TIME: 1 YEAR
TEAM: CONSULTANT SENIOR PRODUCT DESIGNER (MYSELF), CLIENT DESIGNER IN TRAINING, CLIENT DEVELOPERS, CLIENT IT TEAM, CONSULTANT PRODUCT MANAGER, CONSULTANT DEVS
SCOPE: CLIENT CULTURE CHANGE, CLIENT ENABLEMENT, RESEARCH, PROTOTYPING, UI DESIGN, VALIDATION
I worked with a variety of USSF stakeholders, developers, and designers as well as consultant developers and our delivery lead to research, validate, and deliver a completely new way of writing, distributing, and approving strategy documentation within the Space Force within a modern web app. The team also delivered an analytics dashboard which shows the history and evolution of objectives and areas of coverage.
KEY POINTS
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The Space Force strategy process was highly manual, paper-based, and required frequent emails, in-person meetings, and phone calls in order to effectively communicate. It took a lot of time and energy to create.
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Successful start-up style approach to app development takes the support of key stakeholders, who need to see results quickly in order to support the approach.
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The documentation for strategy was hard to access and perceived as 90% "extra" information, 10% "relevant" to what a given unit was responsible for.
RESULTS
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Achieved Operational Authorization, digitized previously manual strategy documentation production process. Strategists use the tool to assign and manage contributors, update priority information, and conduct the SOD review.
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This process previously took 8 hours and much of that was formatting, version management, and wrangling info from contributors. This process now takes under 5 hours (37% reduction) and frees up strategists to focus on improving the strategy.
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Digital version of strategy made available to everyone on consistent platform. Improvements made to finding and acknowledging important information for a given unit.
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Integration with Relay Tasks (Another app we worked on). Objectives are automatically shared and assignable to tasks.
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Established Relay Analytics to investigate and assess objective coverage, connection between objectives and unittasks
DISCOVERY
I created and ran a discovery workshop to align on meaningful outcomes for the work with stakeholders and the team. It was challenging to get specific objectives from stakeholders, who perceived a problem having to do with awareness of the strategy at unit levels, but were unsure how to best capture progress. The workshop helped to clarify some specific indicators of strategy awareness.
The team created noun and technology maps to understand the existing systems, access, and classifications.
I also spent time getting to know the client designer, and established goals for enablement, so that he would be able to continue working on the app after our engagement ended.
ANALYSIS & INSIGHTS
We interviewed every key persona that the strategy documentation impacted. We learned about the authoring process, collaboration with planners, approvals, delivery of the documentation, the unit experience, and assessment of the strategy.
We collected past data and analytics about the strategy process and delivery.
We ran a survey about the current strategy documentation and retreival process.
Working with our main subject matter expert, we learned about the strategy creation process and created personas and multi-channel user journeys which highlighted tasks, people, channels (phone, sharepoint, email, meetings, etc), problems, and opportunities.
I began to transition responsibilities to the client designer, to give him more experience with planning and running research activities.
SOLUTIONS
The team decided to focus first on reducing authoring time by providing a web app which creates the strategy document based on a minimally customizable template and pre-fills many pieces which are re-used from version to version.
We validated this simple app with a strategist who is currently in the responsible role for creating the strategy documentation. We piloted the MVP over a 2-month window and found authoring time was reduced by 37%.
We later discovered and developed many improvements to the authoring experience, added approvals in-app, and established filters and tags for units to quickly find information relevant to their work.
