Systemic (Reporting System Transition)

I was responsible for the technical strategy for an effort to transition a large organization to a new internal ticketing/tracking platform for a portfolio of worker safety related projects. Applying design-thinking and product management principles, I facilitated research and brainstorming sessions, redesigned a business processes to align with a  workflow enabled by new software, created training materials for people impacted by the change, and authored updates a business policy to federate the change.

Problem Statement

To help improve the velocity for a specific portfolio of projects and to modernize internal systems and tools, we sought to rethink a business process and realign it to a new software workflow tool.

Concept Development & Ideation

To explore different challenges and ideas with this portfolio of projects, we held a workshop/focus group bringing together the different internal stakeholders. I facilitated the workshop, which included activities such as people from different job roles sharing some of their likes and dislikes of the current process, and group brainstorming of possible improvements/solutions. We scored the resulting ideas according to the predicted benefits and difficulty of implementation.

One outcome of this was to change the workflow that engineering groups used for addressing a portfolio of projects, and adopting a different and more modern web-based workflow management software. This change would also represent a paradigm shift from a more sequential "silo" workflow to a more collaborative, parallel workflow.

Further Research & Analysis

My next step was to speak with people with differing roles and understand their firsthand experiences with the existing process and software. These included production workers, engineers, and management. I also spoke with these people about the change we were trying to make and to gather any feedback and requests they would have, translating these into product requirements.

As I better understood the existing situation, to get a good understanding of the solution space and constraints, I also worked with the software development team to understand what functions and capabilities of the new software we might use as-is, what could be changed through administrative/configuration updates, and what capabilities would require additional software development.

Prototyping & Testing

With an understanding of the current process, how different groups of people carried that process out, and how the existing workflow software supported the process, I drafted a high level version of a process that would leverage the functions and capabilities of the new software.

Next I wrote a detailed "beginning to end" description of how a hypothetical project would progress through its lifecycle using the proposed process and workflow changes. The description was written in an accessible "day in the life" format. This was then shared with stakeholders in a technical review where they were able to critique and correct assumptions or errors I made and suggest alternative ideas.

Implementation & Results

With a workable future process designed, I turned my efforts to implementation, which included authoring new policy, as well as creating training and communication materials to distribute interally. The change affected thousands of employees across dozens of production sites across the globe.

The changeover proceeded smoothly, with one affected party taking the time to email their director praise for the overall process:

"Communication on this change has been outstanding."

Conclusion

By applying design thinking and product management techniques alongside sound engineering principles, this complex change was able to proceed with minimal disruption to day-to-day business operations.