HPE accelerates its customer obsessed innovation culture with Mural + LUMA System™️

CHALLENGE

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is a technology company that helps businesses by providing IT products, services, and solutions in areas such as servers, storage, networking, software, hybrid cloud, AI, and edge computing. In order to keep pace with changing market conditions and increasing competitive pressures, HPE needed to transform its culture and change how people were working together to become truly customer-centric. 

Sulekha Kuthiala, the UX Architect leading 'Innovation & Outreach' initiatives at HPE explains, “HPE’s strategic shift to offer everything as a service required taking a deeper dive into better understanding our customer pain points in order to meet them where they are.” 

HPE needed people to work and think differently to respond to the market pressure through transformation and innovation. This presented an opportunity to train internal teams on how to apply a customer-first mindset to take away the complexity and make it easier and faster to do business.

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SOLUTION

Kuthiala founded a new initiative, called HPE Innovation Catalysts, that aimed to use design thinking to drive a customer obsessed culture.

To accomplish this, HPE relied on the powerful combination of Mural’s intuitive platform and the LUMA System™ — a proven framework of human-centered design methods that equip people to be more innovative and collaborative in their daily work.

Cross-functional teams came together with Mural’s digital canvas to host collaborative workshops where everyone was able to get on the same page and prioritize product development based on customer wants and needs. During these workshops, Personas, Journey Maps, and Importance/Difficulty Matrix were just a few of the methods in the LUMA System that empowered HPE to bring the customer experience to life and define its new services.

“We’ve shifted how we come together and iterate. We went from debating and arguing to co-creating and collaborating.” - Sulekha Kuthiala, UX Architect, Innovation & Outreach, HPE

Leveraging Mural + the LUMA System™ as a better way of working has created a culture of collaboration and innovation at HPE. This forward-thinking approach is now used to define its internal training strategy and has led to improved customer centricity, cross-functional alignment, and accelerated time to market.

IMPACT

HPE has scaled this new way of working by developing internal communities of practice that continually develop and grow employees’ collaboration and problem-solving skills. Through its Innovation Catalyst program, HPE now has 300+ certified practitioners, 40+ leaders across multiple teams, 12 certified facilitators, and 3 certified instructors.

Kuthiala estimates the team has seen the following benefits since leveraging Mural + the LUMA System™:

• 600 hours of post-meeting synthesis time saved per year
• 800 hours of meeting time saved per year
• A combined estimated cost savings of more than $150,000 per year

Teams at HPE have broken down silos and saved an incredible amount of time since adopting this new collaboration approach. With the Importance/Difficulty Matrix activity alone, HPE product managers can now accomplish what used to take months in only an hour. 

Pioneered by Kuthiala as a strategic tool for thought leadership, Journey Maps have now become one of the most popular methods at HPE and are being used by designers, product managers, customer support, and SMEs across the company. HPE has completed four Journey Maps that span multiple teams including sales, marketing, GreenLake, and Storage. Using journey mapping helped HPE visualize and show cross-functional dependencies to work better together and properly recognize revenue. This has also helped educate experience owners on opportunities for delight, improvements to the workflow, and integration points to further enhance the customer journey.    

Kuthiala has seen clear benefits of the journey mapping. "Applying LUMA methods like journey maps and prioritization matrix in Mural has helped us to understand the current state of our customer and partner journeys. Seeing them visually has enabled us to iterate and brainstorm what our desired future state might look like with innovation, business growth, and customer delight at the forefront."