Major Transformation Enablement | Equiniti (EQ) - Case Study

The User

Equiniti (EQ) provides accessible digital services for regulated markets, specialising in equity and investment products, pensions, payments and regtech. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.

With over 5,000 specialist employees across five countries EQ serves its clients through a number of market leading propositions across share plans and registrations, remediation, credit services and pension administration.

Their vision is to help businesses and individuals succeed.

Their Challenge

In 2020, in the midst of Coronavirus lockdown, EQ successfully delivered the global Workday project – a replacement for a heavily customised and fragmented estate of microsystems used for HR, Finance and Payroll.

To reap the benefits of this new global system, EQ needed all of its 5,000 people across five countries to adopt it for everyday tasks such as recording leave, searching for peoples’ contact details and booking time to projects. This was easier said than done; most people naturally harboured attachments to their own way of doing things, developed and refined over many years prior to the introduction of this new global system.

To complement the engagement journey on which the project team embarked, they needed a way of hosting simple ‘how to guides’ for using Workday, in a way that was digestible, searchable and accessible. There were some 120 different functions that people might need to do in Workday. Having relevant just-in-time information at the fingertips of those who needed to know how to do those different functions was key to driving adoption. PowerPoint slide decks in a series of nested folders in SharePoint just wasn’t going to cut the mustard!

In summary, the challenge that confronted them was to find a platform on which they could quickly and easily build, structure, curate and continuously improve a knowledge library in order to ensure their strategic investment in a new Enterprise Resource Platform (ERP) system was successful.

How Method Grid was used

Ed Watson, Transformation Director at EQ, was intrigued by the presentational simplicity of Method Grid and started to explore whether it could serve as a hosting platform for the Workday ‘How To Guides’. Using the intuitive grid building functionality of the solution, his team very quickly created a framework and set of templates that led to the eventual library of over 120 digestible, searchable and accessible guides.

The guides were grouped into functional blocks (a grid per block) such that all employees could access the knowledge library most relevant to their use case. Within these functional-area grids, there was a logically organised and beautifully displayed set of ‘how to guides’ (one element per distinct use guide).

Figure: Element from the EQ “How To Guides” library showing how to submit time reports in Workday

A typical element (a Workday ‘How to guide’ in this context) contains:

A what-you-should-know summary: key things to be aware of (often policy related)
A step-by-step “how to”: numbered steps with a couple of key screenshots
Further instructions: a downloadable slide deck with click-by-click instructions for those who need more detail
A who-do-I-ask-if-I-have-more-questions section: contact details for further help
Two-minute demonstration: A short video showing how to perform the relevant steps

The Benefits

This was a very specific use-case challenge that led Equiniti to the Method Grid solution. Specific to this challenge, Method Grid’s adoption resulted in a number of benefits.

Primarily, the intuitive build-interface enabled the Workday Transformation team to build out the library at speed – against an aggressive roll-out schedule (set against the further complexity of Covid-19 disruption).

The resultant content met EQ’s quality criteria of being digestible (a rich mix of knowledge resources served up in easy-to-understand functional chunks), searchable and accessible (logically presented, easy to locate).

In aggregate, this ensured that a complex, large-scale roll-out of a new system across multiple geographies was successful. Internal support desks were not overwhelmed as the majority of early-use queries were quickly and effectively addressed. Early user feedback resulted in the need to refine some aspects of Workday – and Method Grid’s intuitive build interface allowed these changes to be rapidly incorporated into the overall user guidance.

The deployment of Method Grid (as the host of this powerful knowledge resource) was instrumental, as such, in their ERP system deployment and user adoption – driving take-up to levels that amply justified the overall investment in this strategic initiative.

Since taking a professional licence in Method Grid, it should also be noted that the solution’s broader functionality has been noted by many and, as such, a number of additional use case projects are now underway. For example, to capture the group’s regulatory policies, project risk management (see related blog) and process control point (risk and compliance) management.

As is often the case with enterprise-level adoption, from an initial, focused use-case the solution’s beneficial contribution grows incrementally – as commensurate with the user audience becoming increasingly familiar with the solution’s potential for far wider application.

The User

Their Challenge

How Method Grid was used

The Benefits

Thousands of organisations depend on Method Grid to manage and deliver their services