Pearson
Pearson’s diverse workforce requires a secure productivity suite accessible from any location. To ensure convenient, high-quality collaboration between team members, Pearson relies on Lucidchart to collaborate, map processes and systems, record ideas, and solicit feedback.
Key benefits
- MOVE TO THE CLOUD
- Lucidchart provides domain-wide collaboration for employees at Pearson, enabling them to share ideas, information, and processes with network diagrams, flowcharts, process flows, and mind maps.
- UNDERSTAND
- Instead of referring back to product-specific video clips, the sales team turns product details into mind maps. With a mind map, they can take in all of the essential product information at a glance and better recall it on the fly.
- INTEGRATE
- For every new initiative, project managers link key resources (e.g. budgets and requirements) to each phase of a process flow, creating a single source of truth.
- TRANSITION FROM VISIO
- Even Pearson's senior technical design engineer was impressed by how Lucidchart lines up against Visio when it comes to responsiveness. With both an intuitive user experience and robust diagramming options, Lucidchart makes the switch from Visio seamless.
SIZE: Large (2501+ employees)
Pearson is the world's learning company, with expertise in educational courseware and assessment and a range of teaching and learning services powered by technology.
Founded in 1884, Pearson has been instrumental to the learning communities of the world, providing them with textbooks, testing materials, and other valuable services. In recent years, Pearson has moved toward a model of digital education in order to reach learners of any age or background.
When the company pivoted to a more modern approach, two major concerns emerged. Graham Calder, CTO of Technology Operations at Pearson, said, “As a company in transition from a traditional, physical products group to a company focused on the provision of digital services and software, we needed an entirely different internal environment to allow our workforce to collaborate. The nature of the talent we needed to drive the company forward was also changing.”
Was it worth switching to cloud-based software if the objectives—attracting top talent and improving collaboration—were met?
Discovering Lucidchart
Many employees had already begun to answer that question. Leaders discovered that hundreds of Pearson team members were using Lucidchart on a daily basis to create business-critical charts, including network diagrams, flowcharts, mind maps, and process flows. Fortunately, Pearson uses myCloud, a unique productivity platform built on a G Suite framework. The existing integration between myCloud and G Suite made it relatively simple to add a third-party app like Lucidchart.
Spreading the word
Graham describes the transition to Lucidchart:
“The initial momentum behind Lucidchart actually came from the user community. We picked up on that, worked with Lucidchart, and started to bring it into the environment. And once it was in the environment, of course, it became visible to a much bigger audience.”
For many, it was their first experience with a diagramming tool, while others were familiar with pricey desktop standards. Nicholas Williams, Senior Technical Design Engineer at Pearson, says:
“Coming from the Visio world previously, I doubted that any remote or web-based application would be able to be as responsive as Visio. Lucidchart is fantastic, and I never expected that.”
Increasing understanding
Not only did Lucidchart’s ease of use make an impression, its end products actually increased understanding among their audience. Gabe Gloege, Director of Learning and Development at Pearson, explained that members of his sales team regularly access a catalog of online courses. These video tutorials cover the basics of Pearson’s hundreds of products so that sales professionals are well-versed in the details.
His team wanted a way to see all the information covered in these videos at once. The courses make sense, but they needed a way to quickly access the information and think about it in a different way to better remember it. One employee decided to use Lucidchart to create a mind map of one of the courses—soon the entire team was creating mind maps for every video and compiling them into a digital booklet that is now a cheat sheet for product information.
Gabe describes the result:
"It’s powerful, being able to see all that information at a glance, and the visual way that it changes your understanding and your perception of the content itself. Each course, when mind mapped, had a fingerprint that was unique to the knowledge of that course. And people started to remember and access it in that way. When you close your eyes and think back, ‘What is the information that I need to pull up in my head?,’ you see that mind map in your head. You go right to where it is. I think it’s a very powerful way for them to remember the information, access the information, and have a different relationship to it."
Lucidchart provides a streamlined solution to the age-old problem of visual communication. Pearson uses the flexibility of Lucid technology to provide a domain-wide platform for collaboration. Widespread adoption of the application resulted in improved collaboration and better understanding as employees support larger goals by using Lucidchart to create, share, and publish diagrams. Combined with G Suite and the myCloud environment, Lucidchart has become a convenient one-stop shop for professional and powerful diagrams.