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mfaithlee@gmail.com
Michelle Lee © 2024
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During a recent Your Career workshop, IBM managers identified that generating a growth plan for their employees is one of their top pain points as a manager.
To begin on our research our objective was to re-envision the Your Career manager experience by refining features to empower managers as effective people leaders. Me and one other designer worked to design and lead the 2 day workshop that invited 8 people managers to participate.
Goals for the workshop:
- Explore integrating generative AI to provide smart insights and streamline processes, empowering individuals to take meaningful action
- Prioritize addressing significant pain points in manager-employee relationships, support talent growth, and drive peak performance, and retention
As we wrapped up the workshop managers created 12 outcomes they wanted to see. These outcomes were voted on based on two factors: productivity and leadership impact (which need statement will make you an effective leader/impact to be a better leader for your employees).
After the voting was complete, the Your Career team then prioritized these outcomes based on feasibility. We prioritized the growth plan as the first feature we wanted to implement.
As part of a team of 4 software developers and 1 data scientist, we wanted to build a generative AI application to help improve productivity for IBMers using the Your Career tool. We estimated the current manual time this would take an IBM manager is 4 hours:
Research – Est. time 1 hour
Find and read performance expectations document. Look at employee’s Your Career Profile for skills, resume, other data.
Gap analysis – Est. time 2 hours
Identify gaps between what’s expected of next desired band/role vs. employees current job responsibilities.
Document – Est. time 1 hour
Put together growth plan document to share with employee.
Our solution was to use generative AI to help solve a RAG use case that would provide a growth plan for employees based on their current band level and role at IBM.
1. Personalized with AI
By utilizing individual Your Career employee data, watsonX can generate personalized growth plans for employees.
2. Built for Managers
Saves managers time eliminating research and documentation and instead focus on helping employees achieving their goals.
3. Enterprise scalable
This can be scaled to every IBMer and job role that has a performance expectation document.
Use case:
Manager, Ethan has an employee, Eva who is a band 8 Software Developer. Eva is ready for a career promotion and wants to know how to get to band 9. Let's see how Your Career powered by watsonX.ai can help!
This is the API the team set up to connect to the AI model. We ran the employee ID with the question, "How can my employee work towards their promotion to Software Engineer band level 9?". The API also takes into consideration the desired band level and a preset number of results. It will run this with the APIs to get the employee's information and their band level information to return results as suggestions to the manager.
The API suggested the following for the employee to improve, "To bridge the skill gap, your employee can consider pursing certifications."
We would then take the data the API gave back to us and create tiles in a user interface with actionable items the employee can take based on their current profile and band level.
For the manager designs I created this prototype based off the design workshop outcomes.
1. Managers should be able to view itemized growth plan for a reportee.
2. Manager should be able to check off completed items for a reportee.
3. Manager should be able to delete items.
4. Manager should be able to add items.
5. Manager should be able to edit items.
6. Manager should see a progress bar for percentage complete.
For this MVP I considered creating designs that were scalable and customizable, as we will be able to use this model and feed more data sets into the design.
Productivity Improvement: 4 hours x 90% = 3.6 hours per employee
Manager with 10 employees: 36 hours saved
The business case for our project is that we estimate this AI generated growth plan will save each manager 90% of their time.
