Engaging Users with Guided Workflow

Posted on: August 11, 2021
Author: Cate Beauchamp

Solutions Customer Summit Series

Every year, risk and financial resilience professionals encounter new regulatory requirements, global threats, and executive mandates. Resources, however, tend to stay consistent. So how do these teams cope? Where can you save time and redirect energy towards these new challenges?

Software-based automation can help, though it comes with its own set of trade-offs. Many enterprise-grade systems burden users with clunky interfaces that don’t match how you manage your program, creating a need for training to cover the gap. Resilience teams report spending more than 40 hours each year updating documentation or training their user base.

But what if the software could also help with that?

Guided Workflow: Embed the Training into the App

Guided Workflow is a capability of the Fusion Framework System™ that leads users through long sequences of activities so they complete their tasks in a timely manner without getting lost. A TurboTax-style UI guides them step-by-step, and each step can include tips and instruction to clarify what they need to do. Users get the help they need and can clearly see how much work they have left.

The assistance users receive is interwoven with the actual fields they need to populate to complete the work, not captured in an external document divorced from the software. Administrators can embed a mixture of rich text, images, and even video to engage users more effectively and illuminate the task at hand. (Take a look at this webinar video to see a demo in action; jump to the 43 minute mark.) And to meet the unique needs of your program, each workflow can be configured to include the right sequence of data entry, quality review, and approvals.

To keep tabs on your program, each workflow acts as a trackable, reportable assignment with a due date. Reports and dashboards can give you a sense of which department is falling behind and may need a reminder. Additionally, since all users perform the same system tasks in the same repeatable manner, you improve your posture with regulators who look for consistency in execution.

Benefits Across Your Teams

By leveraging Guided Workflow, program managers who are perennially stretched thin can spend less effort creating training materials and have more confidence in the final results. The time you save with a simplified rollout—and the time you’d otherwise spend as a makeshift IT help desk—can be put towards leveling up your program to address the next layer of complex challenges.

Increased engagement from your end-user population goes hand-in-hand with better understanding of the value of resilience. There’s a much better chance the concepts “click” for them when the step-by-step process makes sense onscreen. People can’t buy into what they don’t understand.

Your executive stakeholders also benefit. Gathering source data more effectively via smart workflows increases the accuracy of that data, giving executives a better starting point to make decisions. Seamless handoffs (facilitated by the system) minimize breakdowns due to silos and improve cross-team collaboration. And your program looks better in the eyes of regulators, who strongly prefer to see consistency enforced in these process workflows.

Elevate Your Program

Guided Workflow makes it easy for non-expert users to maintain their own data so you can reduce the training burden on administrators and expand your program in a way that scales. With better data, you keep a more accurate view of your exposure and the areas that need improved operational resilience. And since the guidance works the same way for every user, every time, you also strengthen your regulatory posture.

Guided Workflow does not have a separate licensing cost, and installable packages are available for common use cases like business impact analysis and business continuity planning maintenance. If you’re interested, please contact your account rep to learn more.