PROJECT MANAGEMENT DASHBOARD

Time Frame: January 2019 - Present

Team Members: Ashana Evans, Pearl Ruparel, myself

My Role: UX researcher & designer 

BACKGROUND

The theme of this class project was "work on campus." Our team decided to work with the Project Portfolio Management Office (PPMO) within the school's Office of Information Technology (OIT) to help them reduce the amount of time they spent communicating, increasing efficiency throughout the department.

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study is to gather information on all stakeholders, analyzing that data to develop a solution for the problem(s) observed. We'll then conduct concept ideation to aggregate a feasible solution, creating both a low and high-fidelity prototype. The prototype will then be used for stakeholder testing, as well as heuristic evaluations.

RESEARCH

INITIAL STORYBOARDS

The two storyboards below illustrate the interactions stakeholders have with each other while going through their daily tasks.

Affinity Diagrams

We conducted two interviews alongside an observation session of a think-aloud. From the information gathered, we analyzed the data into an affinity diagram.

Personas

Once the affinity diagrams were completed, we had a better idea of the kinds of tasks the stakeholders carryout, allowing us to see what exactly goals they were trying to accomplish. Using this understanding, we created personas for each of our stakeholders. 

DESIGN IMPLICATIONS

The main key findings found were:

• The necessity of a seamless interface that allows both managers and student workers to communicate not only efficiently, but effectively.

• The convenience of a capability to integrate with other tools, ensuring that the proposed tool supports current project management frameworks (PMF) as well as multiple devices.

• Being cost efficient while useful

DESIGN CRITERIA

To ensure that the design implications are observable and measurable, we converted them into concrete design criteria. Those criteria are:

1. Scheduling: The new tool being creating should be addressing the concerns of assigning tasks, checking availability, and prioritizing those tasks for both managers and student workers.

2. Project Planning: PPMO needs a centralized dashboard that incorporates short-term and Long-term goals of both the team and individual workers, this includes deadlines, project progress bars, and project management frameworks (i.e Agile, KANBAN).

3. Generating Reports: The tool needs to keep in mind the many metrics and reports dispersed between team and higher executives. Therefore, it needs the capability of knowing which stakeholder and their needs to generate reports respectively.

CONCEPT IDEATION

The concept ideation started off with a Slice and Dice, where the attributes of our process were broken down to better obtain an understanding of all the aspects of the problem. From there, we used SCAMPER, a creativity tool used to help generate ideas during a brainstorming session. It stands for (S) substitute, (C) combine, (A) adapt, (M) modify, (P) put to another use, (E) eliminate, and (R) reverse. 

CONVERGING CONCEPT IDEAS

To reduce the number of ideas into a manageable amount, our team utilized a qualtrics survey to rank the ideas based upon what each member thought was most important. This step helped us to cluster the similar ideas, while helping us identify which ideas we didn't like. Based on the results of the qualtrics survey, we were able to reduce the list of 50 ideas down to 7 once we eliminated the ones that were redundant in function. We then took those six ideas and placed them within a Venn diagram to find two overarching groups to cluster the 7 remaining concepts. From the diagram, we identified 3 rough ideas from the similarities.

VENN DIAGRAM

THE THREE IDEAS

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TIMETHREAD

Combining meeting request and scheduling meetings

This idea focuses around the scheduling. 

This feature will consist of:

1. Students being able to enter and set their availability in the calendar

2. Managers will be able to view their availability in order to schedule meetings with the student workers automatically through the tool when setting up meetings

3. Managers can directly send the meeting requests

PRIORITYLOCK

Project planning and prioritization

This idea focuses on processing project requests and granting managers control access. Those requests once accepted, would then be viewable to students, but only accessible when the manager has changed the status to unlocked. This functionality enables managers to attach a status to the individual projects that will assist with access control, essentially introducing project/task prioritization.

MULTIVIEW

Different views for managers, students, & higher level executives

This would allow different views to be available to the various stakeholders. Student workers, managers, and higher level executives would each get a unique view customized to their needs.

DESIGN: PROTOTYPES

COMING SOON...