ELENA MCFARLAND
User Experience Research & Strategy Manager @ PwC
ABOUT ME
Welcome! My name is Elena. I'm a Manager at PwC focused on enhancing the user experience for clients internally & externally. In this role, I'm driving product improvements by sharing the voice of our customer to enhance the experience. My overall professional experience ranges from strategy & operations, project/system implementations, automation (adoption & building), contact center & customer support, and recruitment services & onboarding.
THE START OF MY DIGITAL JOURNEY
2019 - Video for PwC's Virtual Digital Academy "It's your turn"
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Experience at PwC
MANAGER - UX RESEARCH & DIGITAL ASSETS LEAD
Apr 2022 - Present
UX Research & Strategy - Digital Asset Lead
Create UXR team goals and sprint planning aligned to product goals and roadmap to determine opportunities for UXR team.
Lead Research Operations by standardizing templates and procedures for efficiency by improving note taking & insights for user testing with new Miro Board template/structure, and discovering a new and efficient Interview scheduling process w/MS Bookings for global participants.
Design and execute a variety of research studies, including user testing/interviews, usability tests, concept tests, focus groups, etc
Synthesize quantitative data with qualitative data to help drive product and design decisions
Partner with design, product, and customer success colleagues to understand business needs, and design appropriate research studies to generate user-focused insights
Transformed the ProEdge product release notes by collaborating across different teams to gain feedback to determine opportunities for improvement. This lead to new changes to format and structure, in result decreasing read time by 61% after 2 sprints.
Share research best practices across teams in P&S and beyond (ProEdge, Astro, PERN)
Digital Asset (Automation) Content Owner by developing a robust knowledge of the library of assets, owning inventory maintenance and standard operating procedures, and providing asset recommendations to alleviate pain points and align with specific use cases to demo to Clients.
Partnered with another team member to streamline a Clients process by creating a custom Alteryx Intelligence Suite workflow. This powerful workflow automated their previously manual processes of downloading loan documents and completing data entry in Excel. Thanks to the automation solution, they can accomplish the same tasks more efficiently and accurately, reducing the amount of effort required to complete the process from 1,000 times a year to a single bulk process per month.
MANAGER - AUTOMATION ADOPTION & DIGITAL LAB GOVERNANCE
Oct 2020 - March 2022
Automation Adoption & Training - Program Management - Digital Governance Leader
Primary focus is to increase automation adoption and knowledge throughout all Business Services (internal facing) Teams at PwC in US & MX (~7,000 staff).
Program Manager for Automation Champions program, creating and hosting monthly meetings for the group to provide training, insights into new tech, and create a community.
Manage automation intake process and review for new automation on the firms internal automation site (Digital Lab) for Business Services Organizations.
Build and maintain Visualizations/Reporting for business unit leaders to help tell their automation story (Tableau & Power BI) and identify trend and opportunities for their team.
Automation Consultant to internal teams. suggesting ways they can streamline processes and save time with automation.
Facilitate training sessions to internal teams to teach ways they can use the different automation tools and resources at the firm.
Member of the Women in Technology (WiT) program, joining meetings with the community as well as planning of WiT events. Lead the Networking planning committee for Fall Fest, a 2 day event with 1500 global registrants, 20 breakout & panel discussions, and 25 leader networking sessions.
SENIOR ASSOCIATE - PEOPLE OPS
Feb 2018 - Oct 2020
Oversaw offshore provider team performance in execution of contact center strategy (workflow and resource management, quality control, etc.) to maintain consistent service delivery.
Teamed with other Senior Associates to identify and implement process improvement opportunities through brainstorming sessions.
Maintained and created new product knowledge base and training materials, working with other functional teams.
Utilized knowledge from Digital Academy training and other resources to automate tasks internally, as well as submitting built automations to the Digital Lab.
Developed Bot for all staff to use to determine holiday hours balance that is published in the PwC Lab with over 20,000 runs. This also resulted in an opportunity to travel to PwC Experience center and share my success story in a video as part the new Virtual Digital Academy
Created Call me maybe Bundle in the Digital Lab to house all automations related to the ECC's scope of support to help decrease ECC volume while promoting the adoption of the Digital Lab
PwC Mexico HC Support Project: Team Knowledge Lead for implementation of HR Shared Services support for PwC Mexico Firm. Created 100+ knowledge documents and 5 training decks for the project launch.
Worked with Mexico HC teams to lead process design sessions for phase 2 implementation of support. In result, created new training and knowledge documents to then travel to Manila, Philippines and train Provider team on new scope.
Create and present monthly operational dashboard to Mexico Stakeholders to communicate progress in metrics/adoption and suggest process improvement opportunities
Tour of Duty for 3 months:
Responsible for upskilling and enabling People Ops in Citizen Led and Citizen+ automations to promote the Your Tomorrow strategy
Personally Upskill in automation technologies such as Alteryx. Tableau, etc. to be able to support the members People Ops (business analytics badge in progress).
Provide assistance or consultation to troubleshoot and resolve technical obstacles with automating processes or looking to create a new automation
SPECIALIST - RECRUITMENT SRVS & ONBOARDING
Apr 2017 - Feb 2018
Processed interview scheduling requests for the US firm which includes standard requests, expedites, and multiple candidate interview days.
Managed daily workload by prioritizing interview requests to ensure the 24 hour SLA is met.
Managed all Tour of Duty & Global Mobility requests, which includes meeting with our GM Stakeholders to provide information on our volume with our recent Go-Live of August 2017.
Managed all Canada interview scheduling escalations and oversee scheduling process performed by Offshore.
Reviewed knowledge documents with the goal of standardizing content and simplifying to make it more easily understood by the audience.
Managed event creation in Yello as a subject matter expert, which is the base of the interview schedules.
Offshored the Event Creation process to TCS by conducting virtual trainings and re-vamping training materials.
Processed quality control audits to ensure team is meeting standards to provide the best candidate experience.
Quickly trained additional resources in the expedite process in effort to reduce turnaround time due to high volume.
Assisted with RPA (robotics process automation) tasks and work with Infosys when needed.
SPECIALIST/CONTRACTOR - PEOPLE OPS
Apr 2016 - Apr 2017
Responsible for handling employee (all US PwC (50,000+ staff)) and candidate inquiries for PwC’s policies related to onboarding, learning and development, Talent Exchange, non-healthcare related benefits such as sabbaticals, education reimbursement, vacation/holiday balances, HR policies, performance appraisal database, and all other general human resources inquires via phone and chat.
Managed the Onboarding inbox daily for inquiries from new joiners as well as recruiters.
Ran daily reports for Onboarding welcome calls, onboarding independence, and monitor voicemail inbox.
Conducted HR training for new hires, as well as nesting and coaching the newly trained colleagues.
Developed process improvement material for Chat and Onboarding trainings that helped trainee’s handle workload alone post training.
Developed and conducted training for process and procedures for working the Onboarding Email Inbox.
Assisted the Standards & Processes team on an audit project for the Contact Centers Onboarding knowledge documents.
PROJECTS & IMPLEMENTATIONS
SERVICENOW HR MODULE
2020
Partner with SNow Advisory team to understand system capabilities to provide recommendations
Design new way of contact center work with project leaders including the Onboarding COE
SERVICENOW CHAT
2019
New chat system for HR Support in US & MX
Partnered with IT/SNow team to learn the tool and create trainings
Trained onshore & offshore team virtually
New role as the SNow Chat SME
GLOBAL SNAPSHOT TOOL
2019
UAT Testing
System Feedback
MEXICO HR CONTACT CENTER
2018
Implementation of HR Contact Center Support for the Mexico firm
Knowledge creation and training lead
Two phase launch of support
Travel to Mexico for intake of knowledge to create documentation and build training
Travel to Philippines to train support team on the new product
WORKDAY IMPLEMENTATION
2018
UAT Testing
Attended Recruiter Workday training to prepare for contact center support on the new product and personal upskilling
Provided onshore support during Go Live
YELLO INTERVIEW SCHEDULING
2017
Managed new Event creation process as the SME
Created documentation and process improvement suggestions
Built out training to transition work after changes were implemented and stable
