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As a large global consultancy, GHD needed to build consistency across distributed teams and establish a single source of truth across all offices. Operating across international territories meant some workflows were location-specific, resulting in rework and regional client deliverables. Without standardized workflows, some clients would receive high-quality but inconsistently presented deliverables depending on which office managed their account. 

To power its company-wide initiative, GHD turned to Lucid and, more specifically, Lucid’s Process Accelerator to establish a single, governed standard across the enterprise, bridging regional offices and rationalizing documentation with dynamic workflows. GHD set out to unify its global teams, streamline processes, and drive consistent project execution.

Establishing a single source of truth 

Prior to standardizing on a single platform, process documentation was inconsistently stored and applied across regional networks, leaving teams at GHD without a single source of truth. This led to duplicated work and maintaining regional versions of the same process, increasing maintenance overhead and causing document drift.

“There’s no reason that two deliverables for the same technical activity should look different when they’re coming from the same company.” —Bryce Leedham, Workflows Lead, GHD

GHD migrated to the Lucid Work Acceleration Platform, retiring Mural, consolidating their visual tooling, and eliminating redundant licensing costs. By leveraging Lucid’s Process Accelerator, opens in a new tab as its central engine for governance, GHD established a secure, unified environment for workflow development. Teams first built secure drafts in team folders, opens in a new tab for work in progress. They then published approved assets to dedicated process repositories within the Process Accelerator across all 48 service lines, where designated service line leaders officially review and publish technical updates.

“The Process Accelerator functionality allows us to retain full revision history under a single, static URL. Having controlled approvals before publishing revisions, along with a designated location for published workflows, made it a very clean solution.” —Bryce Leedham, Workflows Lead, GHD

Maintaining documentation within the Process Accelerator eliminated the need to track down, update, and manage multiple document versions. Teams, no matter where they’re working, could now work with confidence, knowing they're viewing the most up-to-date version. This business-wide standardization also allowed GHD to leverage its global footprint for asynchronous, around-the-clock project delivery, sharing work seamlessly across APAC, the Americas, the UK, and the Middle East.

Unifying global teams with a standardized, visual language

For a distributed global enterprise, consistency is paramount to delivering quality work. Before using Lucid, a lack of unified workflows created misalignment across regions for GHD. For example, one Australian knowledge worker joining a US-based project would often perform tasks using regional Australian processes, resulting in inconsistent outputs with their US teams. They needed a way for everyone to get aligned.

To solve this, GHD launched a massive workflow transformation program with the goal of mapping 2,000 workflows, with over 1,000 already published or in development. GHD standardized all process mapping in Lucid using a custom, GHD-branded BPMN 2.0 shape set, so every team member speaks the same visual language.

Standardizing these workflows established a social contract across regions. Today, team members only need to learn a workflow once to understand how GHD operates. This shared foundation enables consistent project delivery across global time zones. By mapping their current-state workflows, teams build a clear baseline for innovating, optimizing processes, and integrating technologies like AI to deliver reliable, high-quality outcomes for customers.

“GHD teams work with clients across the globe, delivering to a range of clients. Now, whether our client is in Vancouver, Doha, or Sydney, they can expect the same deliverables in the same format for international consistency.” —Anne Lynch, Global General Manager of Technical Transformation and Innovation, GHD

Optimizing knowledge silos

Prior to using Lucid, critical technical expertise was held by senior staff members at GHD. This meant that quality control relied on these seasoned experts being available across large project portfolios, resulting in frequent check-ins to oversee execution. This reliance created an expensive bottleneck and left junior staff navigating a steep learning curve.  

To break the cycle, GHD leveraged Lucid to gather domain expertise from senior employees and convert it into highly documented, step-by-step visual workflows accessible across the company. 
Now, all staff can confidently work on projects, using centralized Lucid workflows for guidance. This mitigates operational risk, retains business continuity as teams evolve, and frees up senior staff to focus on high-value client work.

With Lucid, GHD successfully connected knowledge silos, established a single source of truth,  and standardized global ways of working. The result is a more resilient, collaborative enterprise equipped to deliver consistent service from anywhere in the world.