Changing Time

Leverage Design Sprint to understand problems behind complex time reporting process and then improving it

Project Summary

With this federal government agency’s time reporting tools are sunsetting in the next 6-12 months. The delivery team is tasked to replace them with our BPM platform specialized for their needs.

Responsibilities
Design Thinking advocacy
Design strategy development
User research
Design sprint facilitation
Mentoring & guiding UX team
Prototype & testing
Story mapping
Project Team
Design Lead (me)
Business Lead
Technical Lead
Product Owner
UX Designer

Long Term Business Goal

Ensure ECM (Enterprise Case Management) case workers & managers can quickly and accurately report their time; ensure timekeeping reports are versatile, accurate and useful.

The Challenge

This organization’s employees has been using various antiquated tools depending on their roles and responsibilities, to report their time spent on working on an audit.

With the organization’s plan to sunset these applications the employees have been used to for so long, these tools need to be replaced. We were asked to provide strategic recommendations to tackle those problems and deliver a proof of concept.

The main challenges we faced were the inconsistencies in process, policy, tools and data between these internal organizations.

The problems of this project are comprehensive, business needs are ambiguous, along with a tight deadline. Conducting a Design Sprint is a good fit to quickly define problem and scope. However, the business is unfamiliar with Design Thinking nor Design Sprints…

The Process

Alignment, Confidence, Momentum.

1

Advocate for Design Thinking & get buy in for Design Sprint

We identified the stakeholder we needed to influence within the organization then presented him with the value of Design Thinking and Design Sprint.

2

Conduct user research

We conducted contextual inquiry and user interviews with six users of each timekeeping tool to understand the users’ mental model and behavior patterns.

After the user research is complete, we created a straw man journey map of how the users are reporting their time. We were also able to identify the primary personas.

3

Run Design Sprint

We modified the tradition 5 day Design Sprint to a 2 week Design Sprint to fit the customer’s schedule and meet the business needs. We brought the stakeholders, SME’s, Business Architects, System Architects and UX designers to collaborate together in the Design Sprint. The Design Sprint activities are:
1. Inspire 
– Lightning talks from the stakeholders to define long term goal.
– Journey mapping with SME’s and users to capture feedback and opportunities.
2. Pick a Target
– Ask the experts to capture How Might We’s
– Gather HMW’s and pick a target
– Identify creative constraints
3. Set the Stage
– Create user test flow
– Create storyboard
– Sketching exercise and art gallery

4

Prototype & validate

We turned the sketches into wireframes and clickable prototypes and performed usability testing with the users and iterated upon them.

5

Story map

Collaborate with Business Architects, System Architects & Subject Matter Experts to map the high level user stories, questions, and possible functionalities to the user journey. This allows the build team the ability to quickly reference their user stories with the context of user’s journey and business process.

Results

After conducting the Design Sprint, the build team now has the MVP defined, the prototyped solutionhigh-level requirements, and a delivery plan that gives them focusalignment, confidence, and momentum going into sprint zero.

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