Visualization Challenge

Today, I work with Orange Business Services as a project manager. Recently during the COVID crisis,  we were faced with huge increases in traffic in different locations, we are present in more than 160  countries, and capacity managers, as well as senior management, were faced with a huge number of  daily checks that needed to be done on a daily basis. My boss presented me with a project, to serve  our senior management with some application that would automate the daily checks and facilitate  their decision making. When faced with big increases in traffic, our senior management had to make  the decision to upgrade the equipment. These upgrades could cost millions of dollars, and the  investments had to be placed strategically. The first idea I had was to choose an agile framework,  but with Scrum or Kanban, there is the need to have user involvement on a regular basis, which was  not possible, since our senior management can only be available for very short meetings, and far in  between.

Selection

After having the first meeting with our CTO and CEO, it was clear that needed automation of these  too many checks, but they didn’t really know what they wanted. The meeting was short, and I  couldn’t get much information other than their need for an application to help them make decisions.  I recorded the meeting, listened to it a couple dozen times. After sharing the recording with all  internal stakeholders and business experts, I organized a meeting and used the technique of creating  a Klaxoon board (tool for collaborative intelligence ) to visualize the problem domain with a set of  questions or prompts for discussion to allow a diverse group of stakeholders to learn from each  other in the process of defining the scope, boundaries, key elements, data sources and relationships  between elements to consider when identifying pain points and opportunities for automation.

Application

I started the process by creating a Klaxoon board (we are a multi-national team spread around the  world). The board contained many sections, the first one was dedicated to breaking the ice, so  different emojis where everyone would put their name to give us an overview of their mood. The  second section was dedicated to describing the current situation, what each stakeholder is doing to  check the traffic status on a daily basis, a second section to enumerate the different data sources,  and a third one to identify the pain points we have today. After that, I divided the participants into  smaller groups to go through each subject and draw what could be a good dashboard or scorecard  for them, that would allow them to check the status of different network elements in different  locations quickly, but also efficiently. After gathering all the scorecards drafted by our stakeholders,  we came back together, the whole group, and started discussing each other's drawings and trim  down the fat, in order to keep the most relevant ones. I gave each participant the ability to vote for  their top 6 scorecards. After conducting the vote, it was decided to keep only the 6 most voted for  visualizations that we can present to our senior management, within an automated Power BI  application.

Insight & Approach

The main lesson identified during this exercise with the big group of all stakeholders and then the  smaller groups, is that people work better with visualization that helps them convey their ideas It  was also important to remind different participants of the main purpose, that the application won’t  serve the operational level, but it should be an executive one for senior management, so avoiding  the ‘too much technicality’ trap was a must. After identifying the different most useful scorecards to  be put in the dashboard/application, the development was smooth, and we organized weekly  meetings to synchronize and make necessary adjustments. The project was delivered in three  months and our senior management was very satisfied with the results, they have been consulting  the application every day first thing in the morning since then    .

