Service Design
Timeline
May 2022 to January 2024
Domains
Service Design
Participatory Design
Role
UX Researcher
UX Designer
Design Team
Project Hand-Off
I joined this project in May 2022 after the initial research was conducted and problem was identified by previous UX researchers and designers. My individual contributions were to assist with developing the design solution, lead implementation, and hand designs off to development.
Design Challenge
How might we customize Jira, a project tracking software, to cater to the MSR/SRL ECR Process?
Goal
Develop a Jira project and issue schema that captures all ECR activity at high and granular levels.
Background Context
An Engineering Change Request (ECR) captures technical changes, associated cost and scheduling impacts, and concurrences. The ECR process is a formal method of review and approval before changes are allowed to be made to controlled information. This procedure varies from project to project. In this context, the ECR process supports the Mars Sample Return and Sample Return Lander missions.
Roles Involved
There are multiple roles involved in the ECR process. The primary users are: System Engineers as the ECR Advocate, Information Configuration and Management Engineer (ICME), and the Change Control Board (CCB).
The ECR advocate initiates the need for a change. The ICME acts as a coordinator that oversees all roles performing their tasks to change completion. The Change Control Board (CCB) approves or disapproves the ECR.
Problem Statement
As the volume of ECRs increases, opaque tooling and processes result in a bottleneck, whereby the project team must track down individuals to obtain information about the status of an ECR.
This slows down the team’s productivity, creates confusion, and increases risk.
Identifying Major Pain Points
After developing a cross functional process map of the existing ECR process, the team and I identified that most pain points occurred in the impact assessment phase when multiple roles are most involved in completing a series of tasks within different platforms.
Solution
The team and I configured 2 Jira projects that tracked and managed all activities conducted during the ECR Process. This includes setting up the project, issue, and notification schemas. Users would have access to all ECR activity in order to mitigate bottlenecks and increase status visibility.
Jira Issue Schema: Terminology
Projects capture all activities in issues named epics, tasks, and subtasks. Epics contain tasks and tasks contain subtasks. Each issue captures status workflows and metadata describing the activity or new information acquired.
Creating Jira Issues
This diagram depicts the ECR process broken into four phases and identifies the issue type that is created and used within that respective phase.
ECR Epic Contents
This diagram contains the high-level metadata about the ECR, primary roles involved, important due dates, issue links of related documents affected by the ECR, and tasks and subtasks to be completed until change completion.
Task Relationships
This diagram indicates linking relationships between issues. Once the ECR epic is created, the ICME would link it to the Document epic that is affected. Upon incorporation, the ICME links the document revision tasks to the ECR epic and incorporation task.
Status Workflows
These diagrams are a series of status workflows for each issue. In summary, they indicate the subprocesses that happen within the overall ECR process. Upon each status change, Jira notifies the next role when there is a switch in task responsibility.
Design Process
The following diagram represents the divergent and convergent thinking that occurs. Though the format of the project is presented in a linear fashion, I would often go back and forth between phases as our knowledge and insights grow.
Discover
Heuristic Analysis
User Research
Stakeholder Interviews
User Interviews
Define
As-Is Workflow
Process Mapping
Affinity Diagrams
Cardsorting
Develop
Deliver
Tool Ecosystem
2 Jira Projects
10 Training Videos
2 User Guides
Onboarding
Upon onboarding the project, I focused on getting to know the team, users, and stakeholders. I also reviewed existing design work and documentation. During knowledge transfer, I learned what current tools are being used and the issues they pose to the overall process.
Heuristic Analysis
I started the project doing a heuristic analysis on an existing tool widely used across projects, and concluded that it did not meet the usability standards to support our users. The results from my heuristic analysis helped inform the trade study conducted by our design lead. Our findings led us to decide that Jira is the best tool that suited our user's needs.
Process Mapping
The biggest challenge was figuring out the scope of the ECR process since there was no formal documentation beforehand of the roles and responsibilities involved. Our design lead and I held a series of design workshops with primary users to map out the entire process in order to assess when and how we may leverage Jira's capabilities.
Identifying Main Touchpoints
The outcome of the general overview process map allowed us to create an improved and more detailed cross-functional process map that includes all roles, their tasks, and the tool that they perform their task in. I took lead in identifying users' main touch points that occurred in Jira. This helped me narrow my focus on what metadata requirements were needed upon each step.
Card Sorting
The next hurdle was to develop the essential project and issue schemas. I took lead in designing card sorting activities to identify the required metadata in the following issues: Impact Assessment, Action Item, Incorporation, and Document release.
The goal was to have participants sort out assumed fields or create new fields into zones. Results from this activity helped frame future discussions when creating mockups.
Jira Issue Mockups
I took the results from the card sorting exercise and created mockups of an individual ECR that mirrored Jira's design system. This helped the team visualize all the information needed to be captured upon each phase.
Dashboard Filter Mockups
A dashboard allowed users to see all ECR activities and generate reports. I created mockups of dashboard filters, which helped facilitate discussions between project stakeholders and primary users to decide on which information is helpful to see at a high-level.
Usability Testing
Our team conducted over 10 usability testing sessions to identify areas of improvement to our system. I led the creation of the procedure guides that defined the tool ecosystem, Jira schemas and terminology, and tasks for each role. From the survey results and observation notes, I found that 16 tasks were successfully completed, 17 tasks had minor issues, and 3 tasks required additional guidance.
User Guides
Due to the complexities of introducing a new software tool to users and major changes to their existing workflow, the team concluded that publishing a procedure guide is essential for onboarding training. Usability testing results helped me identify which tasks needed additional communication support through information graphics and training videos.
Storyboarding & Scriptwriting
During pre-production, I outlined the main topic, wrote the script, and drafted sketches that represented either an information graphic or clickthrough. I then handed it off to the project and design leads to review, edit, and approve.
Training Videos
After approval, I uploaded the videos to 2 internal streaming channels (one for MSR and one for SRL). Each channel had 5 training videos, which amounts to 10 videos in total.
