Audit orchestrator
Bringing intelligence, speed, and delight to a traditionally chaotic and dry process.
THE TEAM
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Product owners
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UX designers
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Design sprint facilitator
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Sponsor users
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Business analysts
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Developers
TIMELINE
October 2019 - May 2020
TOOLS
Sketch, InVision, Mural
I was one of 2 designers at inception, later transitioning
into the design lead for most of the project's duration.
MY ROLE
The problem
Audits of the quote-to-cash business process were currently being managed through email and team rooms in a manually intensive manner without sufficient tracking, communication, coordination and structure. This resulted in a chaotic and ineffective workflow, with thousands of hours of effort wasted per year.
It was challenging for the audit support staff to know what teams should be involved in the audit and for the quote-to-cash staff participating in the audit to quickly locate the data that the auditor was requesting. Manual data manipulation was excessive. It was difficult to track progress and
communicate quickly. Also, the process of executing the audit was disconnected from the business process that was the subject of the audit.
Project goal
The project goal was to create a new application to provide a transparent workflow, reduce manual effort, enable quick compilation of information needed, and effectively coordinate the teams involved.
Other secondary goals:
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Design a tool that was flexible enough to support other similar workflows in the future.
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Leverage existing capabilities from a related sales transaction support platform, along with creating new capabilities.
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Utilize UI components designed for the new audit application as building blocks for a design system serving the sales transaction support platform.
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Create a tool that could potentially become a commercial product.
The product owner wanted to have a minimal viable product initial release implemented in one quarter. At the same time, the sponsor user group wanted to have this initial release be able to fully support an audit, without the users to needing to resort to their current methods. In this way, adoption and further evolvement of the tool could take place.
To comply with NDA, I have intentionally hidden and replaced content in this case study.
My role
Following an initial design sprint, where I was a key contributor, I gradually transitioned into the lead design role. I then worked closely with end users to close gaps in the understanding of their needs and to iteratively refine the details of the design.
I was one of 2 UX designers who participated in the initial 4 day modified design sprint, which established the concept and direction for the project.
During the design sprint, I helped to:
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Identify and document user needs
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Ideate and visualize solutions
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Inform the flow of the tool
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Create the initial prototype
The design sprint resulted in a validated high level concept, but with many details of the design yet to be worked out. I gradually transitioned into the lead design role and worked regularly with users to fill this gap. I uncovered additional insights about user needs, iteratively refined the design, solved the major challenges and further validated the design through reviews with users.
My contributions for refining the design included:
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To-be scenario map
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User flow
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Data structure diagram
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Mockups
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Prototype
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Hills
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User story map
Solution
We designed a collaborative work space that dealt in a flexible manner with the complexity of an audit, enabling the work to be managed in an efficient, transparent, and organized way, while leveraging the inherent relationships between the audit documentation, scope and participants.
The initial design sprint was followed by continual user involvement
Built through active listening to users as they described to us their tasks, goals and painpoints, we generated ideas, quickly conceptualized a high level solution, and then continued to refine and elaborate on the details. Users were engaged the entire way.
Provided structure, transparency, collaboration and task support
The result is a tool that will provide them a clear view of their audit tasks with status, capture needed evidence in a structured manner, and publish that evidence easily for audit staff to consume.
At the time that I left the project, the development of the initial release was to start shortly. It will form a strong foundation upon which advanced functionality can continue to be added in the future, including cognitive intelligence to automate organizing participants and retrieving evidence, with the eventual goal of allowing the auditors to handle more of the audit process on their own, in a self-service manner.
Results:
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It is estimated that the application will save 11,000 hours/year of effort.
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After seeing designs for this tool, the audit department expressed interest in becoming a direct user of the application.
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Components from this application are planned to help seed the design system for a related sales transaction platform.
What others say
‘‘Very grateful to you for taking a leading role with design research, crafting prototypes and driving alignment sessions. You're making a very big impact on the success of this project.’’
Lee Duncan
Enterprise Design Sprint Leader
‘‘Thank you Steve for your keen attention to the users and dedication to the [] initiative. This opportunity has enabled the team to fully embrace design methodologies and best practices. It is amazing to see our stakeholders' growth mindset burst wide open as they thoroughly enjoy this co-creating experience with us... the deliverables are yielding a completely altered way of working, it is collaborative & effective!’’
Patty Lally
Q2C Transformation Leader
Learnings
While successful, the project provided some good lessons that I take away to continue to improve my design process.
Perform user testing more often to help iteratively refine the design
This helps identify improvements to make and is particularly helpful to validate design approaches for complex tasks.
Explore more alternative approaches early on
Experimenting with different screen layouts based on knowledge of the user task can uncover new solutions.
Focus on highest priority projects
When balancing several projects at once as part of a small UX team, its important to be able to maintain focus on the most important projects, even if it means giving up or postponing
some lower priority work.
Below are more details on the project's phases and my contributions.
The initial design sprint
The design sprint that launched the project
The team came together for a 4 day modified design sprint to create and validate the design concept based on user needs.
I took part with the team in a design sprint that was well run by an experienced facilitator (Lee Duncan), keeping focus on solving the problem, engaging us creatively and achieving an initial design that we could move forward to refine.
Day 1: Understand (ex. Lightning talks, How might we, empathy maps, journey maps)
Day 2: Sketch & Decide
Day 3: Prototype
Day 4: Test with users
During the design sprint, I helped to:
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Identify and document user needs
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Ideate and visualize solutions
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Inform the flow of the tool
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Create the initial prototype
Lightning talks
We listened to the users describe their process, painpoints and ideas, while translating these into 'How might we' questions to innovate on. I helped to identify and capture these points.
Empathy maps
During the workshop we heard lightning talks from users about their current process and struggles when performing audits. We embodied what we learned in empathy maps and as-is experience maps, illuminating the needs to be addressed.
As-is scenario maps
We charted out the steps that users take during audits to help us understand the various phases of the process and identify opportunities to solve key painpoints.
Sketching solutions
We looked at existing tools that had functionality that could inspire ideas. We also sketched our own design ideas, heat mapped important aspects, and voted to identify the most promising ideas. Here is the sketch that I submitted, one of two submissions selected as most promising by the sprint team.
Mapping the flow
Based on our understanding of how an audit works and the painpoints we heard, we sketched out a screen flow for the application.
Rapid prototyping
I helped to create a rapid prototype for initial user interviews to validate our concept and gather feedback.
Key user needs we identified:
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Relevant and streamlined tracking and communication of work to be done
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Accuracy and speed when executing process steps
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Gathering information from multiple tools into one location for the audit
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Summarization of information gathered
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Easier identification of who should be involved in the audit
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Re-use of previous audit responses
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Providing better structure of the data being audited to enable easier retrieval
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Increasing the ease and speed of communication among the audit participants
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Task support to foster quality responses to the audit questions
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Possibility to eliminate or reduce manual quality checking by audit support of the responses
The main user roles included:
Audit Support - This role acts as a coordinator between the auditors and the quote-to-cash process staff who provide the data needed in response to the audit. They orchestrate the audit so that it can be completed within the stated timeline. They need to be able to easily involve the right quote-to-cash teams, track progress, review and consolidate responses, and share findings back to the auditors.
Quote-to-cash - As a role that provides day-to-day support for sales transaction business processes, these users are called upon to provide evidence of how these business processes were followed in response to specific audit questions. They need to be able to track their audit related tasks alongside of their other work, find relevant documentation easily, and provide clear responses to the audit requests.
Auditors - This is the corporate audit staff that initiates audits, requests specific information as part of those audits, and receives evidence in response. For the initial release, they were originally not going to be a direct user of this new application. The intent was to gain their agreement to use this tool as a direct user in the future, with potential to self-serve their audit requests.
The workshop helped the team to understand the unfamiliar and complex process involved with an audit. We mapped out steps visually and overlayed this map with opportunities to innovate to solve user painpoints, such as making audit evidence easier to discover, providing alerts, and making it easier to identify the right participants for the audit.
Here is my sketch. In the top section, I show a step for the audit support role to set up the audit based on established templates to take advantage of similar structuring of data across audits. In the middle section, I envision cognitive support for automating the search for relevant documentation and the use of a familiar shopping cart model to assemble selected evidence. In the bottom section, I show a quote-to-cash user's view of one of their audit tasks, including associated comments.
The main steps in the audit's flow consisted of 1) receiving requests from the auditors for information, 2) setting up the audit and assigning tasks to identified participants, 3) compiling the information in response to those tasks, 4) tracking and supporting the completion of tasks, and 5) exporting the compiled information to share with the auditors. The structure and content of the audit tasks varied somewhat from one phase to another as the audit progressed, one of the challenges that I helped to solve later. I contributed ideas for the flow and views.
Above is my early mockup for an audit task detail view, which I would later evolve as to content, layout and behavior. The prototype that we created was used to do validation reviews with end users, as well as for presentation to product owners to help gain approval for the project to move forward. Early end user reviews identified an additional role, that of the quote to cash focal, who would receive audit tasks and then in turn assign them to the appropriate people on their team.
Approach
Following the design sprint, I worked closely with users to iteratively refine and build out the design.
I met regularly with users to gain a deeper understanding of their goals and tasks, to review design mockups, and discuss ideas. For most of this phase of the project, I was the sole researcher and designer.
Refining the design
My approach included the following key elements:
Focused on data structure
With the degree of complexity and variability of the data within an audit, solving the question of how to structure that data was foundational to the design.
Utilized artifacts and work examples to
understand the data and user goals
Observing how users work illuminates aspects of the task that users may not verbalize.
Involved the developer, business analyst and stakeholders
This teamwork spawned new ideas and overcame roadblocks,as teammates suggested where existing functionality could be leveraged or alternative approaches could be taken.
Leveraged design patterns
Employed familiar patterns to helps users learn and understand the application, while also using them as sources of ideas to solve commonly seen user needs.
Took advantage of past user research
Research I had done in the past on how to manage attached documents was leveraged.
Formed a prioritization strategy
Focused the team on using the tool's initial release to save the user manual effort on their most critical tasks. This could then help build adoption to justify further tool enhancement.
How I solved the major challenges
The complexity of the audit process and the goal to create a tool that was flexible enough to adapt for other processes, provided several challenges.
An audit goes through several phases that vary with respect to the data involved and how that data is manipulated. Also, a stated project objective was to have this application serve as a flexible platform for other similar business processes, including to supply UI design system components that could be leveraged in a related existing global sales transaction support tool. So, I had to balance all of these goals while designing for an experience that would allow audits to be conducted in a much more transparent, organized and efficient manner.
Created a data structure that works across audit phases
This enabled consistency for users and minimized development.
The audit consisted of several phases. Within each phase, the audit staff would provide information to which the audit support and quote-to-cash roles would have to respond. In early phases, this took the form of question and answer, while in later phases it took the form of auditor findings that needed to be agreed with or corrected. Finally, an action plan had to be created in response to the issues that the auditors identified. To provide a consistent user experience and to minimize development effort, I looked for a data structure that would be adaptable across these phases.
Initially, I looked at a flat structure that focused on the specific tasks involved in each phase, which resulted in too many unique UI elements and behaviors. As I worked with the users and learned more about the steps they do within each phase, and did further analysis on what was common across the audit, I arrived at a multi-tiered solution whereby a parent-child hierarchy would sit within the overall request-task-subtask hierarchy. This would allow for clearly organizing the information in a way that would adapt to the needs of each phase, but without taking on excessive development of unique features per phase.
Using this data structure, other relationships in the data could be taken advantage of in future releases of tool to solve additional user pain points.
Organized the application to allow audit support to manage the audit at multiple levels
Users could track the audits they were managing, as well as dive into individual tasks within those audits.
Users needed to be able to view:
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All of the audits they are involved in
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An overview of a single audit
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An overview of the tasks for an audit
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Details of requests, tasks, and subtasks within a given audit
I worked closely with users to understand the most important data that they needed to track at each level and the manner in which they needed to filter those views. I created a flow map to convey this organization. It helped others on the team to understand how the application was organized, what each view provided, and navigation paths.
Created a task details view that guided and supported responses to audit questions
The heart of the application was the view where quote-to-cash users would receive the details of what the audit staff was requesting and populate the correct response in a timely manner, while engaging in conversation with audit support.
The task details view evolved over the course of the project as the data structure and pattern of use came more into focus from my discussions with users. Among the changes were:
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Aligned the questions and responses side by side in a hierarchical structure for easy reference
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Moved the 'Comments' section from the bottom to top right to be easily visible while completing the responses
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Added an 'Attachments' section to list all of the files used within the responses. Leveraged earlier user research I had done for improving attachments management in a related application.
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Added a 'Notes' section to where audit support could offer helpful guidance for quote-to-cash users as they provide their responses. This helps address a painpoint we heard regarding the need to obtain quality responses to audit questions.
Provided a
dashboard to track tasks and respond to events
Audits are fast moving, with responses needed within hours. Using this dashboard, users can see what tasks need completed by audit phase, be alerted to where they have to jump in, manage deadlines, and assess the level of work remaining.
Audit support assigns tasks and waits for quote-to-cash to complete them. Here they can follow which tasks are ready for their review and be alerted to events such as new comments about those tasks from quote-to-cash. For quote-to-cash users, they can see how sub-tasks they assign to others are progressing. This view can be filtered by the parent requests from audit that generated these tasks, helping to track and fulfill a specific request.