IBM: Technology Expert Labs
As co-lead on IBM Technology Expert Labs’ service design transformation, I helped turn a slow, fragmented contract process into a streamlined, automated workflow projected to cut creation time by 80% and improve compliance for teams worldwide. Partnering with stakeholders across sales, legal, operations, and IT from all over the world, we also presented our results to senior Vice Presidents & Executive Sponsors within the company. The resulting blueprint introduces streamlined approvals, standardized templates, and connected data flows, projected to cut contract creation time by 80%, improve compliance, and free sellers to focus on clients.
To honor my NDA, I’ve kept this case study free of confidential info. Designs are my own recreations using public design systems, and don’t reflect IBM’s views.
Role
Designer (UX/Service Designer)
Team
IBM, CIO Design
Timeline
Winter 2024 - Spring 2025
Disciplines
Service Design
Project Overview
IBM Technology Expert Labs (TEL) is the professional services arm of IBM, helping clients implement and optimize IBM’s complex technology solutions like cloud platforms, AI tools, and big data systems. You can think of TEL as the “install and optimize” crew for high-end technology. In essence, they make sure it works in the client’s environment and delivers business value. Technology Expert Labs have deep skill in a specific technology or product, such as watsonx or Maximo. They’re called when a customer needs product specific help such as installation, customization, or a health check.
Before TEL experts can start helping clients, there’s a sales-to-delivery process that includes:
- Scoping and pricing the work (proposal)
- Creating and negotiating a contract
- Getting approvals from pricing, legal, and compliance teams
- Registering the contract in IBM’s systems
- Handing the deal to the delivery team
The problem? These steps were scattered across several disconnected tools (Salesforce ISC, Conga, CPQ, spreadsheets, etc.), with lots of manual work like copy-pasting data, rechecking information, and emailing drafts. Templates and clauses weren’t standardized, contracts could be inconsistent, and approvals were slow - sometimes taking weeks and delaying project starts.
As part of TEL’s larger service design transformation, I co-led the Contract Management workstream out of 4 other workstreams, involving 45+ cross-functional participants across the Americas, Asia, Europe, & Middle East with VP & Executive Sponsor visibility, which involved mapping the current process, identifying pain points, and designing a more streamlined, automated future state.
My Role
- Co-led the Contract Management workstream (out of several other workstreams) within TEL’s service design transformation
- Facilitated and documented discovery workshops with sellers, proposal specialists, legal, and operations
- Created As-Is and To-Be journey maps for the contract lifecycle
- Synthesized pain points into actionable design opportunities
- Defined integration touchpoints for a centralized contract management platform with IBM’s sales and delivery systems
- Designed and maintained the internal w3 Publisher site as the central hub for project information, resources, and deliverables - ensuring accessibility for stakeholders across TEL and visibility at the Vice President level
- Coordinated content reviews and approvals with senior leadership to align communications with executive expectations
The Challenge
Our mission:
How might we simplify and connect the contract process so it’s faster, more accurate, and less manual - freeing sellers to focus on clients instead of admin?
Therefore, our task was to:
- Understand the end-to-end contract journey from multiple perspectives
- Identify breakdowns and inefficiencies in the process
- Co-design a future-state experience that’s faster, more accurate, and more consistent
Approach
The Contract Management workstream within TEL’s Service Design Transformation ran intensive discovery and design workshops, forming part of a multi-month, high-visibility global initiative. Sessions began in the winter of 2024, with iterative workshops, inter-session prep, and feedback loops leading into blueprinting. The project brought together ~45 cross-functional participants, such as service designers, sellers, legal specialists, architects, and project management leaders. Overall, the project engaged with several stakeholders across global TEL operations, with direct attention from VP and Executive-level leadership.
Stakeholders Engaged
We connected with people from across the contract lifecycle to capture a 360° view of the process, for a total of 8 personas identified:
- TEL Sellers - creating and negotiating client contracts
- Brand Sellers - attaching TEL services to broader IBM deals
- Proposal Specialists - preparing and formatting Statements of Work (SOWs)
- Legal Reviewers – ensuring compliance and updating terms
- Operations & Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) Teams - validating contracts and registering them in IBM systems
- Architects & Project Management Office (PMO) Leaders - designing, supporting, and managing the systems behind the process
Research Methods
We ran a series of collaborative activities to unpack the current experience:
- 45 one-on-one experience interviews to understand role-specific challenges, needs, key workflows, data, and the main points
- Observation Sessions to watch the contract process unfold in real time
- As-Is and To-Be Journey Mapping to visualize every touchpoint, tool, and handoff from proposal to registration
- Persona development involved in contract creation
- Pain point analysis to prioritize the issues with the biggest impact on speed, accuracy, and compliance.
As-Is Journey Mapping
Although the above diagrams are blurred for privacy reasons, you can see the complex blueprint design work that was done to determine how the existing, fragmented contract process (As-Is). We started by mapping the current contract lifecycle in detail — from proposal creation to registration.
This service blueprint captured touchpoints, personas (actors), process steps, technologies/systems involved, policies, critical moments (pain points), ideas/opportunities, metrics/data, questions, and observations/facts.
It revealed the complexity of the existing process: multiple disconnected platforms, repeated manual steps, and no single source of truth for contract terms. After mapping out the end-to-end journey, we realized there was a total of 30 tools involved in this overall process of contract management alone.
Pain Point Layering
On top of the As-Is blueprint, we layered the pain points gathered during interviews and workshops - issues like duplicate data entry, unclear approval ownership, inconsistent templates, and lack of contract status visibility.
This visual helped stakeholders see not just the steps, but also where the process was breaking down and why delays were happening.
To-Be Blueprint
Next, we co-created the future-state blueprint with stakeholders. This mapped the redesigned process, now centered on a centralized Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform.
The To-Be state introduced automated data flows from upstream systems, standardized templates and clauses, automated approvals, and real-time contract status visibility.
Compared to the As-Is map, the future state had fewer touchpoints, cleaner handoffs, and a clear single source of truth.
Overall Key Findings
1. Process Complexity & Fragmentation
The contract journey spanned multiple disconnected systems - Salesforce ISC, Conga, CPQ, spreadsheets, and email - with no single source of truth for contract data. Information lived in silos, personal archives, and offline files, making it hard to track and manage consistently.
2. Heavy Manual Effort
Duplicate data entry was the norm. Sellers and support staff often retyped the same information across systems, copy-pasted between tools, and reformatted documents multiple times - each step adding time and introducing opportunities for error.
3. Workarounds & Inconsistent Practices
In an effort to speed things up, sellers sometimes bypassed official systems altogether. While faster in the moment, these shortcuts introduced compliance risks and version control issues. Templates and clauses also varied by geography, team, and even individual seller, resulting in inconsistencies and frequent rework.
4. Slow Approval & Review Cycles
Approvals often involved multiple loops, with unclear ownership at each stage. Missing or incorrect data triggered repeat validations, and without visibility into where a contract was in the process, delays compounded.
5. Impact on Sellers & Business
Instead of focusing on client engagement, sellers were tied up in admin work. Delays in contract creation and registration pushed back project start dates - slowing down delivery and impacting revenue.
Supporting Artifacts
Beyond the As-Is and To-Be blueprints, we created a set of supporting artifacts to ensure the vision could be clearly communicated, adopted, and implemented across TEL’s global operations.
- Personas: Summarized the needs, frustrations, and tools of key roles in the contract process (TEL Seller, Brand Seller, Proposal Specialist, Legal Reviewer).
- Integration Diagrams: Illustrated how the future contract lifecycle management platform would connect with IBM’s existing sales and delivery tools, reducing system silos.
- Opportunity Statements: Clear, prioritized recommendations tied to specific steps in the blueprint, making it easy for project teams to act on research findings.
- Template Harmonization Guidelines: Outlined rules for standardizing contracts and clauses globally, while allowing for market-specific exceptions.
- w3 Publisher Hub: An internal, VP-approved knowledge base housing all deliverables, updates, and resources, providing a single source of truth for the workstream.
Reflection & Impact
When I first joined this project, I knew the topic of contract management wasn’t going to be glamorous. It was dense. It was technical. It touched dozens of systems and had more acronyms than anyone could keep straight. And yet, this was also what made it fascinating.
There were so many moving parts: sellers, legal reviewers, proposal specialists, operations, global approvals… every step was a handoff, every handoff was a potential delay, and no one had ever seen the entire process laid out in one place.
Mapping it all was like untangling a giant knot. At first it felt overwhelming - so much detail, so many exceptions. But as the patterns started to emerge, the work became exciting. We could point to a step and say, “That’s why contracts get stuck for weeks,” and everyone in the room would nod in recognition. I realized that more people want to reach common ground than not.
That’s the power of service design: taking something abstract, invisible, and frankly a little boring, and making it tangible enough that people want to fix it.
By the end, we had something concrete: a future-state vision that VP-level leaders and frontline sellers could both understand, and a clear path to get there. And even though the project was intense and the environment uncertain, it reminded me why I enjoy this work: in the middle of complexity, you can still create clarity.
Projected Outcomes
- Contract creation time reduced by up to 80%.
- Standardized templates and clauses for global consistency.
- Automated data flows eliminating duplicate entry.
- Real-time visibility into contract status for all stakeholders.
For me, the biggest takeaway was that service design isn’t just about improving processes - it’s about making sense of complexity and translating it into a story people can actually use to drive change.
