SHELL innovation HUB

2023-2024

Role: LEAD SERVICE DESIGNER

Project: DRIVE SUPPLY CHAIN RESILIENCE

THE TEAM

Agile Hub is an innovation unit within Shell dedicated to helping the business identify and validate business assumptions. Made up of designers and technologists, my role has involved helping senior stakeholders shape early assumptions into validated business cases- resulting in live services used by staff.

THE business area

The Supply Chain team of Shell’s most profitable plant. A 400-member strong team responsible for procuring goods and services vital for plant operations.

THE CHALLENGE

Supply chain leadership wanted their team to meet business goals of improving the plant’s eco standards and to buy things in quicker, smarter ways. However, due to legacy systems and rigid, complex processes they lacked the tools, data and time to do so. From initial conversations, it was clear there was opportunity to transform and innovate the plant, but we faced two major obstacles:

  1. The leadership team had very little experience of complex innovation or digitilisation projects, often enforcing change through a top-down approach that simply didn’t land.

  2. Shell were working alongside QatarEnergy who were very resistant to change, preferring print-outs to anything digital.

THE OUTCOME

Nav-E - a fully implemented, award-winning AI-driven supply chain management and purchasing tool used by Shell Qatar’s Supply Chain team to ensure they’re buying local, quality products for their LNG plants.

 

Kick-off workshops and discovery centred around these three themes.

THE APPROACH

The project sponsors were unsure of what they wanted. All they knew was that they wanted it to have impact and be delivered fast.

Workshop activity: stakeholders sharing how disruptive they would like this project output to be

  1. Kick-off: we started with a two-day exploratory workshop, involving the senior stakeholders (IT and business) to thoroughly investigate the business area; its issues, workings, financials and aspirations.

  2. Discover: with a top-line business case established, I ran a more detailed discovery, speaking to over 45 members of staff in 2 months (through interviews and workshops) whilst our tech lead and project owner built-out a bigger delivery team. The output of my work included: As-is service blueprint, key user journeys, 7 personas, validated and sized opportunity areas.

  3. Design and build: with a project-team assembled, I led a week-long ideation workshop with the project team, senior stakeholders and key service user groups to build to-be journeys and design/ tech ideas. These were then re-prioritised and fleshed-out into an MVP.

  4. Embed and scale: with the first MVP currently being used by all core user groups, we are currently building on user feedback to improve the service, moving new work into production at the end of every 2 week sprint.

 

KEY themes

  1. Stakeholder engagement

Having experienced big, complex projects in big, complex organisations before, I believed the only way to make this project a success would be to carefully consider how we would engage stakeholders. I found success through treating it as any other ‘epic’ or project area by:

  • Running a series of workshops to map-out all the stakeholders, their roles and their levels of influence

  • Running an ideation session on HOW we were going to engage each group: the format, the approach, the RACI on who was leading that engagement

  • Having created a detailed engagement strategy, I have been keen to update this frequently; replicating language and terminology heard by (e.g.) the new CEO to ensure it’s clear how this project continues to align with Shell’s strategic goals. This has ensured it remains top of mind for all key influential stakeholders.

The results: The senior project sponsor recently said “This [biweekly check-in] is the best hour of my fortnight. I’m perhaps too frank with my feedback but that’s because I love what you’re doing, it gets me truly excited and you’re the best opportunity we have to change.”

By closely engaging with stakeholders, we've nurtured a strong sense of trust within the team, allowing us to bring about significant changes to supply chain processes; transforming the way things work, rather than simply adding a new digital solution on top of the old processes.

2. Hard working service design assets

This project was fast moving and clients wanted tangible results. As a result, I ensured the assets i created were done in an open, collaborative way with stakeholders, with the value of the output clearly demonstrated by improving our shared understanding of the users and the problem space(s).

I also wanted these assets to be openly accessible, enabling the team to explore, use, and improve them without my constant supervision. To achieve this, I converted all assets into an interactive Figma 'project site'. This empowered the tech team to hold multiple workshops using existing blueprints to refine their data strategy, and empowered the PM to create a roadmap independently.

The design output of my assets was very well received by the lead client and actually lead to a UI design pivot to align with my internally facing service design assets.

The service blueprint was used by multiple teams in digital and printed forms to facilitate their work. The top ‘core’ lanes were kept consistent, whilst the bottom lanes were interchangeable based on the team using the blueprint.

 

3. Dual-track delivery

AI had huge opportunity to support our service, but this would take time. So that we could start delivering value early we used a dual-track delivery approach:

  1. Short/ mid-term: agile design approach answering the most pressing pain-points using a Sharepoint/ PowerApps solution.

  2. Mid/long-term: future visioning work focusing on big, value-driving initiatives, facilitated by AI but also requiring big changes to existing processes.

This dual track approach meant that users were engaged often and quickly benefitted from our work but the bigger, more challenging, areas were (are) still being worked-on with Shell’s newly formed AI team, delivering a clear short/mid/long-term roadmaps.

Quickly ideated and delivered PowerApp solutions alongside…

… future-facing, AI-driven concepts.

 

4. Robust measurement

Measurement has been an essential part of this project. Starting from top-line project goals, I developed detailed baseline measurements in terms of time/ volume/ users using qual and quant methodology. From here I was able to calculate the (rough) financial benefit for delivering each of our use cases/ project epics.

This measurement approach was essential in delivering further project funding, in a time when the new CEO was cutting the majority of internal IT projects.

 

The results

Since launching, the project (along with 2 others in the programme) has won Shell Digital Asset of the year at the annual AI awards, due to its groundbreaking, first-in-use approach to AI within Shell. This has opened up further funding for the project, which is now used by the AI team to experiment with the latest technology in the space.

MVP was launched within 6 months of project starting.

On key features delivered, user sentiment on those areas of the process has risen from 4/10 to 9/10.

50% reduction in time to complete standard purchase flow, meeting KPI 2 months early.

Nav-E is now in conversation to be rolled-out to 4 further regions.

“Our collaboration with the Agile Hub has been nothing short of inspiring. The focus has been on leveraging technologies like blockchain and AI for simplicity and efficiency. The implementation of these technologies and transformative process and people changes is not only bringing immense benefits to Pearl GTL but also holds the potential to revolutionise operations across the entire Shell organisation.”

Project sponsor (Head of IT GTL East and Africa)