Mission-critical resource planning
A government organization needed a redesign of its resource planning experience.
I partnered with federal employees—instructing them to become skilled product designers.
Together, we built a planning system that greatly improved their quality of life.
Project type
Zero to one
Platform
Responsive web application
Software as a service
My role
Sr. product designer
(consultant)
Timeline
2018
Constraints
On-site collaboration
Secure environment
Untrained client partners
Continuous member rotations
Team
Client + consultant pairs
2 product managers
2 designers
10 engineers
The problem
The federal government was tasking overqualified employees to create critical resourcing plans due to the nature of their specific expertise.
We needed to design a user-friendly system with built-in logic so that less specialized employees could create plans of even greater quality in less time.
We were tasked with designing the new smart software and also training federal employees to adapt and manage it.
How
Extreme
user-empathy
I regularly woke up at 1:30 AM, ate breakfast in the mess hall, and worked alongside the night shift planners.
Photo by Crystal Housman
Client
enablement
We practiced gradual release of responsibility, candid feedback, and set achievable goals with clients.
Continuous
delivery
Deployed user value weekly conducted regular usability studies, design critique, and UX QA.
What
Cloud
native
Planners loved our auto-saving, always up-to-date, change-logging, drag-and-drop SaaS solution.
Low
barrier
The old process used Excel macros and colorful boxes to represent time, resources, and tasks.
System
of systems
We partnered with another product team to adopt and extend their proof-of-concept design system.
Outcome
A few months after launching the new resourced planning product, our government partner was able to reduce planning staff by 50%. They also started utilizing generalists to fill planning roles and were able to send the previous, overqualified workers back to work more appropriate taskings.
Achievements
User base grew from 6 to 200+ in a few weeks.
Solution was forked and used across the enterprise.
Novice clients became employed designers!
Insights
Drag-and-drop is hard.
All-or-nothing user adoption works with agile, but it puts added pressure on the team.
Conway’s Law is real.