design thinking, a human-centered approach that emphasizes deep understanding of users, idea generation and rapid prototyping and testing, and argued that its methods help reduce cognitive biases that impair innovation, such as projecting one's own preferences onto users and favoring the first idea.

Hackman and Oldham (1976) proposed that jobs offering a range of skills, a whole piece of work, visible importance to others, freedom in how to do it and direct knowledge of results produce critical psychological states, experienced meaningfulness, responsibility and knowledge of results, that lead to motivation and satisfaction.

Why Design the Details

Week 5 chose what to change; this week decides how. The difference matters because interventions often fail in their details. A conversion team that calls applicants sounds simple, but its success depends on when the call happens, what the specialist can do on the call, which systems they use, what happens when verification fails and how the specialist's day is structured. Robertson and colleagues' finding, discussed in Week 5, that interventions work by changing the work setting means the setting must be designed with care.

The Design Team

The team included two lending officers, two branch staff, a digital developer, a member service manager and the new member growth manager, with the internal consultant as facilitator. Including both lending and branch staff applied the intergroup work from Week 5: designing together made the handoff a shared problem.

Understanding the Current Process

The team mapped the current path. After a dealer or online application is conditionally approved, an automatic message tells the applicant to come to a branch or phone within five days. If they call, a contact center agent transfers them to a branch, which schedules a visit. At the branch, staff open the account, re-enter loan data and send documents to lending, which funds the loan. The team counted 11 handoffs, 4 systems and an average of 3.4 days for those who completed it.

Understanding Applicants

Design thinking pushed the team to talk to applicants. They interviewed 15 people who had been approved but never joined. Twelve said they were willing to become members but could not visit a branch during working hours; eight had already been approved by another lender that funded the same day. Several said they did not understand that membership was required. One said, "I thought I was approved. Then it felt like I had to apply again."

The applicant thought she was done; the credit union thought she was just starting.

The New Process

Within two hours of conditional approval, a conversion specialist calls the applicant, explains membership in plain language and offers to complete everything on a video call.

On the call, the specialist opens the account with identity verification and electronic signature, using loan data already in the system.

The specialist funds the loan the same day and arranges payment to the dealer.

If the applicant prefers, the app now offers a link to complete membership digitally, prefilled with loan data.

The dashboard shows each applicant's status to the conversion team, lending and branches.

Handoffs fall from 11 to 3, and systems used directly by staff from 4 to 2.

The Conversion Specialist Role

Applying the job characteristics model, the team designed the role so that one specialist owns each applicant from approval to funding, providing task identity; handles membership, deposits and lending, providing skill variety; sees the dashboard of their own conversions, providing feedback; can approve fee waivers up to a limit, providing autonomy; and hears from members they helped, reinforcing significance. Six specialists were drawn from branch and lending staff, building ties between the groups.

Technology

The design required three technical changes, chosen after the process was designed: an integration that passes loan application data into the account opening system, eliminating re-entry; video identity verification and electronic signature, approved by the compliance officer under federal requirements; and the shared dashboard. The full app redesign remains deferred.

How the Design Team Worked

The team met twice a week for six weeks. Early sessions produced disagreement: lending officers wanted applicants routed to them, branch staff wanted them sent to branches. Applicant interviews broke the deadlock, since neither option matched what applicants said they wanted. The team then sketched three possible processes on a wall, walked through each from an applicant's point of view and scored them against speed, member experience, compliance and cost. The chosen process combined the best parts of two sketches. Including people from both units meant that by the end each side could explain the design to colleagues as its own.

Compliance and Risk

Opening accounts remotely raised compliance questions. Federal rules require credit unions to verify members' identity, and the compliance officer worried about fraud through video calls. The team worked with her to adopt a verification method used by other credit unions, combining document scanning, a live video match and database checks, with a fraud review of the first 500 accounts. Bringing compliance into the design early prevented a late veto.

The Prototype

A four-week prototype ran with two specialists and 300 approved applicants, compared with 300 handled the old way. Conversion was 68 percent in the prototype against 39 percent in the comparison group. Time from approval to funding averaged 0.8 days. Problems surfaced: video verification failed for about 10 percent of applicants with older phones, so a phone-based alternative was added; specialists were overloaded on Saturdays, so a weekend schedule was created.

Lessons From the Design Phase

Three lessons stand out. Talking to applicants changed the design more than any internal analysis did. Designing the role with job research in mind produced specialists who asked to stay in it after the prototype. And choosing technology after the process was designed kept the cost to about $1.2 million rather than the $6 million app redesign first proposed.

Conclusion

Design methods turned Saguaro's intervention into a concrete process, role and set of tools. Process redesign cut handoffs, design thinking revealed that applicants wanted to join without visiting a branch and job design shaped a motivating conversion role. Technology was chosen to support the design, not to drive it. The prototype nearly doubled conversion and exposed problems that were fixed before rollout, which Week 7 will plan.

References

Davenport, T. H., & Short, J. E. (1990). The new industrial engineering: Information technology and business process redesign. Sloan Management Review, 31(4), 11-27.

Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 250-279. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90016-7

Liedtka, J. (2015). Perspective: Linking design thinking with innovation outcomes through cognitive bias reduction. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 32(6), 925-938. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12163