Challenge:<\/strong> The existing PPM platform suffered from significant usability issues and diminishing business value, leading to customer churn. The main problem was a fragmented user experience and outdated interfaces across its numerous interdependent modules, hindering visibility and collaboration for users ranging from CEOs to contractors of the work they were planning or was underway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Solution & Contributions:<\/strong> Led a multi-year, ground-up redesign effort across 17 core PPM modules (including Admin and Roadmapping), focusing on enhancing usability, consistency, and strategic alignment. Key initiatives included:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Impact & Outcomes:<\/strong> The redesign significantly improved the platform’s performance and business value:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Strategic Alignment:<\/strong> Successfully elevated design understanding and ensured consistent quality standards across a wide variety of stakeholders, bringing UX to the forefront of product strategy. This work was recognized by internal stakeholders as having “saved this product.”<\/meta> PPM helps large companies break down silos and gives anyone, from the CEO to part-time contractors, visibility into planned work and the status of current works-in-progress. PPM is customized to each business’ specific needs and processes. For instance, customers like JP Morgan have different needs than Boeing, Coca-Cola, Amazon, Ikea or Disney. The graphic below is an older example of the complexity and interdependencies of a company like Disney. Disney was often a good reference in the design process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Modules like Conversations, Tasks, Risks, Documents, Financials, Issues, Changes, Staffing, Projects, Administration, Timesheets or Roadmapping worked in unison and shared relevant data that kept people and teams in sync to help companies function.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the years, PPM had fallen behind in its usability and overall business value. As UX began to modernize interfaces, PPM was falling behind and losing customers. I was hired to redesign the product from the ground up. Below is an example of the Information Architecture and the overall UI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I worked on PPM for three years and achieved the following high-level accomplishments:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note:<\/strong> This case study highlights the design of the Admin and Roadmapping modules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An administrator has authority to architect the entire PPM instance for their company and have it customized to their business’ process and needs. The bulk of an administrator’s time is spent collaborating with stakeholders to create and maintain templates for the various divisions, teams, and individuals. Over time, if any new need or issue is found, an administrator is called to create a new template or alter an existing one to help a division or specific team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To start the redesign of the Admin module, my team met with three customer Admins for initial contextual interviews and then kicked off a three-day design sprint to move quickly. Here you can see the detail page and module screen come to life during the sprint:<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the sprint, I started to create rough clickable prototypes in Axure. After a few internal iterations with PM, the team met with customer administrators and asked them to create a new project blueprint. Our primary measure of success was time on task compared to the current Admin module.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The user testing revealed time on task was reduced by 73%. In the deliverable below, the attribute details of a project can be referenced within the last tab of any project. This location of project details allows for business planning, continuity and ease. If there were ever an issue, the end-user could call an Admin to reference where a field was in the template details for updates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Roadmapping is a shared view that clearly communicates project planning and status used by different divisions. <\/meta>During initial research it became clear the Roadmapping was going to be a heavily-used module. PM and UX identified five key customers in various sectors for research. UX led the contextual inquiries to understand the customers’ planning process as well as what was and wasn\u2019t working for them. From these meetings, my team started to lay out initial user flow and high-level needs\/wants. During some contextual inquiries, we found customers sharing pictures of sticky notes and affinity diagrams from past meetings. Most often, users would show us spreadsheets that had no version control and often led to communication breakdown and confusion.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n PM came to my team with so many ideas that didn’t quite fit together. After a lot of deliberation, we distilled the ideas down into simple diagrams to help align ourselves and PM and focus on the problem. One of my designers created this diagram that helped us frame many conversations about work breakdown structures. Thinking in first principles was a key process in the group’s ability to think clearly and succinctly with such complex topics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other principles my team defined for Roadmapping:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I created the diagram below to help align the UX and PM teams on the data flow model called the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS):<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hypothetically, during a meeting, a director can build and share a roadmap with the executive team and speak about relevant metrics and status updates that make sense to the group at that level. Later that day, the same director can sit with their direct reports and share a more detailed, granular view of how the work is being done, day-to-day. Behind the scenes, WBS is tracking the progress of these projects using attributes that are constantly updated in real-time and presented to each persona type, at each level of the company in ways that makes the most sense to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During this project, my team met with stakeholders daily and we would meet as a UX team in the afternoons. Together, we came up with features like Saved Views, Dependencies and Scenarios. Possibly the biggest user benefits this module provided were the Timeline, Board and Grid views. This three-way toggle view helped users visually interpret, pivot and configure the same attribute data behind the scenes in different ways – a very powerful tool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The interaction spec below was delivered to Engineering and was also given to the VP of Product to present at the company’s annual customer conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over time, our NPS started to improve and key metrics for usability steadily increased, too: <\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of this success was made possible by my direct team. That said, I think the reason the product was successful was due to the integration between PM and UX. A lot of trust was built, we communicated fluidly and embraced the wildest of ideas while keeping the customer in mind and researching assumptions early and often together. Below are some feedback from internal stakeholders:<\/p>\n\n\n\n UX is always refining the product. They are never done and are always there to help us understand.”<\/p>\n– Product Owner<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n You help us see the problems more clearly and communicate to other stakeholders.”<\/p>\n– Product Manager<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n You have saved this product\u2026”<\/p>\n– Senior Director of Product Management<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Executive Summary Role: Manager and Lead Designer, responsible for the redesign of Product & Portfolio Management (PPM) platform for large global enterprises. Challenge: The existing PPM platform suffered from significant usability issues and diminishing business value, leading to customer churn. The main problem was a fragmented user experience and outdated interfaces across its numerous interdependent… Continue reading Product & Portfolio Management<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-163","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":806,"href":"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/163\/revisions\/806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Enhanced Usability & Retention:<\/strong> Directly improved product usability and retention, reflected in a 73% reduction in time on task for the Admin module and a noticeable increase in NPS and overall usability metrics.
Operational Efficiency:<\/strong> Provided users with innovative tools like the multi-view Roadmapping module, which solved critical version control and communication breakdown issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBackground<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nProblem<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nSolution<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Process: Admin Module<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Background, research and discovery<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Prototype<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/RhAHoyvpIxU_gy8KBA1HmnTd9vGs53SuCovv_kiuwykYsGakBpP59nY2TFeeYLp_RghrqyodZOEwrDo33OIGjSVsHDl-NNEai0AKf_7mQDUlaKW1OzVigZGA8udiL136_vbLC80AiCI-1024x800.png\")
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Research and findings<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/Frame-5-1024x640.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nProcess: Roadmapping<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Background, research and discovery<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/Uk13Fd7fV26Nq9j3KYxz0PaLs5XMuuCT6vqSSyo6uxVFL1xDEDqsoQnJi8M31AT7R5BlEJQ5d5hdh1EVlrQSFBZAWHPev6J8ainkkKswSIc-RgJNeAMS08GFIZyHRbMsgw2paywGvSo-1024x768.jpg\")
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Defining First Principles<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/HtJZwa7QLoYGRHGR26JvJTbO1fQeBwjqyn_x1x_5zHDroomuvvJIUfuI6rxPq374B05rI_8DuS0-WL_w-coU9TDICUP7adlKsAN58xtPYOZg0A0rxLq1uvq_xcniXUsYYk8EIpu_Px0-1024x576.jpg\")
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Systems Thinking<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/Screen-Shot-2021-09-11-at-10.01.08-PM-1024x616.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n3. Design Iteration<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Timeline View<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/ATRHQQ4nncOpDvubGB_5sUVJSTS1aXze8TGqF3nUTB5ThrklGreOYnUmNrXjXiaeuTtig7sPnkHpxRx_yq1dyIrGHxfdKkMKmC3yKd9WQCUJj6HJmPHt7Fwh5mcFfmTM9WYqfUORPDI-1024x711.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/Frame-55-1024x640.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nBoard View<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/twK2E4fBAK5hPYND6OJO_KE6wewJgFF77RZduJV1Te6dJD0fL7Y0Wmg2-9_eyBePquG8PbgP_1YypCi61rcpMORdhpS9utX1roNQgPEBmjAxBauELwwsGrljVbPckIm4Nx61fGeW2iw-1024x712.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/bNF68wRVnFDWaFRpGyZtR6asGtX8CP2VOv1MFzwx7ihSObkTrk_5syGViq4hwW5KrMq0pX358qiiPxGiRyG0QQoKNwuVX-H02zFwiz4So1IGo5CC5WK-cjYtjYtz-Rcp5gh6eZE7uY4-1024x640.png\")
<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nGrid View<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/wB8XNRWaJUmIax_qoXXkYUgE6nl7cPHh3r_cQ6yQgbjIGvTn_WNIqi-TGYTYC1c-T3GFFz1NX01FCzetkYqQnvuq8uGzQeAeukVQTJ_4HxCLJibVEEkqISmXsRfzx-dfkcZDgMfabvQ-1024x718.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/wTTvoSomAq1ofMct3R54WApIHV8u_WPYh2YgvLepJWiVsgRsZH9l5liMqK7yd2hzKxaAcQpaBbpN9wgP_CI8HYmdbzfPfXKrdVJ2yzcqP64yPMpBiPd_beFJbcgTKZbH4Tnp_GOuLL4-1024x640.png\")
<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nEnd Result<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/PPM-video.gif\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nReflection<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/evanverdoia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/Screen-Shot-2021-09-11-at-10.33.47-PM-1024x313.png\")
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