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Duration
12 months
Role
Product Designer
Team
Caleb Pase , Cormac Rada,
Will Schwieder, Max Rutman, Jillian Nick
Rep. John Garamendi
Readiness Subcommittee Chairman
Rep. John Garamendi
Readiness Subcommittee Chairman
Rep. John Garamendi
Readiness Subcommittee Chairman
The Joint Strike Fighter program was conceived in the 1990s as the most ambitious aircraft development effort in the Defense Department’s history. In 2010, the ballooning costs triggered a breach of the Nunn-McCurdy Act, a law that forces the Pentagon and Congress to evaluate whether to cancel a troubled program. But because the F-35 was intended to replace so many legacy fighter jets, military leaders essentially had no choice but to keep it going.
The ownership and use of the Joint Program’s data are some of its main challenges to cost and operational efficiency. Lockheed Martin (LM) has exclusive control over data rights, preventing the government from applying pricing pressure, properly managing inventory, and answering stakeholders' most critical and basic questions, such as the current location of millions of dollars worth of components. The problem is compounded by the disorganized and man-draulic manner in which the F-35 initiative uses the data they receive from LM and the data they attempt to track internally.
The Joint Program relies heavily on paper-based reports, aggregated from disparate numerous sources in spreadsheets, slides, and/or PDF documents generated from over 140 tools and sources.
By employing Cloud technologies, data lake architecture, role-based access control, predictive analytics, and responsive design, we had the opportunity to completely reimagine a myriad of internal processes. We sought to create a holistic, proactive organization by optimizing management, reporting, and forecasting acquisitions, manufacturing, and maintenance, sustainment decisions, by integrating within and
across user work streams.
Patterns help establish a consistent look and feel to the app. Solving common design problems in similar ways, creates mental models that allow users to accomplish new tasks without direction. Couple this with atomic components, and you can build new pages of this application, across breakpoints, in no time at all. (ex: graphs, list view, detail pages, etc. )
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An executive wants to see high-level trends to identify actionable information that can influence organizational and departmental behavior before problems arise, while analysts are tasked with data entry, analysis, simulation, validation and management. To design for personas with varying needs and exposure to data, I designed a tiered journey.
When the user enters the application, they see a tailored dashboard with information pertinent to the role. To understand information outside their initial purview, they are able to navigate into summary visualizations and drill into individual use cases for more granular data.
Instead of focusing our energy on making one-off hyper-interactive components for each persona, we chose to create views that were flexible enough to answer questions at each level of the organization. At each level of the visualization, we provided stackable filters to answer a wide permutation of questions, contextual and trending metrics, and root-cause previews to facilitate the user’s next critical question and drill-in.
To an organization crippled by data rights, good data is worth its weight in gold. No matter their technical or mathematical proficiency, we wanted to empower government users to wield the power of data. Within the application, we baked in continuously learning algorithms into our designs to identify and prioritize the most pressing issues without users having to crunch the numbers themselves, show progress towards data maturity without having users manually audit their databases, and set thresholds to monitor fluctuations from plan.
Created a shared knowledge base of the user's key responsibilities, pain points, desired outcomes, available data sources, and indicators that drive decision making.
An analysis of current reports and work products, allowed us to map those insights to indicators within key metrics, gather business and data transformation logic, find gaps and inconsistencies, as well as the need and value of integrating multiple data sources.
Co-Creation sessions were held to verify what we heard, co-create initial schemas for solutions, and provide priority into the focus of subsequent sprints. Below are the initial concepts, logical design schemas, and high-fidelity comps.
Procurement managers track individual contract actions and associated data over 135 excel rows. These bloated excel files bury poorly performing contracts that pose potential risks down the line, updates overwrite historical data needed to predict future performance, and obscure individual responsibility for contract management including timely updates to data used to allow the finance team to effectively plan spend plans.
In these designs, the procurement process is tracked through 9 main milestones on a timeline. The user is able to clearly identify what major milestone the contract action is currently working towards, as well how the contract is performing to schedule - " On Track, At-Risk, Late". Clicking into the card, enables the user a deeper analysis of the initial plan, current plan, revisions, intelligent projections
When the procurement timeline is completed and the contract is awarded, the finance team is responsible for creating a schedule of events that obligates money to the lowest line item over the course of the year. They are currently managing this process in 6 separate tables they eventually paste and print into powerpoint slides. They use small indentations to indicate 5 levels of parent child relationships. They place red numbers in table cells to correlate to connect a many to many relationship of delayed contracts to multiple obligations to multiple levels of multiple budgets . At the end, an inability to obligate to plan leads to expired and misused funds.
In these designs, obligation amounts are tracked over the course of a fiscal year. As a sand chart, this graph visualizes individual budgets and in sum, the total program budget. Clicking into a budget shows the user the relative size of the efforts that make up the selected budget. Clicking into forecasted obligation event, the user can see the progress or potential delay of the associated contract action towards obligation.
There are two shifts of Op Center analysts that create an excel doc twice a day to report on the availability of the global fleet. To understand trends in supply chain, mean-time-to failure, and maintenance time impacting mission capability, leaders have to compare entire binders of printed excel sheets across several tabs. These key drivers were only understood at the highest, aggregated level of the fleet, and were not available to national, site, squadron, variant specific populations and leaders.
In these designs, aircraft statuses are visualized over time as a category comparison. Filters dynamically change the population of aircrafts represented in the status aircraft to tailor trending insights specific to a user's audience - nation, site, squadron. Users can click into status populations or individual aircrafts and understand why the aircraft is non-mission capable, what's actions are being taken to fix the aircraft, a projection on when it will be mission capable, and conduct a root cause analysis to understand key drivers over the complete lifecycle of the plane.
