University of Melbourne

The Australian National University

McGill University

Director at Paper Giant

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Paper Giant

Capability Director

I work for the University of Melbourne's Innovation Practice program - a new Masters of Engineering program. Our course brings together engineering masters students, working professionals and industry innovation projects. Each semester we engage over 30 organisations, deliver over 30 real projects, educate our students and provide a leadership development program for our participating industry leaders.  My role is to help design the syllabus and the underlying business model, commercialise the course for scale, deliver lectures and engage our sponsoring organisations to participate.

The University of Melbourne School of Engineering

Lecturer & industry engagement lead

As the first strategic designer through the door at Australian Unity, I led a range of initiatives. My work culminated in the establishment of a new human centred design practice and a mandate to re-engineer a recently acquired business in the AU portfolio to ensure sustainable commercial viability.  My work involved:- Delivering a lifestage research program to inform a range of strategic decisions- Establishing a sprint program to explore new revenue streams and reengineer existing IT and service model capabilities- Designing an internal delivery model as part of a major transformation program- Designing a new department, designing roles and recruiting practitioners  - Positioning HCD to senior executives and building advocacy at all levels of our business

Australian Unity

Practice manager - Human Centred Design

I worked with a range of commercial and public sector clients in a variety of capacities which included: - project leadership and delivery across service design, business transformations, and design research- business model design and service/ product strategy- training, team building, job design and recruitment consulting for organisations looking to build service design capability internally

Freelance

Service Designer, Business Designer and UX Researcher

As a freelance senior service designer, I was invited to help establish and deliver a transformation program to define the future state of retail service delivery across the Telstra mobile portfolio. Our program integrated agile, scrum and lean startup methods, enabling us to break up the Telstra service delivery machine into parts while maintaining a holistic view. My team and I rapidly delivered  outcomes in seven sets of two week sprints. Our goal was to create a new service model, an outstanding customer experience that could be delivered in a new IT environment, while reducing operational costs, and meeting strategic success criteria for the next 5 -10 years. My day to day work involved current state diagnosis, customer and staff research, writing IT and business requirements, designing a target state and communicating that target state.In addition to my immediate project delivery responsibilities, my contributions included practice and team leadership, setting the scope for research and economic analysis, building the argument for Opex investment, and helping to establish our program structure, ways of working and operating rhythms.

Telstra

Contract senior service designer

As a senior practitioner at Thick, I had numerous responsibilities which included:- Leading multidisciplinary teams to innovate service delivery models, often in response to policy reform, demographic change, economic pressure or the desire to better meet customer needs / enable outstanding customer experiences. - Leading best practice and building team / client capability across the entire service design lifecycle from project design and scoping, through to project delivery including problem framing, research, opportunity identification, requirement building, ideation, prototyping and implementation. - Leading research planning, fieldwork (using techniques such as co-design workshop, ethnography, survey, user testing and interview), insight generation and deliverable creation (process maps, journey maps, blueprints, storyboards, empathy artefacts, research reports). - Ensuring our designs were strategically informed by our client's business model, value proposition and commercial strategy. When building new services from scratch, I helped to create the business models, value propositions and business cases for investment that sat behind our service model.- Contributing to lead generation and business development; responding to RFQs, writing proposals and pitching service design methods and projects to new clients. - Establishing our our internal service design capability and contributing to the strategic direction and positioning of the agency as a whole- Interviewing new designers, running training and mentoring younger practitioners

Thick

Service designer, business designer, research lead

As a contract service designer / design strategist at Huddle, I worked with the NAB NextGen IT transformation program to perform user research and create recommendations for service delivery and IT innovation across a suite of NAB products and channels. Internally at Huddle, I introduced a number of practice management initiatives and worked to develop reusable service design models, guides and tools for the company.

Huddle design

Service designer / design strategist

I worked with the founder of Agile Bench to build growth strategies, perform user research, test new product features and develop the business value proposition.

Agile Bench

Business Consultant

In addition to my role as a Knowledge Worker with the Capgemini Accelerated Solutions Environment (ASE), I was engaged as a service designer and consultant with varying responsibilities. I was involved with internal ASE business development and transformation, and the life-cycle design, positioning and delivery of new internal and external services.

Capgemini Accelerated Solutions Environment

Service designer

Knowledge Workers are a global community of practitioners who apply a sophisticated design methodology to tackle complex social and organisational problems. We work with numerous consulting firms and clients in Australia including PwC’s The Difference, KPMG and Capgemini Consulting. As a freelancer working at various levels of seniority, I was responsible for designing and delivering bespoke co-design forums for over 30 public, private and government organisations Australia and New Zealand. These decision making and design events typically engaged groups of 40 -150 senior executive stakeholders for three days in an immersive format and contributed to major IT, cultural and strategic transformation programs. They required extensive design, planning and logistical preparation for which we worked closely with a client sponsor team.As a senior practitioner, I helped to launch new internal capabilities for particular organisations in this space and assisted the consulting firms I worked with the grow and position our practice.

The Difference (PWC), KPMG, Capgemini Consulting, ANZ

Freelance Knowledge Worker, facilitator, project manager, senior consultant

I worked in a copywriting and editing capacity with a variety of university department researchers on research funding proposals and academic papers before submission to peer reviewed journals.

Self Employed

Content strategist and editor

I worked with students and their families to develop learning and studying strategies. I focused on teaching metacognitive skills around organisation, critical and reflective thinking, and self assessment. I also worked one-on-one with young children for a reading intervention agency. I focussed on identifying reading and visual problems, building action plans with parents and helping children to develop the confidence and skills to enjoy reading.

Ashlee Riordan