An eight month timeline for a project as large as Hitachi Consulting’s website transformation provided a number of challenges and pressures. Accomplishing our robust goals for experience designed required a strong and consistent collaboration with executive leadership, not only collect requirements and provide design iterations, but obtain the support needed for a successful company-wide adoption. Throughout the project I met with and presented to senior executive leadership on an almost-daily basis to ensure the final product met the goals of the business, and the principles and visuals of the new brand were adopted across the company.
Collection of stakeholder presentations from competitive analyses, design reviews, and executive presentations.
Brand Adoption
The website was one of the most visible and robust executions of Hitachi Consulting's new visual identity, which I defined the year prior to launch. While this was monumental in company adoption, I was still faced with the challenge of involving numerous stakeholder groups across sales and marketing that produce externally facing collateral. I facilitated a handful of virtual training sessions to key global marketing and sales teams to educate them about changes and expectations. I developed an internal brand portal where guidelines, assets, and examples were available to the company – the launch of which was supported by the CEO at a global town hall meeting.
Design review presentation
Design Review Iterations
Under the aggressive time constraints, my team demanded a great deal of time and energy from executive stakeholders to review wireframes, mockups, and content maps to provide necessary feedback in order to approve pages for publishing. Each of the 5 key approvers we sought input from had a different preferred method of receiving information, and we quickly learned the most effective presentation style to make each of them feel involved, recognized, and central to the decisions being made.
Design review with VP Global Marketing
Executive Presentation
Throughout the course of this project my team and I gave a multitude of presentations to collaborate with the business, collect feedback, present progress and status, and educate about impacts and changes. From reviewing mockups with marketing stakeholders to presenting “design evolution” overviews to senior executive and c-suite leadership, there was no shortage of interaction with all levels of our organization that led to a successful adoption of the website.
Website launch celebration
company roll-out
The reception of the website launch was generally ecstatic, as Hitachi Consulting now faced the market with rich stories and beautiful design. The challenges that followed were around how new content was developed and published, what contacts globally needed to be involved to approve new content, and who on the web team would manage the continuous updates post launch. My team and i created a process to encourage collaboration between marketing, solutions development, and delivery to develop accurate content that marketing and the web team would build into existing or new pages, to ensure that the website remained relevant, authentic, and end-user focused.