AutoBOM

Increasing the accuracies for small cell engineering design and bill of materials generation

UX Lead | Aug 2016 -  Jan 2017

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The Small Cell / InBuilding service line is losing a lot of time and money in delivery of their small cell networks to AT&T and Verizon clients.  

They needed to streamline efficiencies and increase accuracies throughout but primarily in their engineer design and Bill of Materials (BOMs) generation area and a tool they call AutoBOM.

Problem to solve

Challenges

  • Very technical and complex domain
  • A business and product with very tight timelines,  quick cycle times and SLAs in play
  • Existing tool with a ton of technical debt, based off a excel macro tool.
  • Network Engineers can be a challenging user group to work with. Highly technical, little patience for errors. Either want to do the work all manually or the system to do it 100%, little in-between.
  • The tool is only a tiny speck in a huge field of tools and process. Creating a challenge to identify where the true role this app plays in the bigger scheme of applications and systems,
  • Working with a outside-our-silo development team

My Role

Product strategy, UX Strategy and Design on a small product team of stakeholders and offshore development team

First step was to lead the teams, stakeholders and leaders through design thinking workshops to capture and clarify requirements and understandings

Combined findings into project brief documents to articulate the problem space and start communicating the vision and goals that would ground the process during the following design phases.

Summarized all the role-based needs, environments, tasks and expectations into archetypes deliverables.

This helped the team stay grounded on who they building for and things that mattered to them like environment, form factors, etc.

Round one of digital sketching with daily reviews with stakeholders and live collaboration sessions

Quick-built interactive prototypes allowed me to get rapid validation of the complex requirements with stakeholders and users. 

Phase II consisted of more detailed wireframe prototypes with feedback from user testing

Even the most thoughtful research and designs can fall short without collaboration. True innovation happens when engineering is part of the process from the start

Delivered from offshore engineering

Designed and Expected

So what happened and why?

  • Developers did not buy into UX design and felt spending extra time on implementing the designs was worth extra time.
  • Lack of front-end (CSS/HTML) expertise on the development team
  • Boils down to inner-office politics, and businesses within businesses mentality

Other identified issues

Cost-saving mechanisms that included off-shoring engineering teams that were setup and accustomed only to receive final specs , were not involved in the process.

The engineering team did not feel invested in the quality or success of the tool and therefore made their own decisions on development.

So I worked with all stakeholders and planned out a phase II that involved engineering at all steps. 

What did I learn

  • The best laid-out design strategy, wireframes, and specs, even those backed by user research and validation, don't mean much if your engineering team is disconnected. Design needs to be approached as a team. 
  • The need for continued evangelism and pushing of user-centric design never ends.
  • Existing libraries and assets of common elements, in particular overall layouts,  would dramatically improve the ability of remote/overseas teams to deliver higher-quality code and keep them accountable. ( This was the beginning of my design system focus) 

Lets Chat

cgray24@gmail.com

972-265-9474