Created the Honda Digital Platform Guidelines, a single governance, process, and documentation reference across 18 European markets, measured through pre- and post-rollout surveys rather than just interviews, to prove the guidelines changed behaviour.
→ Reduced onboarding time and increased platform compliance across 18 markets, measured through pre- and post-rollout surveys. Single governance and guidelines reference adopted across all 18 markets and the incoming agency.
Problem
Honda's European digital platform ran across 18 markets, but there was no central set of guidelines tying them together, and no single source of truth for how the platform was governed, who was responsible for what, or how to get access to the systems that ran it. Markets and agencies were each interpreting process their own way, which produced inconsistent implementations from one market to the next, slow onboarding whenever a new market or supplier joined the platform, and compliance gaps that kept recurring because there was no shared standard to check against. The gap became acute around the transition to a new lead technology agency, when a steady stream of requests from the 18 markets asking how to get access to specific systems had no consistent answer and no reference to point them to.
Context
As European Digital Platform Section Manager, I owned the platform's operation across all 18 markets. Every market and every part of the incoming agency relationship needed the same basic answers, who to contact, what they had access to, how governance worked, and how the platform was actually meant to be run day to day. None of that was written down anywhere that could just be handed over. Every version of the answer was living in someone's head or in a one-off email, and every market was interpreting process its own way as a result.
Business objective
Give the business, the 18 markets, and the incoming lead technology agency a single, current reference for how the platform was governed, structured, and accessed, standardising both onboarding and ongoing platform governance so answering the same questions repeatedly, and re-explaining process market by market, stopped consuming time that could go into improving the platform itself.
Customer/user objective
Market teams and the agency needed a straightforward way to find out who to contact, what they had access to, and how a request actually got approved, without needing to already know the answer to ask the right person. They also needed one consistent standard for platform process, technical implementation, and content governance to work to, rather than each market interpreting it their own way.
Constraints
Eighteen markets meant eighteen sets of assumptions about how the platform worked, and eighteen sets of local pressures and priorities. The framework had to be built while the agency transition and ongoing platform operations continued in parallel, so this couldn't be a project that paused delivery while it was produced. It also had to prove it actually changed behaviour rather than just existing on paper, and it had to stay current, since a governance document that goes stale within months is worse than no document, because people stop trusting it.
Stakeholders
Market teams across all 18 territories, the incoming lead technology agency, my own team including the Delivery Manager and Digital Specialist who reported to me, and the wider Honda stakeholders whose approval processes needed to be documented accurately. Regional stakeholders across all 18 markets were also directly engaged to validate what the audit and survey findings meant in practice.
Research and discovery
I started with an audit of existing practice market by market, and across the agency relationship, to understand where the real inconsistencies and gaps were rather than assuming I already knew. I ran pre-rollout Microsoft Forms surveys across all 18 markets alongside stakeholder interviews and workshops, to get a genuine baseline rather than relying on interview impressions alone. That combined picture surfaced the specific gaps, markets each interpreting platform process their own way, and a lack of clarity around governance structure, responsibilities, and how to get access to the systems that ran the platform.
Options considered
One option was to keep answering requests and inconsistencies as they came up, market by market, and treat that as the ongoing cost of running the platform. The other was to invest in building one proper reference once, covering platform process, technical standards, content governance, governance structure, and system access together, and maintain it as a living document. I chose the second, since the volume of repeated questions and the recurring compliance gaps made clear the cost of not documenting this properly was already higher than the cost of doing it. I also considered validating the guidelines through stakeholder interviews alone, but decided that would only capture opinion, not proof that behaviour had actually changed, so I built in a pre- and post-rollout survey to measure that directly.
Prioritisation
I prioritised the areas generating the most repeated questions and the most visible compliance gaps first, system access, who was responsible for what, and the platform process points where markets were diverging most. Those were the things every new market conversation and every agency handover kept needing to re-establish from scratch, so fixing them mattered more than covering every possible edge case in the first version.
Delivery
I led and built the framework myself, with support from my Delivery Manager and Digital Specialist. I ran pre-rollout Microsoft Forms surveys across all 18 markets alongside stakeholder interviews and workshops, engaging regional stakeholders directly to validate what the audit had found and build consensus before anything was written down, since guidelines nobody had bought into wouldn't get followed. From there I authored a full guidelines framework, hosted as a structured reference, covering platform processes, technical standards, content governance, and market onboarding procedures, alongside the governance and approval structure, core responsibilities across the Honda digital team, the product divisions, the markets, and the agency, and a full systems access reference so people knew what existed and how to request it. I rolled it out with supporting documentation and stakeholder training, and set it up to be versioned, releasing an updated version whenever there was a material change and sharing it out to all stakeholders at that point, rather than letting it drift out of date silently. Once the guidelines were live, I ran the same survey again post-rollout, so I could measure whether behaviour had actually changed rather than just whether people had read the document.
Decisions made
The decision to make it a properly versioned, actively maintained reference, rather than a one-off document, was the one that mattered most. A static document would have been out of date within months given how often the platform, its stakeholders, and its agency relationships changed. I also decided to measure the guidelines with a pre- and post-rollout survey rather than relying on stakeholder interviews alone, because interviews would only tell me what people said, not whether their behaviour had actually changed. And I structured the content around the questions people actually asked, access, responsibility, and process, rather than a generic template, because that's what determined whether people would use it.
Trade-offs
Building this properly took time away from other platform work, at a point when the agency transition was already consuming significant attention. I judged that time well spent, since the alternative was the same questions being re-asked and re-answered indefinitely, which would have cost more over the life of the platform than building the reference did upfront. Running a pre-rollout survey before writing anything down also added time at the start rather than moving straight to authoring, but without a baseline there would have been no way to prove the guidelines had changed anything.
Business outcome
I created the Honda Digital Platform Guidelines, a single governance and documentation reference that aligned the incoming lead technology agency, all 18 markets, and my own team around one source of truth for platform process, technical standards, content governance, responsibilities, and system access. The pre- and post-rollout survey comparison showed measurable improvement in how consistently markets were following platform process, not just in stated awareness of the guidelines. Onboarding time for new markets and agencies came down significantly, and platform compliance increased across all 18 European markets. Time previously spent answering repeated access and process questions was freed up to focus on improving the platform itself, and the guidelines became the standard reference for every new market and agency onboarding from that point on.
Customer outcome
Markets and the agency had a single place to go for platform process, technical standards, content governance, governance structure, responsibilities, and system access, rather than needing to track down an answer informally or interpret it differently each time.
Lessons learned
A governance and guidelines document only earns trust if it stays current, so building in a versioning and release process from the start mattered as much as the content itself. Most of the value came from documenting the things people asked about most, access, responsibility, and the process points where markets kept diverging, rather than trying to cover everything exhaustively from day one. And measuring the rollout with a pre- and post-survey, rather than relying on interview impressions alone, was what let me show the guidelines had actually changed behaviour, not just that people had read them.
What I'd improve today
I'd build an ongoing compliance-tracking dashboard against the guidelines from the start, rather than relying on the pre- and post-rollout survey as the only measurement point, so drift could be caught continuously instead of only at the two checkpoints I measured against.
