The managing director over resource planning decided to investigate purchasing a new software application to facilitate this process. I was asked to interview stakeholders and get a list of requirements for the new application.
The first thing I did was gather a list of stakeholders and users who would be affected by a tool change. I crafted interview questions that would get an idea for the current state of the resource planning process, their use cases, and their requirements for the application.
The 16 stakeholders I interviewed included project/product mangers, budget officers, architects, and CIOs of BYU, BYU Hawaii, and BYU Idaho.
After interviewing the stakeholders, I gathered the things I had learned into a report. This report was structured as follows.
- Executive summary
- Solution goal
- Success criteria
- User requirements
- User journeys
- User personas
- User stories
- Risks
Below is the user journey map I created for product/project managers.
I also created a process flow to document the current state of the technology planning process. This flow will be used to locate areas of improvement and to identify the functions the application needs to accommodate.
This project was cool because I was given complete ownership and responsibility over it. I've worked on a similar project previously to identify the current state of the data delivery pipeline at the Office of IT, but this was the first user/process research I've done entirely on my own.
