Customer challenge
A leading international construction company we’re looking to provide various teams and stakeholders across their global business accurate information and insights to help drive their business decisions on a daily basis and but also at a strategic level. With hundreds of construction projects underway across the globe at any given time the client had no way of getting an accurate picture of progress spanning all projects, blockers, compliance, risk, cashflow or opportunities. They had existing dashboards, however there they were not created in consultation with the users and as such the information wasn’t relevant to them - added to this the data wasn’t accurate. It was common practice for stakeholders at the executive level when querying a specific project to ask their direct report, who in turn would ask theirs, until typically 7 phone calls later the information was obtained - and then the process to get the information back to the stakeholder began.
Our approach
In the first week of the 6 week Discovery we interviewed the key users of the platform, which was the executive team. We began by asking what business decisions they need to make on a daily basis, what data they would need to help inform those decisions and prioritise what would be essential now versus what they could wait for in six months. After we had synthesised the information and come up with the most common data points that would service the needs across the executive team, we worked very closely with the Kasna team to conduct a technical assessment of how we could get accurate data to support it. To ensure our design had future relevance we created an IA of the desired portal, discussing with the client our findings, recommendations and what could be in scope across different releases. After landing on a three phased delivery roadmap we began MVP straight away and designed the UI which we tested with the users, iterated on their feedback and then worked with the Kasna team to bring it to life.
Outcomes and Results
We created a series of dashboards that gave a consolidated, realtime and accurate global view of their projects. We tailored dashboards to different roles so that the relevant information was displayed to the right user, in the right way so that they could understand the information in front of them and make decisions applicable to their role. A common mistake when building dashboards or analytics portals is to simply display all the data you have available - the more the merrier, right? In short, no. By taking the guesswork out for the user it meant they didn’t need to interpret the data - that was done for them and they could get on with their day. As a result there were huge operational efficiencies made across the company while providing a way for the executive team to more confidently make strategic decisions. Beyond MVP being delivered the portal expanded to calculating the required roles for specific projects to minimise risk and inform resourcing forecasting, opportunities identification and as granula as photos being uploaded for site progress and compliance to name a few.
