Persona Insight - Example Pack

Overview

The Persona Insight Library Pack is a turnkey solution allowing you to measure activity across a range of technical and sentiment-based areas so that you can build an understanding of the behaviors of employees as they go about their daily work.

The pack is slightly different from other Nexthink Library Packs in that it is essentially a framework of measurements that enables you to solve a multitude of business requirements. Therefore by importing and running the pack, you will discover your Persona-based activities of your Employees but in fact, it is what you do with this information that will provide you with the real power and functionality that the pack brings.

The Persona Insight – Developers Example pack is not intended as a Production-ready pack, which should be imported and used out of the box. It certainly can be used in Production once understood and configured as wished, but its main purpose is to act as a guide to how the Persona Insight pack can be used to develop actionable Personas within your Organization. The intention is to use this pack by installing it (it does fully work) as a guide as you use Persona Insight. If you wish to develop it into a working pack you are perfectly able to do so, just by tuning it to the Personas, Persona Traits, and other items that are relevant for your Organization.

Pre-Requisites

The Persona Insight - Developers pack requires Nexthink version 6.29 (On-Premise) or 2020.5 (Cloud). Versions of Nexthink below this will not work.

The pack also utilizes the Digital Experience Score 2.x, so please download the latest version of DEX for your environment.

The Persona Insight pack must have been installed for this pack to work.

Persona Insight - Recap

Please make sure you are fully familiar with the Persona Insight pack before using this example pack. To this extent, both import the pack and also read the documentation.

The aim of understanding a Persona is to be able to identify which of the employees within your Organization are exhibiting a particular behavior – be it using a piece of software, having a particular level of motivation, accessing a specific domain, consuming a certain amount of resources, whatever it may be and then drive an action based on that Persona.

With Persona Insights, this idea is split into two concepts:

• Persona Traits – these are the “building blocks” that measure an individual construct, such as the amount of time Microsoft Excel is being used during the working day. The key points on Persona Traits are that:

  • They are measured, between 0-10, so you can have a Persona Trait at any particular level, they are not binary – you might be a 4.6 MS Word user but an 8.7 CPU Consumer. This way for each employee you can see not only that they are exhibiting a trait, but by how much they are exhibiting it.

  • Common Persona Traits are grouped together - the parent folder “Designer Tools” contains the Adobe products Acrobat, Illustrator, and Photoshop for example. For certain groupings; Collaboration Tools, Productivity Tools, and File Sharing Tools, a summary Persona Trait Score has been created. This allows you to measure not only individual tool usage but also an accurate result for the overall behavior of the group (which might be more than one collaboration tool) can also be understood.

• Personas – Personas are made up of one or more Traits and are generally binary – you are or you are not. An example of a Persona might be “Ready to move to VDI”, i.e. users in this Persona can be transitioned onto a Virtual platform. Personas have some key characteristics:

  • They can be defined at a Score level or at a Metric level. For more detail on which might be the best method to use, please see the associated Configuration Guide for Persona Insights.

  • They should ideally be binary – i.e. you are or you are not. This is because Personas should drive a decision or recommendation. This is a soft rather than hard requirement, it is Nexthink’s recommendation.

  • They can be 1:1 or Many:1. A Persona could be “Users needing 16 Core Systems” which would be a Persona based on the single Persona Trait of CPU Intensity, i.e. how CPU power hungry the user is. Equally, to use the example above, the Persona Trait “Ready to move to VDI” might include the number of applications in use, plus low power consumption use, plus single monitor usage for example.

How do I make use of this Pack?

This pack is a walkthrough of a fictional business case for Personas – that of tailoring the device to match the individual needs and understanding of the Employees that have these Personas, both those you know about and those you don’t.

To highlight this, we have used the case of Developers, who have been expressing unhappiness with their work device Digital Experience. In this Organization, there are developers that you know about, who are identified by HR as such and are listed in a category in the Finder - Persona Insight – Job Role. There could also be employees who are doing Developer type activities that you weren’t aware of. For these employees, we have defined a new Persona, Hidden Developers.

Persona Insight - Developers Score

To understand the Persona Traits, i.e. the behavior, of our Developers, a separate Developers Score file has been created with two main components:

• HR Developers The Persona Insight pack already contains Persona Trait scores for Front End Tools Consumer and Back End Tools Consumer. These have been incorporated into the HR Developers scores in this Example pack to form three Developer Personas: Front End Developer, Back End Developer, and Full Stack Developer. For each type of developer Persona, we combine their HR role (from the Category mentioned above) with their active use of specific developer tools. For example our Score for Backend Developers will be: "HR Role = Dev" AND "Back-end trait > 5" AND "Front-end trait < 5" == "Back end developer" i.e. Active use of Back End Tools but not much use of Front-End Tools. The same principle is used for front-end developers; and full-stack developers who are using both front and back-end tools.

• Developer Traits It is possible that our Developers might also be using other tools to those listed in the existing persona traits for front end tools consumer and back end tools consumer. We want a Persona Trait breakdown of these too, so we have created a new set of Persona Traits to cover anything we think they might be using and put this into the same score file. These entries simply measure the individual usage of these tools and translate it to the standard 0-10 score. (Note also that the score is based on the correct field for that usage – so Focus Time is used for a GUI-based tool, whilst Execution Duration or Total Network Traffic are more suitable for non-GUI applications).

• Hidden Developers The final element of the Developers Score is for the concept of “hidden developers”. This score entry measures the active use of front-end or back-end tools combined with no known HR role as a developer.

Now that we have our definitions, we can plot dashboards showing us the Persona Traits, Digital Experience scores, top applications, and so forth of our three Personas and we can also make recommendations on particular devices, applications, and domains for our developer Personas.

Dashboards

Persona Discovery

This dashboard contains insight about developers in your organization, such as the Digital Experience Score, CPU usage, memory usage, and main Persona Traits.

With this dashboard, we can understand the Developer’s role within the Organization, so that we can then make recommendations based on what we discover.

Persona Recommendations

With this dashboard you are purely seeing an example structure, the idea is that you would construct it based on the data that you have found.

Starting with some sentiment KPI’s and history graphs and the Digitial Experience Score, we can show sentiment (hopefully) improving over time. This allows teams to strive for continuous improvement.

The following sections are entitled Recommendations for… (there are three, for Front End Developers, for Back End Developers, and for Full Stack Developers). They outline the actual items we recommend for each Persona, from the hardware, CPU, OS, applications, and then domains. Each is scoped to the Persona in question.

The next section is for the Persona Hidden Developers. This Persona is looking for people who are not part of the HR record of Developers in the Organization (i.e. not in the Category in Nexthink’s sense) but they are using Developer toolsets. This has two potential important Use Cases:

1. Are they having a good Digital Experience? It's quite possible that because the Organization did not realize they would be using these toolsets that they have not got sufficiently powerful devices.

2. Are they licensed to use this software? Often if the software can be installed in the user context (so does not require admin rights) an employee can now put on a piece of software that has a real associated cost but not realize this. This must be tracked.

Finally, there is a section for Potential Persona Transitions which is a really interesting possibility. This is using new Personas, defined in the score, which look for people using one Persona trait significantly but also touching on another, so for example Front End developers who are also using some Back-End tools. This shows a level of use of the toolsets which implies they may well be familiar with it and are good candidates, if the project needs, to move roles. Therefore, the pack looks at these types of Persona Trait values and shows the possibilities of moving between various combinations. This is a very high potential discovery of hidden talent that could be useful to many organizations.

General Hints and Tips

Load the score into the Nexthink score creator so you can see and understand the score. Remove and add as you wish, it is entirely flexible.

If you wish to make this example pack work for your Organization, you should tune it to your needs. By modifying the HR Developers scores to point to a different Job Role category and a different persona trait score from the Persona Insight pack you can transform the information it displays. Similarly, you could replace the developer based applications listed under Developer Traits with scores that measure applications you wish to track in your organization instead. The majority of the pack is dynamic.

Note: Some metrics refer to the new summary Persona Trait scores in the main Persona Insight pack - namely Collaboration Tools and File Sharing Tools. These scores refer to the respective lists of applications in the category Persona Insight - All. Please be aware that these keyword lists may have been customized for use in the main Persona Insight pack. If this is the case then you may have to duplicate this category, modify it, and the metrics that refer to it for it to function correctly in this Example pack.

Changelog

V1.0.1.0

Metrics changed to reflect category changes made to Persona Insight main pack.

V1.0.0.0

Initial release.