I highly recommend The Hard Yards team - experts in delivering measurable results on the most complex business challenges!
Starting in September 2016, Hard Yards effectively supported Sentara Medical Group with Human Centered Design and Agile Delivery services. First, Hard Yards organized discovery and Human Centered Design sessions to clarify the problems and personas that our Analytics team was supporting. They effectively captured and communicated our patient experience, and the business processes and technologies that mapped to each journey.
With clarity on our problems and personas, Hard Yards helped Sentara to iterate on minimal viable products to create useful business intelligence tools. The Hard Yards team brought deep and diverse experience to bear and they unlocked our team's potential to deliver great products in a much more responsive and effective manner. Hard Yards focused our Analytics team as they transitioned from primarily regulatory and clinical reporting functions, to increasingly complex analytical functions that created data-driven insight for our Executive Team. Hard Yards conducted dozens of ethnographic interviews with executives and practice directors. The insights generated from this research were translated into action through the creation of tools that directly addressed user needs. The research uncovered gaps in the flow of information between executives and directors. It also uncovered redundant work done to fill gaps in the current toolset. The outcome of this research ultimately refocused the Hard Yards team on creating an aligned and consistent set of financial reporting dashboards that link high level executive goals with the data directors need to take action against those goals.
Our objectives evolved significantly, and the Hard Yards team remained extremely flexible during the engagement, and pivoted seamlessly as we piloted a Tableau data visualization project for the entire system. The results were dramatic, and supported a large system investment in data analytics capabilities focused on end user needs. What began as a small pilot project became a larger effort to extend these best practices to our entire Analytics team. Based on the success, we engaged Hard Yards to work with our Project Management Office to continue their process improvement efforts. I offer Hard Yards my strongest possible recommendation - they are experts in successfully applying Human Centered design and Agile/Scrum methodologies to complex business challenges.
- Gus Nicoll, Chief Operating Officer at Sentara Medical Group