Resource Management System Enhancements

Overall Project Mission

The overall project mission involved the maintenance of assignments in the resource management application to facilitate the resource allocation process for a global management consulting firm.  While the functionality to enter project assignments existed, a number of users were not maintaining the data in a timely fashion and in some instances, were not entering assignments at all. Therefore, resource availability in the system was not accurate and the value of the application was in question.

The Challenge

The team needed to quickly identify the root cause behind the poor usage and implement changes before all users lost confidence in the system. However, the users were geographically dispersed and had little time to spend with the project team. Therefore, the team needed to find alternate but highly accurate means of analyzing the issue.

The Solution

To analyze the situation, the team developed hypotheses behind the poor usage and collected data from the application to prove them. Then based on the data collected, the team developed conclusions and solutions to the issue. Thus user interaction was minimal and could be done without visiting each site.

Develop a hypotheses - The team believed the poor usage was due to poor usability of the system.  In other words, too many steps were involved to enter and subsequently maintain an assignment.  Also, the team believed that different assignments should follow a different application flow.  For example, the data required to enter a vacation should be different from the data required for a client engagement.

Collect data - To test the hypotheses, the team analyzed the assignments that were entered into the system. The team mapped the actual data entered on the assignments against the fields that were displayed in the multiple screens required to complete the entry of an assignment. In doing so, the team found that the most commonly used fields were dispersed across multiple screens. Additionally, the team analyzed the types of assignments that were entered and the frequency of the various assignment types. Then for each assignment type, reviewed the required fields and found that the required fields for certain assignment types were dispersed across multiple screens. Finally, the team compared the data entered onto assignments to those entered on the engagement and found numerous fields that needed to be manually entered in both places, rather than defaulting from the project.

Develop solutions - Based on the data collected, the team concluded that different screens should be developed for client vs. non-client assignments and the integration between the engagement management and the resource management modules needed to be improved.

For each of the different screens, the required and most commonly used fields were grouped together to reduce the number of user-clicks. For example, non-client assignments required fewer fields and could be entered with as little as three clicks. For the client assignments, the improved integration with the engagement management module allowed the defaulting of numerous fields, such as client industry, functional classification, and location.