Genpact is a global professional services firm focused on delivering digital transformation for its clients, putting digital and data to work to create competitive advantage. Its name means “generating business impact.” As a General Electric spinoff, Genpact combines its deep heritage of Lean Six Sigma — an analytical framework for removing waste and increasing efficiencies by reducing variation and refining business processes — with its expertise in digital solutions to serve clients worldwide. In the early 2010s, Genpact recognized that the increasing pace of technological change offered a strategic opportunity to reimagine itself as a company, particularly how it provides value to customers.

Human-centered design, also known as design thinking, became the clear choice for Genpact to advance two strategic initiatives, both centered around people: first, to trigger a cultural revolution among 75,000 employees to re-envision the way they work; and second, to reposition Genpact’s core offering as “Lean Digital,” a unique approach built on three long-time strengths — Lean Six Sigma, digital expertise, and industry domain knowledge — plus a new and deepening capability in human-centered design, all to maximize value to customers.

Genpact needed a knowledge partner that could move quickly to build human-centered design capability in its global workforce, in a way that made sense within a Lean Six Sigma environment. The approach needed to be simple, easy-to-learn and repeatable — with excellent training and follow-up support and resources. After researching options in 2015, the company invited LUMA to lead a pilot training, then a workshop using the LUMA System of Innovation to reimagine Genpact’s finance and accounting offering, the company’s largest service line. “Our ah-ha moment happened when we saw it in action. The rest is history,” said Shalu Manan, vice president learning and development.

With full support from Genpact leadership, the company began an extensive program of LUMA training and empowerment for its customer-facing teams around the globe, including interactive workshops, online support, on-demand resources through LUMA Workplace, and coaching, with some Genpact team members advancing to LUMA certification to build internal capability. Genpact’s HR department incorporated human-centered design into the company’s employee improvement and innovation program, right alongside Lean Six Sigma designations. Genpact teams held human-centered design co-imagination sessions with clients to explore challenges, frame problems and prototype quick solutions, weaving in the other pillars of Lean Digital — Lean Six Sigma, digital expertise, industry domain knowledge — as projects progressed. The Genpact culture change revolution was under way.

With any major initiative, a critical question is how to assess its impact — what are the key metrics, and how best to measure them. As Genpact continues to scale its human-centered design capability using the LUMA System, Giacomelli, senior vice president and chief innovation officer, identified three three key metrics he uses to measure progress:

Projects: The number of client projects that incorporate human-centered design, which increased tenfold from Q1 2016 to Q1 2017, a strong exponential curve as a measure of added value for clients and Genpact.

People: The number of Genpact employees trained in human-centered design — more than 1,000 and counting — and who are fully embracing the methods in their work, as a measure of building sustainable change.

Culture Change: And most challenging, the extent to which design thinking has become a core component of Genpact’s cultural change and strategic transformation, as it broadens beyond an environment grounded in Lean Six Sigma. “Cultural change is the most complex, but it’s also the most powerful,” Giacomelli says. “I think the future will tell if design thinking is really delivering the complete visionary power we had in mind. The early signals are very positive.”