A financial organization I was supporting wanted to identify the main roadblocks, issues, problems that their analysts were facing while using SAP's EPM add-on. They knew their analysts were having problems completing their tasks but were not able to articulate the problem to their IT partner. On the other hand, the IT partner was eager to improve their solution but wanted to make sure to work on important things for their customer.

My role was to guide both the financial organization and their IT partners on how to discover user pain points. My proposal was to run co-design sessions given that most of the users were co-located, time was limited and there were a lot of unknowns on the user experience of the tool.  During these sessions the users were divided in 2 groups were they had to write down their whole process using the SAP tool: from the moment they get the data until they submitted the calculations.

At the end we were able to create 2 user journey maps and set a list of 10 prioritized backlog items that the IT group could deliver in the following quarter. Fixing this 10 items reduced the number of support items and made the process less error prone for the analysts.