I was hired by Digital Transformation as a service designer to create user personas as part of the first stage of a large Enterprise Content Management project for Pacific Community (formerly known as SPC), an NGO based across 22 countries in the Pacific. My objective was to give the clients (SPC) an understanding of who their staff were and what their content related needs were.
As the project was a large one (over 500 staff in the organisation) it was important to get an idea of what the pain points were and what the scope of change could look like. This was important as previous attempts at digital transformation projects had been met with resistance when new systems were delivered that didn't work for the end users and their unique contexts.
Research
Through a combination of online surveys and face to face interviews I was able to gather a fairly representative sample of the organisation, roughly 100 people / 20% or the organisation. The scope was limited to purely to staff content creation and management needs and was not intended to create broad spectrum personas.
Context
As the organisation's staff are distributed across multiple countries as well as some out in the field, getting a good spread of users was difficult. Face to face contact is highly valued in to the Pacific so interviews were organised where there were large clusters of staff but traveling to meet everyone was cost prohibitive. Ultimately the online surveys complement the interviews well and with a bit of extra prompting covered all the divisions, giving a reliable number of responses.
Outcomes
The outcomes of the research were slightly surprising. For such a large organisation the content management needs were not especially complex. When analysing the data it became apparent there were two Primary persona types who made up roughly 60% of all users, and three Secondary user types who made up the other 40%. There was no clear split of users from one division needing different things from other divisions, rather there were people across multiple divisions doing similar work and needing similar content management tools.
