Story-telling with Data

Driving transparency and data driven decision making across the digital portfolio

In a four day Design Sprint, we prototyped and validation tested a digital dashboard that mapped and aggregated over 20 data sources to provide executive leadership the visibility to analyze and optimize their portfolio of digital investments based on value realization.

The scenario

The client’s Digital Transformation Lead described was one we've often encountered … Busy, frustrated executives drowning in data, but unable to verify information or draw actionable insights around one of their largest areas of investment.

Inconsistent data governance around their portfolio of digital project was impacting time to decision making, it was typically a laborious 2-month process of individual discussion with business and IT leads to gather information for quarterly budget meetings.

"Data Puke"

There was no single source of truth, digital investment data resided in multiple systems and a series of one-off dashboards and spreadsheet that were not properly tracked. Most concerning, process breakdowns were resulting a lack of trust and accountability with project owners increasingly resistant to sharing project performance and financial status.

Solving this problem would give the client the visibility to allocate scarce resources more efficiently and help streamline processes for finance, project teams and senior leadership.

So we made it happen …

In 4 days

Alongside our client, we rapidly prototyped and piloted a digital platform that mapped data from multiple source systems to visualize how digital projects were performing relative to their business case and the organization’s strategic objectives.

Eschewing the “data puke” presented by most dashboards, the platform was explicitly designed to provide insights, recommendations for action and analysis of business impact as the client’s leadership analyzed ROI on their digital spend. Simple visualization techniques like color coding and sizing provided visual cues and context to the information being viewed and commentary helped the data tell a meaningful story about investment performance.

By designing a solution that’s visual, dynamic and intuitive, we created a digital product that enabled busy executives to zero in on the insights that matter and make better data driven decisions with line of sight to business outcomes. More importantly, we re-energized their digital team, giving them the confidence and a detailed roadmap to execute their MVP in four weeks.

"This is fast and it is working!" marveled the client throughout the process. As they uncovered a positive new way of working and collaborating that created immediate impact, they committed to a series of workshops to share Design Sprint techniques throughout their digital organization and provide new tools to their colleagues who were also tasked with accelerating innovation.

INDUSTRY

Oil & Gas

PROJECT DURATION

4 Weeks

DESIGN SPRINT DURATION

4 Days

PROJECT TEAM

Experience Design Lead

Sr. UX Designer 

Business Analyst

SERVICES

Design Sprint Workshop

Rapid Prototyping

User Testing