Dazzle © Branding - A Symphony of Innivation

The discovery revealed that 90% of the business uses Microsoft project (MSP) for their project schedules, and as a result, the Lighthouse were only including 10% of their targeted user base by not offering the MSP integration. One could challenge the users suggesting them to convert the MSP file to Primavera P6, however due to high license costs and client contracts mandating Microsoft Projects, that was not an realistic option. User interviews also revealed that Lighthouse did not incorporate enough user-research on the persona handling the project schedules, the planner. Further discovery with the new identified persona, the planner, revealed a lack of willingness to change ways of working. Each had their own processes in place and Lighthouse was in some scenarios seen as a threat to their job, instead of a way to reduce workload through features like progress tracking which were currently led by Planners through numerous meetings with Design managers and excel spreadsheets which had loads of challenges associated with it.

The interviews with design managers revealed several pain points regarding their project schedule and their context. They first of all didn't understand the schedule they were sent by the project manager, it was difficult to locate their responsibilities in the schedule due to large amount of data in a clunky PDF. Furthermore, the work breakdown structure were defined by the Planner and not the design managers who were executing the work, so a need to be able to restructure the WBS were added to scope of the new development, as well as being used as a unique selling point to the business later on.

The benchmarking of direct and indirect competitors also revealed a need to be able to add several work breakdown structure levels, the former Lighthouse solution only offered the users a maximum of three levels in the WBS, which also was an issue as some large-scale project with clients had more than three. That decision of introducing additional customisable levels only led to more inclusive design for our users as they then would be able to adopt the tool and tailor their own WBS to fully understand the work they were undertaking.

With low adoption, extensive user feedback and stakeholder feedback, my final recommendation as part of a UX guild team, was the Lighthouse did not serve the business goals it intended to due to;

• Users lack of confidence in data

• Lack of must have functionalities

• Downtime and bugs

• Poor interaction designs

• No design system or style guide for the app

• Poor navigation and structure as information hierarchy did not account for a two level which was needed

As a result of guild meetings with enterprise and solution architects, developers, and business stakeholders, the final decision were to rebuild the application. That was the birth of Production Manager.