Data Governance Framework
Learning Design
Design and development of content for a leading Energy Company’s Data and Information Governance Framework roll-out.
Context
I worked with the Change Management Lead to establish a program to manage the company’s organisational change and develop Data Governance training material for use during the roll-out. Through an iterative design process I developed a structured roadmap and guide to be able to scale the framework organisation-wide, based on a customised change management plan, utilising strong visuals and change management best practices to communicate to the audience.
This included detailed communication plans and templates to go out at various stages of a future roll-out to the various stakeholders. To establish communications about Data Governance to the wider organisation, I worked with Communications specialists to draft content for their intranet page and create additional Data Governance training and awareness materials users could download freely.
Timeline
January - May 2023
Role
Lead UX/UI Designer
Tools
Figma, Miro, Loom
The challenge
With significant planned growth of assets across the company’s value chain, it became necessary to manage the growing complexity and the cost and risk of managing data. However, the organisation was facing challenges introducing healthy data governance practices. We needed to create not just the roll-out framework but also ensure the content was engaging, educational for data governance beginners and did not require a data governance expert to dispense the information for future roll-outs.
The approach
Coming in 5 weeks into the project, I started with having discussions with the client’s team lead, getting up-to-speed and creating a research and inspiration board on Miro. As it was important to the team lead that we wanted to go in a visual direction, I initially focussed on potential illustration and graphic styles that conveyed similar tones of voice to what we also wanted to achieve. We also dived into the direction we wanted to see the change management content lead the users and the desired outcomes, such as understanding of roles and responsibilities, and so decided to illustrate characters for different roles in data governance to give users visual queues to break up the text and detailed content we had to disperse.
Ideation and mapping out Learning Design content
I started with rough sketches for the visual assets to roughly communicate my ideas without investing too heavily time-wise. I added notes to indicate the team lead’s ideas were considered, such as the inclusivity of characters being illustrated. For the data governance educational content, I began mapping out a structure that detailed the objectives for each week, examples of content, and learning activities that would evaluate whether they had understood the content. would educate users in bite-sized weekly segments, based on the data governance topics we wanted to cover, and brainstormed activities that would engage with the user to review the content. Based on the content maps I created rough drafts in Miro to ensure content would fit on the requested A4 flyers.
Final Designs and Change Management Tools
I took my sketches from Procreate to vector illustrations on Adobe Illustrator, ensuring characters looked consistent as a set while demonstrating a wide range of personalities. These illustrations were used through educational slide decks and paired with data governance roles alongside colour-coding. The data governance educational content was refined with the theme of ‘digging deeper into data’, which allowed strong colours and visuals that were still in line with the organisation’s branding. I also designed slide decks that clearly communicated the framework timeline and what content to share which would expand the framework in the most efficient timeline
Problem Focus
Effective change management
Users did not feel engaged with the data governance content, and needed a clear, simple delivery of information. I focussed efforts on simplifying technical jargon and wording and make the presentations more accessible to non-data governance experts. It was also important that educational content was split into logical segments that built off of previous learnings. Users seemed to be frustrated by conceptual ideas around data governance and needed practical information, so I ensured that we curated the information for users with specific job responsibilities in the organisation. I designed the A4 flyers to be easily shared during weekly stand-ups to increase the chances that users would interact with the content.
Reflection
What did I learn from this project?
My primary objective was to create an educational content framework, design the content to be digestible for users and create change management content for the data governance team to use for future roll-outs. This was a great learning experience as I was designing and creating content for both data governance and change management, topics that I was initially unfamiliar with and required a lot of research into and discussion with experts within the team on how to best convey the information. I developed a learning strategy that focused on practical information that considered the users time-poor schedules and interest in establishing a data governance framework. This approach ensured that my designs curated to the audience while still providing the large amount of information required for a framework establishment.