TL;DR
Streamlined internal statusing deliverables to reduce employee pain from frequent notifications. Delivered a calmer, more effective workflow experience that introduced a repository for status updates that could be leveraged for all deliverables. Upon full implementation, this digital reporting experience led to a time savings average of 2 hrs per week per employee.
Introduction
The goal of this project was to create a standardized process that would reduce the number of times that IT management had to status on their initiatives, automate the reporting to the extent possible, and decrease the time taken to complete several recurring operational deliverables.
Role and Responsibility
To complete this process optimization, I worked as the UX/UI designer and low-code/no-code developer, completing user research, designing the process, designing the digital experience, and developing the web application (utilizing Power Apps) and the automation flows (utilizing Power Automate).
Tools Used
• Adobe Illustrator
• Microsoft Power App
• Microsoft Power Automate
Problem
Through the conduct of user interviews with individuals involved in the process, we discovered that there was no standardized process amongst the different functions on how to collect the data, review/edit the data, approve the data, and finalize the output. Most individuals said their process for gathering the data was done mainly through Excel or email, with reviews and approvals taking a similar route. This caused a lengthy aggregation and reformatting of data gathered from the different functions.
How might we develop a standardized method for collecting, editing, approving, and formatting material outcomes from the different IT functions on a weekly basis?
Research
The team developed a user research plan that began with creating a User Interview Plan. We based this plan on the execution of user interviews, which kick-started our entire process.
Research Objectives
To understand our users' current process(es) for gathering the items for this report and how they feel about it.
To understand our users' knowledge of why we collect the weekly outcomes and how they influence further communications and documentation.
To understand the similarities and differences across the processes of our different users.
Solution
We decided to create a digital Power App in tandem with automation flows that sent push notifications to assigned leaders for approval, automated data movement into the final report, and automated the formatting of the final report output to meet business requirements to solve the issues of different individual processes and hours of manual intervention and reformatting
Upon full implementation, this digital reporting experience led to a time savings average of 4 hrs per week per employee.
