Reports are a big deal in our client agencies. They allow people working at a site to know who should be there (and who shouldn’t be there), as well as provide visibility and accountability for managers into the operations of a site or region. Because reports are so important, over 100 of them were in use across our client agencies. Many of the different reports served a common purpose and had largely overlapping information, so we believed that we could combine many of the reports and create about two dozen reports that would serve our customers better. We also needed to set rules on who could access reports, as well as create ways to automatically send the reports. Some sites need a daily report sent by email or fax (or hand delivered as there is no internet connectivity), and users often needs to translate field notes into reports to send to management.
For this Reports micro-service, I acted as both UX designer and product manager. To create a useful and accurate framework with full client buy-in, I held a weekly Subject Matter Expert (SME) meeting and invited representatives from all the major agencies. Throughout the week, I would collect questions my team encountered and enter them into a Jira Confluence page. At the weekly SME meeting, I showed an agenda of the meeting topics, went through the proposed design/framework, asked questions, wrote down new questions, created action items, and assigned action items to people present. People in the meeting had access to the Confluence page and could reference any past meeting to see questions, answers, and links to designs.
Our team successfully created a page to create reports on demand, as well as to automatically generate reports and have them sent to an organizational inbox, individual, or roles at a location. Users are able to choose from a list of instantly available reports, or select users are able to choose the data to create highly-customized reports.