Engagements in Envision
"How can we make complex consulting engagements easier to manage across multiple teams?"
Backstory
Ensono's Advisory and Consulting (A&C) business had record growth in 2020 and 2021. Although this increase was a great thing overall, it also presented new challenges to how well consultants could execute on agreed-upon scopes of work. One of these failures nearly cost Ensono a large client. As the sole Product Designer on the portal team, I partnered with product leadership, developers, users, and stakeholders to create a digital solution for our clients and internal associates.
Identifying Problems
Conversations with Stakeholders
My first step was setting up a discovery session with the 5 leaders from each arm of the consulting offering.
Key Takeaways →
I asked questions like...
-
At any given time, how many active engagements are there?
-
Can you tell me about a time that the client wasn't satisfied after an engagement?
-
How many folks are involved and what are their roles?
-
How does the handoff between your teams work today?
-
What types of actions items are needed from clients?
-
Missing documents and employee turnover leads to
he-said-she-said down the line. -
Clients need to see a timeline of important events so they could prepare properly.
-
Multi-layered engagements lead to lengthy email
trails and missed details.
Getting our Clients' Perspectives
After a handful of convos with clients, I learned that multi-layered engagements that sometimes spanned over the course of a couple of years all seemed to blur together for some. Digging through old emails to put together a trail of events and convos was inefficient, ineffective, and way less than ideal. The overall sentiment was that there were multiple short-comings that were unacceptable in a top-tier, relationship-based sales organization.
A Single Pane of Glass
Clients and Ensono associates needed a central depot for all engagement-related communications and materials so expectations were set clearly on both sides, everyone was held accountable, and no one had to dig through old emails to find documents. I hypothesized both internal cross-team hand-off and post-engagement client satisfaction would improve if this were accomplished.
Overcommunication
Clients and associates need a communication channel outside of email that all of the necessary parties have access to
Transparency
Clients need a clear look into all of the important activities that comprise their consulting engagements
Accountability
Ensono associates need a way to make sure clients are doing their part so Ensono does not get blamed undeservingly
Centralization
Hand-off between consulting silos would be improved if all of the important documents could be easily accessed at any time
The Solution
Since a large client was threatening to leave, this project got bumped up to burning house fire status immediately. With that being said, what you see below is an MVP for this module, with future enhancements currently in the works, which I'll discuss briefly a little later. I presented this solution to 3 clients, my entire team, and all 5 consulting leaders and it received very favorable feedback with some suggestions for improvement. Although I did not get a chance to present this solution to the angry client, the sales manager on the account reportedly sent my mockup over and got some lightweight good feedback from them. They have not pulled their business from us yet...not saying it's due to our concerted and timely effort in releasing this module, but it probably didn't hurt to see that we were taking their dissatisfaction very seriously. Either way, I guess it's better late than never, and we'll be watching to see if this solution produces the desired outcomes as its use ramps up.
Usability Testing
Although we were in a rush to get the engagements module shipped, devs got done early with 2 days left in the sprint so I seized the opportunity to test this new tool on a few users. We discovered that we had a problem...the Gantt chart functionality was very awkward and unintuitive. To no fault of his own, our most senior dev recommended integrating Highcharts and we agreed, only to be disappointed when we learned of these unexpected technical limitations. Of course, I was the one who was the most concerned about these usability flaws, while the devs and PO...not so much. It was time to see what our users thought.
Results and Iterations
Since we were short on time and our best dev was taking ownership of the Gantt chart integration, I did not get involved in every step of every task flow. The original "Create Chart" modal produced an empty area that puzzled users during testing. Thankfully, I quickly iterated on the design which was included in the initial release. My solution was to require users to add 1 milestone in the "Create Chart" modal so they would have a semi-populated chart appear after clicking "Create". The other possibility was to have an empty chart frame but at least have the specified dates appear, but I decided that it would be a more substantial experience and save clicks to have users add a milestone.
There was another point of confusion for users. When either a milestone or a task were clicked, the CTAs on the bottom right changed to allow users to take a few actions. However, tasks could only be dependent on one milestone, so the "+ Add Milestone" link there didn't align with users' mental models about the hierarchy of milestones and tasks.
Devs were able to complete this iteration before release as well so that users would only see the CTAs related to either tasks or milestones when clicked, not a mix of both, thereby keeping the users' perception of the Gantt item hierarchy intact.
Future Roadmap
We've created a few analytic events for things we'd like to keep an eye on as this module's use ramps up. We are interested to see how many engagements are created, the titles of the internal users that use the different functionalities in the module, and how much client-user interaction is taking place, and what they're using most.
Since preventing client dissatisfaction with engagements was the main driver, the interface should provide a general sense of how things are going at a glance. Therefore, devs are working on integrating Google Analyzing Sentiment AI in the comments section. Also, we're aiming to eventually create a client feedback loop within the module.
Finally, devs are currently researching how we can ingest data from the Power BI booklets that are produced post-engagement so we can present them in a way that shows users the information that is most important to them thereby saving them time digging through the lengthy, super-rich documents.