CHALLENGE

Employees in one of USDA’s largest conservation agencies didn’t have a way to share their ideas and solutions with colleagues who could use them.

OUTCOME

A lightweight platform that not only helps participants share their work with others, but also enables agency leadership to identify opportunities for investment.

OVERVIEW

The USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service is tasked with “helping people help the land.” Their employees work with farmers, ranchers, and foresters across the country to help them integrate environmentally-friendly practices into their work. To do so, they work in local offices that are often very rural; as a result, many of them rarely have the chance to meet and share experiences with colleagues in other areas. This, in turns, has led to local offices frequently “re-inventing the wheel” by creating resources and tools that may have already been developed by other employees, but which they may not know about.

To address this challenge, NRCS worked with my team at the FPAC Customer Experience Innovation Lab to develop a solution that would enable employee knowledge exchange without requiring a steep learning curve. Our answer to this problem was the NRCS Employee Innovation Portal, or EIP, an easy-to-use online platform that utilized a technology employees already knew (Sharepoint) to help them share their best tools and ideas. The project team I led conducted user research, identified key user segments and their needs, and worked with potential users to define the site’s information architecture. We also helped NRCS define its theory of change, identify key research questions that would help them understand the project’s success or failure, and design a scaled pilot structure that would allow continuous feedback integration. Finally, we helped them design their outreach strategy by ensuring that our research insights informed their tactics and messaging.

The EIP is now a thriving internal site that not only permits users to upload tools, but also - in response to customer demand - allows employees to submit their ideas for new tools and requests for agency investment. As a result of this success, NRCS is also using data from the EIP to identify what solutions should be scaled up across the country and where the demand/need for a given solution is particularly high.