Designing organisations, not screens
A new digital ecosystem for Wipro and its people — and, at the start, nobody inside to design it.
Practice — Service design · Enterprise transformation · Design leadership
Role — Led three of the four workstreams — Order to Cash, Hire to Retire, Records to Reports
Team — Wipro Digital design, with Designit, SAP, EY and global business heads
Period — 2018–2022
Client — Internal · Wipro
Everyone in the organisation is the user.
Four enterprise processes decide what it feels like to work at a company. The hunters in sales and pre-sales. The delivery and programme managers. HR and talent. The executives reading the numbers. Each of those days is shaped by a system somebody designed, or didn’t.
Wipro Quantum was framed as four enterprise processes to be modernised — a technology programme with a design workstream attached.
We made it something else. Understand how the company and its people actually work: with clients, within themselves, and with the people around them. Then build a more efficient system around that.
Designit, Wipro’s strategic design consultancy, led the vision — roadmap, service strategy, experience principles, brand positioning. Wipro Digital had to make it real. Designit held Lead to Order. Order to Cash, Hire to Retire and Records to Reports were mine.
The hard part was never designing intuitive experiences. It was adoption across a global organisation operating at significant scale.
The rules we designed by
Design the way the organisation works, then the screens it needs.
Agreement is made in rooms, not in files.
Nothing ships that the people it lands on have not drawn themselves.
What we did
01 · Put the business at the whiteboard.
Business teams drew their own process before anything was designed. What came back was not a requirements document — it was where the rework actually lived.
02 · Interviewed the people the change would land on.
Not the sponsors. The people whose working day would change. Then mapped the journey end to end before a single screen existed.
03 · Prototyped so stakeholders could argue with it.
Made real enough to be disagreed with. A deck invites approval; a prototype invites the objection you need to hear while it is still cheap.
04 · Sat in the room with SAP, EY and the business leaders.
Redesigning business processes, aligning enterprise workflows and integrating SAP-driven solutions into Wipro’s operating model. Design owned five things end to end: understanding business processes, mapping service ecosystems, defining system interactions, designing the digital products, and driving organisational adoption.
How the work ran — DISCOVER · DEFINE · IDEATE · PROTOTYPE · DEPLOY & TEST. The double diamond, run linear or iterative depending on the size of the problem.
Project highlights
The challenge — One company, four experiences
Four enterprise processes, each shaping somebody’s working day, each modernised as a technology problem. Success depended on business strategy, technology, operations and design arriving as one effort rather than four.
The approach — Rooms before files
Whiteboarding, interviews, journey mapping, prototypes built to be argued with, and standing collaboration with SAP, EY and engineering. None of those were deliverables — they were how agreement got made.
The outcome — A digital foundation
Four enterprise processes redesigned as one ecosystem. Simplified operations, modernised internal platforms, and a system built to scale across the organisation.
Gallery
Business teams drawing their own process — before anything was designed.
The journey, end to end — mapped before a single screen existed.
Prototypes made to be argued with — real enough for stakeholders to object to.
Where decisions actually got made — workshops across Finance, Sales, Delivery, HR and Operations.
Results — “Enterprise design is organisation design.”
What changed for the user
Simplified processes across global functions, and improved adoption of the enterprise platforms people work in every day. Four populations — sales, delivery, HR and executives — working inside one ecosystem rather than four.
What it was worth
5× — hours saved, cycle-time reduction and adoption.
+25% client satisfaction through embedded design.
The honest line
This is a programme, not a product, and programme numbers are always partly somebody else’s. Designit set the vision; the transformation belonged to Wipro. What is mine is three of the four workstreams and the adoption problem inside them.
Four enterprise processes. Three of them mine.