Morgan Delk

As the newly minted IBM Offering Development Program was hitting it's stride, having successfully completed and published dozens of offerings based on a new program model supporting the IBM Consulting Strategic Growth Pillars, the head of IBM Consulting asked the team for a way to index the full complement of offerings. The original request was a list of offerings in PDF that could be updated quarterly and emailed to Partners and Associate Partners. Based on our extensive user research among this key target, our hunch was that this audience needed more than a PDF, and it would likely just get lost in their daily sea of emails.

To confirm this theory, we revisited our users, confirmed our suspicion, and landed on a new idea. What if we created a digital experience where they could shop all the new offerings? Or even better, what if we curated these offerings based on how they talk to clients? What if we mapped complementary offerings so instead of talking to a client about a single issue and offering, consultants could frame the conversation in terms of common Client Challenges, and solve both current challenges as well as some others they may not yet have identified? Our SVP loved it. IBM Consulting leadership loved it. And as a result, "Pathways" was born.

After launch, we established a regular cadence seeking user feedback, allowing us to iterate and add features. As we evolved Pathways, we wanted to expand the tool’s value and help connect the offerings story across IBM Consulting's "Client Conversations," through the recurring offering themes, by Industry, and for the "Cognitive Enterprise," so it became an ever-improving, and ever more popular destination for Consultants to identify key offerings and build client proposals.

As Experience Design Lead, I managed a team of designers domestically, as well as a small team of Visual and UX Designers in Shanghai. We ideated on new features and functionality, redesigned the UI, worked with our industry colleagues to identify appropriate industry-specific offerings, updated the framework to include an offering filter by Industry, mapped each of the 72 offerings in the tool to each of the IBM Consulting Client Conversations, built out a new, more robust Search capability, redesigned the UI for all offerings, then tested it all with our users and continued to iterate.

The launch was a huge success. Within six months we had 10,000 users. Within 12 months we had data that Consultants who reported using Pathways to craft their proposals were 36% more likely to close a deal. And Pathways was being shared at the highest level of IBM leadership at conferences and events around the world as the single most important tool to help consultants articulate IBM’s value proposition.

Role: Experience Design Lead, Creative Direction

LEDS is a partnership between IBM and Lumen made up of Business Analysts, Solution Owners, SMEs, Craft Leads, Designers, and Solution Architects. Our charter is leading initiatives that transform the Customer and Employee Experiences across their Service Delivery organization.

USER WORKSHOPS

I joined LEDS in late June of 2022 as a Sr. Experience Design Lead. My first week on the team I was pulled in to help design and deliver a 50-person client workshop to map the customer journey across the entire LBGUPR process for one of their key products. The workshop and subsequent work helped define an entirely new journey for Lumen customers.

ELMO

Most recently, I've helped a small, core leadership team embark on envisioning the long term future of Lumen based on the new CEO's vision for Lumen. This included client workshopping, conducting industry trend research, investigating omni-channel strategies and best practices, helping to craft a fully-reimagined digital customer and employee experience, UI design, prototyping, building the Lumen leadership readout materials, and developing user testing materials and videos to evaluate our work with customers. Meet ELMO. This is an ongoing effort but the transformational potential for Lumen is tremendous.

DESIGNING THE PROCESS

We developed a core collection of artifacts to establish consistent, repeatable storytelling across each of the nine key phases for all program initiatives. These were the executive readout materials that helped us frame our critical learnings for each initiative as well as support our strategic recommendations for how to move forward. These artifacts defined the "Moments That Matter," from which client leadership determined budget and resource allocation for every LEDS opportunity.

DESIGN THINKING AS A SERVICE

My team and I created a new LEDS offering called, "Design Thinking as a Service" as an alternate offering for those opportunities that came our way but didn't fit our ongoing roadmap. Our client was excited to take this offering on the road throughout Lumen and asked that we turn something around quickly. We partnered with teammates to create the framework then design and build out the supporting collateral including content creation and visual design. It took a bit of holiday work but we had a great offering framework and story two weeks later.

-- From a colleague quoting our senior client, "Jason just was singing your praises on our backlog call in terms of the new operating model deck and DTAAS. Said you were asking all the right questions, you got his vision, that you just “get it” and he couldn’t wait to see your "Morgan Magic"!"

A NEW INTRANET

And finally, from day one, it was obvious the LEDS internal digital presence on the Lumen Intranet could be better; much better. Challenge was, it had to be built entirely in Sharepoint and Lumen had limited access to the features Sharepoint offers. We made a pitch for how we could make great strides and were subsequently given the go ahead to lead the full redesign and partner with other designers on the team to bring it to life.

IBM, through a partnership among IBM Consulting, IBM Quantum Research, and IBM Quantum Systems had an unprecedented opportunity to educate Fortune 500 clients about the impending paradigm shift in computational technology that quantum would usher in, then help them identify opportunities to capitalize when it becomes commercially viable.

Most clients, however, were unaware of the changes on the horizon and unfamiliar with quantum. Our competitors wanted to become the "partner of choice" for our clients but IBM was the only provider with 30+ years of quantum expertise, full stack capabilities, and proprietary hardware, applications, and algorithm expertise that could lead our clients to "quantum-advantage."

We needed to drive awareness of quantum, create urgency around adoption, and help our clients envision what the future could look like for their enterprise and their industry. Our message was, clients who didn’t prepare would lose as competitors locked up IP and acquired expertise that would position them to win tomorrow.

For those ready, the opportunity was to help us gain a deep understanding of their business, then deliver a customized engagement with client leadership and IBM quantum experts to unearth how quantum will effect their unique enterprise and how they might chart a path to advantage.

Contribution: Over two years, from a design perspective, I led the development and delivery of the client engagements. Working with IBM Quantum Industry Experts, we conducted research, explored use cases, prototyped, iterated, tested, and refined various client engagement models, delivered client workshops, and created readout materials that defined strategies and road maps for ongoing work.

With the success of the IBM Quantum client work, we leveraged the IBM Consulting Offering Development model to build out the IBM Quantum offering. With the arrival of COVID, we quickly pivoted from in-person workshops to virtual workshops via Mural and deliver remote client engagements with participants logging in from across the globe.

I had the opportunity to work with some of the best minds in IBM along with forward thinking clients like CLS, Progressive Insurance, E.On, Doosan, State Farm, BNP Paribas, HSBC, SAP, and more. Today, the frameworks my team created are the foundation for our exploratory quantum work with clients.

The Cognitive Buying Assistant (CBA) was an idea that came to life in an Enterprise Design Thinking workshop with a large, global, equipment, services, and software client.

As with many difficult and cumbersome enterprise procurement systems, the client discovered their employees were placing the majority of their purchases with online retailers rather than through their system and its negotiated pricing, costing the company millions. A 3% increase in compliance = $1MM in savings so the opportunity was immense.

Over 12 weeks we conducted a heuristic evaluation, generative research, interviewed more than 50 users and ran 30 usability sessions. We arrived at a number of insights that helped drive our understanding of user needs, opportunities to employ IBM Watson Cognitive APIs and Ai, and user inspiration that would help define a design system that felt like a radical departure from current procurement tools and better aligned with users expectations that their business tools should be as delightful as their every day consumer experiences.

The result was a beautiful, intuitive solution that cultivates relationships with its users through Natural Language Understanding that identifies sentiment and emotion, Speech to Text, and AI algorithms that help shoppers find exactly what they’re looking for based on their habits and the habits of shoppers with whom they share affinity.

Role: Experience Design Lead, Creative Direction

Over the last decade or so, Lee has lost its way and forgotten the optimistic spirit of its founder, H.D. Lee. Though the company continues to make innovative products the brand has been languishing in a steady in decline.

Consumers associate Lee with a dated product mix and distribution channel that’s simply lost its relevancy in today’s marketplace.

Our challenge was to appeal to Millenials, conquer brand perceptions, encourage trial and grow revenue. In addition to a mix of print, TV, digital, social and experiential we got a crack at the website and the client was thrilled. “This is how Lee Jeans should look.”

Role: Creative Direction, Lead Design

ADCOLOR® is a non-profit that promotes and celebrates diversity within the advertising industry. Every year they host a conference and awards show with an audience of practitioners, celebrities and young talent new to the industry.

Until now, the organization has been primarily focused on the event. But in planning for the 10th anniversary, we lead the charge to define the organization as a brand. After a series of planning summits we developed a strategic platform and set of principles that would guide ADCOLOR into the future and its new role as a year round voice for advocacy.

From that platform we dug in to develop a brand identity that included a new logo, brand guidelines, content and social strategies and templates for web, email, print, digital and experiential.

Role: Creative Direction, User Experience, Design Lead, Team Lead

Stainmaster® needed to refresh its brand and over the course of the year that evolved into a new Brand Guideline, desktop/tablet website, mobile site and reimagining many of their sub-brands.

Among their highest digital priorities was creating a great customer experience based on an exploration of their motivations, needs and access points. And a category breaking look and feel characterized by a modern yet accessible digital experience that would resonate across all target segments.

Role: Creative Director, Experience Design, Design Lead

JoS. A. Bank invited GSD&M to pitch a rebrand of the organization. Among the deliverables was a reimagining of their digital experiences including desktop, mobile, social and experiential. Unfortunately, we didn't win the big prize.

Role: Creative Direction, User Experience, Design Lead

GSD&M negotiated with Food Network for a custom online contest called "Chopped Impossible: Restaurant Challenge," and branded by Sysco.

The contest was a call for recipe submissions from restaurant professionals aligned with Sysco product themes. The general audience voted and finalists were selected by Food Network, who then competed in the ‘Open Your Basket Challenge’ for the grand and other prizes.

GSD&M was tasked with creating a responsive promotional site to build awareness for the show and Sysco products, promote participation in the contest and drive new partnerships.

Role: Creative Direction, Designer

When we launched, "At The Corner of Happy and Healthy" we revamped the entire Walgreens brand with a new look and feel and wanted to create a site within a site to drive campaign traffic.

As we dug in, we realized Walgreens had a "treasure trove" of great content but it was buried in so many deep holes that users rarely discovered it.

So we mined and harvested content that aligned with the overall messaging of the campaign and built an experience within walgreens.com.

The experience was a huge success yielding significant increases by virtually all metrics including time spent on site, page views, downloads, and sign ups.

Role: Creative Direction, Designer

GSD&M Presents is the arm of the agency responsible for all the cool bands that play on the Austin campus. Whether intimate gatherings in the agency theater or when we play host to thousands during the annual SXSW industry party, GSD&M Presents always lines up super talented artists.

And every so often you get a chance to design a poster announcing the event.

Sometimes you get a whole weekend to concept, illustrate and design your poster as with Aaron Behrens and the Midnight Stroll.

Sometimes they tell you to have something in less that 24 hrs b/c we just got word the band is playing "tomorrow" – as with Dawes.

Role: ACD, Designer, Illustrator

James Luther "Jim" Dickinson was an American record producer, pianist, and singer who fronted, among others, the Memphis, Tennessee-based band Mud Boy and the Neutrons. At the SXSW Festival, a group of several hundred gathered to hear about the life and times of the accomplished musician and producer from those who knew him best.

To commemorate GSD&M's 40th anniversary, we created a poster series celebrating our greatest accomplishments on behalf of our clients, the environment, and/or the community.

Southwest Airlines had been a beloved client since our earliest days. And Shamu was one of our favorite ideas, ever! It was novel. It was iconic. And it was the first time anything had ever been done like it on a commercial jetliner.

Role: ACD, Designer, Illustrator

To commemorate GSD&M's 40th anniversary, we created a poster series celebrating our greatest accomplishments on behalf of our clients, the environment and/or the community.

"Keys" poster - #31 in the poster series "The 40 Greatest Things We Ever Did” told the story of first-time home ownership and helped new home buyers find information to set them on the path of purchasing a new home.

Role: ACD, Designer, Illustrator

Logo design for GSD&M's internal design studio. 828 comes from the agency's address at 828 W. 6th St. in Austin, TX.

Role: Design, Illustration

Logo design for local Austin architect.

Role: Designer

Type treatment.

Role: Designer, Typographer

Logo for local Austin program. AFTS provides art supplies and art classes at the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless. At the end of each year they host a show and sale, at which they sell the work produced by the artists. All the proceeds are in turn distributed to the artists. Some of whom earn enough to get off the streets.