Key Results
- Managed a 46% increase in design requests year-over-year without doubling headcount.
- Unified an 8,000-person organization under a single creative intake “front door.”
- Eliminated the “Expert Bottleneck” by decentralizing project management through a tiered “Circle of Trust” model.
- Improved Executive Visibility by replacing anecdotal feedback with hard capacity and volume data.
The Challenge: Invisible Growth & The Expert Bottleneck
Children’s Mercy Hospital operates with a lean in-house creative team of approximately seven designers and videographers. However, they serve a massive internal audience of 8,000 employees, any of whom can submit a marketing request.
As Grace Powell stepped into her role, the team faced two primary hurdles:
- The Data Gap: The team felt overwhelmed, but without a way to quantify the influx of work, it was impossible to articulate the need for process changes or additional resources to leadership.
- Single Point of Failure: Grace had become the primary “knowledge hub” for the entire system. Every status update, technical question, and project assignment went through her, creating a bottleneck that slowed down the very team she was trying to support.
The Strategy: The “Circle of Trust” & Role-Based Clarity
To transition from “survival mode” to “scalable growth,” Grace implemented a multi-layered strategy centered on transparency and operational foundations.
1. Grounding the Story in Data
By utilizing historical reporting, Grace discovered a 46% increase in design requests in just one year. This metric allowed her to move away from anecdotal complaints about being “busy” and instead present executives with a tangible reality: the team was scaling output far faster than headcount.
2. The “Circle of Trust” Model
To break the bottleneck, Grace restructured how the team and stakeholders interact with the workflow:
- Admins & Approvers: A core team focused on backend experience and high-level traffic control.
- Individual Contributors: Task-focused users who focus purely on execution and reviews.
- Managers & Directors: A layer focused on high-level visibility and capacity thresholds.
- Requesters: The 8,000 potential clients who interact only with the “front door” of the process.
3. Standardizing the “Single Front Door”
Grace eliminated “cubicle conversations,” emails, and instant messages as valid request methods. By mandating a single, unified intake queue, she ensured that every project was visible, tracked, and vetted before it ever hit a designer’s desk.
4. Utility-First Training
Grace shifted her training philosophy to focus on Role-Based Visibility. Instead of teaching every feature available, she tailored instructions to what each specific person needed to do their job. This “less is more” approach ensured that designers could stay laser-focused on creative work while project leads took ownership of timelines.
The Conclusion
By focusing on process foundations—clear queue ownership, role-based training, and a single source of truth—Grace Powell has turned the Children’s Mercy creative team into a model of efficiency. The team now handles enterprise-level demand with a lean, highly-organized structure that prioritizes both high-quality output and the well-being of the creators.
“You can’t force curiosity… instead of saying ‘you can do this,’ it’s about saying ‘you should do this’ to make your specific workflow better.” > — Grace Powell, Children’s Mercy Hospital