summary
Enbridge Energy is an oil and Gas pipeline company that supplies energy to various parts of North America. The company has a very large workforce of pipeline specialists that maintain the various aspects of the oil pipelines.
Empathize [Persona]
Several requirements meetings were held where myself and the Business Analyst queried the Product Manager for product specifications and further clarification of features found in vision documents. The product manager was a functional Pipeline Specialist Manager pulled from the field. He helped us to gain an empathetic understanding of the users needs by explaining daily processes of field workers, managers like himself, and the planning and scheduling specialists.
Define [Journey Map]
Information provided by the Product Manager who was himself a pipeline specialist in the field before being promoted as a manager, combined with the vision documents, helped me to define the core problems of the pipeline scheduling process. At the time the scheduling team created schedules for pipeline specialists with a very manual process where the schedules were automatically generated by an SAP program and then downloaded as an excel spreadsheet, which was in turn transmitted to managers via email. Managers subsequently disseminated schedules to the pipeline specialists physically in morning huddle meetings. Communication between the three parties was very inefficient. If there was a schedule change from the planning and scheduling team it had to be emailed to the manager, and vice versa, or if there was a change that a pipeline specialist needed to make to his/her schedule it had to be communicated verbally to the manager. Also, a common daily practice involved pipeline specialists deviating from their schedules and working on items that were deemed high priority emergency work items. These occurrences had to be documented on paper at the end of the day with a full explanation for the reason of the deviation. Overall the process was very inefficient, costly, error prone, disjointed, and communication itself was very fragmented between the pipeline specialists, managers, and the scheduling team.
Ideate & Prototype [Wireframe]
A set of applications that can utilize the same database to make scheduling data available between the various users functions, and communication more efficient.
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A web application for the planning and scheduling team so that they can create and update schedules at a high level.
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A solution for the field workers
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A solution that would aggregate the data from the other two applications so that various metrics could be tracked.
Very low fidelity wireframes were created and shared with the team over a course of several meetings.
Testing
At the start of the project several pipeline specialists had been designated for user user experience testing and user acceptance testing. After every few sprints I performed proctored user testing where I asked users to perform certain actions within an interactive prototype. SUS scores were also generated.
TEAM
UX Designer (me), Business Analyst, Technical Lead, Scrum Master, 3 Engineers.
tools
Sketch

Invision

Balsamiq

Workflow Methodology: Agile
Features were broken down into user stories. User Stories were divided up into 10 day Sprints. Each Sprint consisted of a Sprint/Capacity Planning meeting, a Sprint Retrospective, and a Demo for the Business.