Crafting Strategic Decisions

Too Long; Didn't Read

The Problem

Considerable senior leadership resources are allocated to deliberating over initiatives within FamilySearch. This allocation of time translates into significant financial investments solely dedicated to understanding the scope of ongoing activities within the organization.

The Solution

Develop an internal dashboard tailored to enable leadership to seamlessly generate and monitor all initiatives. This implementation would provide a concise overview of initiative progression, facilitating informed decision-making. More importantly, it would significantly reduce costs for the organization, a key financial goal for the senior leadership team.

Introduction

At FamilySearch, an initiative is a project that aims to solve a business problem. The organization measures and contrasts these initiatives to determine which to solve first. Each initiative has a business problem to solve, a team, tasks, priorities for the tasks, and time.

Senior leadership spends considerable time and resources overseeing and reflecting on initiatives within FamilySearch. I was selected to join a team to develop an internal dashboard that would unify the organization and facilitate informed decision-making.

All Initiatives Page

The first task was to design a page where the organization could view and create new initiatives. After many iterations and tests, I discovered that these initiatives needed to include the type, the title, the team involved, the business problem it was trying to solve, and the stage.

I organized the initiatives and needed information in a simple table and added a search bar at the top for easy filtering by initiative name, product group, or team. I also included a side sheet full of additional filters such as initiative type, approval state, stage, business problem, and teams. Lastly, I added an "add initiative" button where users could create a new initiative.

Initiative Request Form

Once I finished the initiatives page, I began designing the experience for creating a new initiative. I conducted extensive research with senior leadership to understand the requirements, the process, and functionality.

The design contains the required fields and some chips representing the initiative's authors and the business problem it will solve. A "back to all initiatives" button is placed at the top left of the form, and the "save" and "cancel" buttons are on the bottom.

When editing an initiative, a bit more information is displayed. As the initiative progresses through its three stages—discovery, prototype, and production build—additional fields must be filled out.

Capacity & Timeline View

Placeholder

Conclusion

Placeholder

Key Takeaways

Placeholder