Digital Product & Process Redesign - Publishing

Challenge:

A leading non-profit global curriculum provider faced significant challenges with their publishing department—a critical component and profit center for the organization. Their curriculum development process suffered from excessive costs and extended time-to-market timelines. With curriculum requiring regular revisions every few years, some content had become outdated due to these inefficiencies. Previous attempts to address these process issues had failed, largely due to the organization's hierarchical, political, and collaborative nature that made implementing change particularly difficult.

Solutions Implemented:

As interim Head of Publishing, I carefully analyzed each step in the existing workflow, then led a comprehensive process and product redesign initiative:

• Product Redesign: Transformed the monolithic curriculum into modular, online components accessible to licensed users, enabling immediate availability of revisions

• Process Redesign: Eliminated a series of approvals and handoffs by restructuring the workflow from a sequential review chain to a collaborative team-based approach

• Organizational Redesign: Restructured working teams to bring key stakeholders together rather than maintaining siloed responsibilities with frequent handoffs

• Content Enhancement: Developed a standardized template for video exemplars demonstrating curriculum implementation in schools, creating consistency and efficiency in production

Results Achieved:

The comprehensive redesign efforts yielded significant improvements in both cost-effectiveness and time-to-market:

• Production Efficiency: Dramatically shortened curriculum development timelines by implementing team-based collaborative approaches instead of sequential reviews

• Cost Reduction: Reduced video production costs by approximately 50% through standardized formats and templates, simplifying pre-production planning and production

• Scale Improvement: Developed a multi-site video production strategy that captured 3-5 different curriculum exemplars in a single trip

• Content Quality: Created valuable 3-5 minute video exemplars showing real-world curriculum implementation, enhancing the value proposition for schools

• Process Sustainability: Successfully implemented lasting change in an organization where previous improvement attempts had failed

• Innovation and Ideation Excellence: By reimagining the curriculum as modular digital components rather than traditional publications, I introduced a paradigm shift that overcame entrenched organizational resistance. This innovative approach eliminated bottlenecks in the revision process while simultaneously improving accessibility and relevance for educators worldwide.

The redesigned approach allowed the organization to update their curriculum more frequently while maintaining quality and reducing costs, creating a more sustainable publishing model for this core business function.