Project Overview
Project Overview
Global Enterprise SaaS Company
Initiator and lead — problem definition, solution design, and implementation
Internal online training team (supported and contributed to execution)
A few months, rolled out in phases
Monday.com, Confluence, Google Drive
"How might we build an operating model that supports a growing team — creating shared systems, clear coordination, and documented ways of working without disrupting what already works?"
The Situation
The Situation
A two-person online training team serving ~3000 users had no shared system for managing requests, tracking work, or coordinating with the teams they depended on. Nothing was broken but the team was about to grow, and the informal ways of working that had held things together so far wouldn't scale.
The internal online training team sat at the centre of a small but interconnected ecosystem.
SMEs
Online training team
Support and ops
Department tags were used as access permissions that determined which employees could see which courses. These set the tone for the enrollments that Supoort & Ops did. Nothing went live without their involvement.
For a two-person team, this worked. Requests came in over email and Slack to whoever was free. Everyone knew who to call. The ops team was a message away. Informal, fast, functional.
But the team was growing. And what works for two people moving fast doesn't automatically work for four.
Where the cracks were showing
No shared visibility
- No shared view of what was in progress, who owned what, or where things stood
- Requests arrived without information needed to act on them, sometimes without internal approvals
Ops team always last to know
- Contacted in a rush right before launch rather than built into the process
- Department tag names given by SMEs frequently didn't match system labels, causing back-and-forth that delayed every launch
Archived courses still surfacing
- When a course got archived, no one was systematically notifying the ops team
- Learners would find themselves still enrolled in training that no longer existed
This initiative wasn't handed down. It was identified from the inside, proposed to the team, and built with their support.
What We Built
What We Built
The proposal was straightforward: design an operating model for the team. A set of structures, tools, and standards that would let the team grow without losing track of anything. The team backed it, contributed where needed, and helped refine what was built.
Seven connected solutions
A formal intake form on Monday.com replaced ad hoc email and Slack requests. Every request, new course or update had to come through it. The form captured everything needed upfront, including whether the required approvals were already in place, and drew a clear line between new requests and updates to existing courses. Starting work only to discover a prerequisite was missing became a thing of the past.
A shared template designed for two audiences at once — the training team and the ops team. The tag mismatch problem got its own fix: a table of every existing department tag with checkboxes. SMEs ticked what they needed rather than guessing names from memory. The ops team's required fields were folded into the same document, so everything they needed arrived in one place without anyone having to chase it separately.
A workflow board on Monday.com gave the team a shared view of every active project — with clear owners, current status, and a step-by-step production template covering every stage of the process. Coordination touchpoints with the ops team were built into the template as explicit steps rather than relying on someone to remember.
The LMS had no native way to track course ownership, SME relationships, update status, or training track membership. So one was built: a board sorted by department, capturing all of that information, with automations set up to notify the ops team the moment a course was archived.
Everything was documented in Confluence: the process, the standards, the naming conventions, the publishing settings. Publishing settings mattered more than they might sound — internal courses carried specific access controls that had to be configured correctly at publish time, otherwise visibility would be wrong. When new team members joined, they had somewhere to go on day one. When questions came up, there was an answer that didn't depend on asking the right person.
Files had been organised by course name, which meant knowing the course name was a prerequisite for finding anything. The Google Drive was restructured by department of request — which is how the team actually thought about the work, and how stakeholders naturally referenced it. Finding files stopped requiring institutional knowledge.
A walkthrough deck for new SMEs set out how to work with the team, what was needed from them, and where responsibilities sat on each side. It gave every new working relationship a professional starting point and reduced the time spent re-explaining the same ground — whether the SME was in their first week of working with the team or transferring from another department.
More than the individual tools, what changed was the nature of how information moved. It stopped living in people's heads and started living somewhere shared and findable.
The Outcome
The Outcome
The team had a system. Archived courses stopped surfacing as active. And when new people joined, there was something to onboard them against rather than an unwritten set of conventions passed down informally.
The informal knowledge that had kept the team running became infrastructure.
Why This Matters
Why This Matters
This wasn't a course. It wasn't a product interface. But it was a design problem — one about systems, information architecture, and the experience of the people moving through them. The pain points were mapped, the places where information was arriving too late or not at all were identified, and a set of connected solutions was designed to address the root causes rather than the symptoms.
Systems thinking sits at the heart of both UX and learning design. Most of the time, that shows up in the work itself. Here, it showed up in how the work got done.