Got a small team, dealing with  and you need to make a case for software simulation? Luke Borgnis of Wells Fargo Financial presented a discussion offering guerrilla methods to battling the ineffective design regime.

Borgnis laid out a comical yet true typical corporate design process that’s absurdly complicated, poorly ordered, and time intensive. And at the end of the process, begins the development of the user interface.

His bank needed to upgrade its antiquated mainframe interface for account management to a Web based interface. They finally decided to do this because sales was moving from account-centric to customer-centric. The training on the mainframe UI took 20 days. They were paying people for a month while they were selling nothing. And to make matters worse, they had very high turnover, 40% of team members left after 18 months.

Borgnis had a small team and used unconventional tactics to get the system deployed quickly. To get business buy-in he put together a very conservative ROI showing a 50% reduction in training which would save more than $6 million annually. In actuality, he saved far more than that reducing the traditional 160 hours of training down to only 12 hours-a 90% reduction. But what’s more astonishing is by reworking the interface, Borgnis’ team saved three seconds for a single task that was accessed 50 times every day by sales people. That resulted in annual savings for Wells Fargo of $.75 million. In the end, by using iRise simulation the financial services company released its new Web-based customer-centric sales system in just nine months after kickoff.