United Bible Societies (UBS) is a complex international charity operating a network of more than 150 autonomous Bible Society offices around the world, each of which is a significant and complex organisation in their own right. These offices are overseen by an international body that coordinates efforts between them and provides vital governance and brokering services, which allows the whole organisation to work together to efficiently reach every part of the world. In particular, the global team coordinates the funding and implementation of numerous mission and development projects run by those in-country Bible Societies.

UBS’ leadership engaged Suru to design, develop and manage a bespoke web application — the Solomon Project Registry — to be used by both UBS' global team and individual Bible Societies’ staff. It needed to support a set of complex workflows involving multiple users from UBS and other Bible Societies and integrate with data and workflow events from external systems.

We conducted numerous process modelling sessions with stakeholders across the organisation to map, evaluate and optimise operational processes and the context in which UBS staff do their work. We also conducted user research and business case analysis before the project was underway which led to UBS updating their original roadmap in light of new information from our research and alternate approaches. Our early guidance unlocked new opportunities that UBS hadn’t envisaged.

Before our involvement, UBS had already begun their project by immediately soliciting proposals from firms to build an app but this yielded ideas that were based on too many assumptions and only scratched the surface of what was possible. The traditional tender process had encouraged everyone involved to skip past the hard work of research and strategy and straight to picking a solution.

Suru turned this round with roadmapping. We showed UBS how to properly research the need in the organisation to clearly define the problem space in its full breadth — simply further digitising the processes they already had wasn't going to move the needle on the organisation objectives. This early research phase not only yielded a much stronger proposition by allocating resources to the features that gave real impact, but also brought Suru and UBS into collaborative exploration whereby they iterated and refined the project in response to new ideas and feedback from stakeholders. These stakeholders, due to their involvement in the research, bought into the project and felt ownership which dissipated resistance to change and made the ultimate rollout much more successful than it otherwise would have been.

The impact of Solomon has been substantial. User adoption and satisfaction are high, and many of UBS’ processes have been streamlined and improved through Suru Partners’ ongoing consultation. The system received praise not only from stakeholders in the organisation but also the Charity Commission’s auditors.

We have remained closely involved with UBS and continue to evolve and grow the application on a continuous deployment schedule, responding to UBS’ changing needs and allowing UBS to take advantage of new opportunities quickly.