Mission Training & Readiness System
Modernizing a complex legacy process of drafting mission task lists and training events in accordance to military doctrines
MISSION - Deliver and implement a phased modernization plan to replace a complex legacy system with progressive web applications to improve the process of drafting mission task lists and training events so that units can attain and maintain high levels of mission readiness reflective of current doctrine
TIMEFRAME - October 2022 - August 2023
CLIENT - A branch of the U.S. Department of Defense
ROLE - Product designer / consultant, pairing with a junior client product designer and closely collaborating with product managers and software engineers
SITUATION
A branch of the Department of Defense approached our company with the request to modernize their decades-old, monolithic training event and readiness management system. This system had an active user base in the 100,000s, and it was mission critical for ensuring that units were trained and ready to the most updated military doctrine. However, the system was plagued by frequent server downtime and performance issues, failing integrations with other external platforms, costly upkeep, and poor usability with outdated interfaces and interaction patterns.
Right from the start, the project faced two challenges: the large scope of the project could demand large amounts of funding and institutional commitment, and the complexity of the domain could prove to be too risky if not replaced correctly. To add fuel to the fire, not everyone at the leadership table believed that design could add value to this project: our Labs org often staffed projects with a designer like myself so that we can deliver products loved by our users, but one key client stakeholder openly asked why design was involved and questioned its value when more critical engineering work would always be prioritized over “UX refinements.” He was not wrong in that the heavier lift lied in how we might modernize the tech stack, but replacing the system feature-by-feature without understanding how people might use your app would not bode well for the longevity of your solution, and we wanted to win our client leadership over with why our approach to software development works.
TASK
Our challenge thus was two-fold:
- Survey the domain of training event management to formulate a step-by-step plan to modernize this tangle of a legacy system
- Execute a successful product delivery on our proof-of-concept and earn our stakeholders’ buy-in for our whole Labs methodology and also for design
ACTION
For the first action in scoping, I assisted our chief platform architect in planning and facilitating a systems mapping exercise together with our client business stakeholders, domain SMEs, and the full development team to make sense of the legacy landscape. This was where we threw all the existing components/objects in the current training system onto our whiteboard, attempted to draw boundaries around the different domains, and outlined the connections and dependencies (inputs and outputs) between every pair. The exercise aligned us on our understanding of the big picture as well as our vocabulary for describing aspects of it, and it set us up to begin prioritization, because now we have visible targets that we could evaluate against many criteria, such as complexity in dependencies, size of blast radius if we fail, and potential value from addressing the biggest clusters of user pains - done while in a tight feedback loop with our stakeholders.
From this, we drafted a multi-year phased approach for how to modernize the entire system by “strangling” one area at a time, and the Training and Readiness module emerged as our top priority because of its relative independence from other parts of the system and its location upstream. Diving into this area, I co-led a series of Discovery & Framing workshops (including contextual inquiry, assumptions generation and prioritization, and many user/SME interviews) to identify the most valuable problems to solve and align on a solution direction. The process allowed us to map out a detailed service blueprint of how our primary task analyst user managed training events and what are all the pain points along the way. Our research surfaced widespread usability issues in the legacy forms: convoluted workarounds, repetitive manual entry, and hidden interactions that only seasoned users could navigate. While many of these could be addressed with modern UX patterns today, our research also revealed deeper process inefficiencies.
Our service blueprint map for the primary user of the T&R module describes his journey, the supporting processes and artifacts, and friction points along the way.
For example, we uncovered a critical bottle-neck in the overall workflow: task analysts were often stuck waiting for working groups to finalize mission task lists (which could take months) before they could start planning in the system. To keep things moving, they would hack together “draft” events in the tool or track versions on paper until they were confident enough to key it in. These workarounds added unsolvable stress to their job (they felt like they were being asked to “wait and hurry up”), delayed commanders downstream from being able to start planning their own training against the events, and ultimately risked unit readiness. With this discovery in mind, I worked with my team to propose a draft state design: a way for analysts to begin planning before tasks were finalized and share previews downstream so that commanders could get a sense of what was coming and start their planning earlier. This feature could potentially turn this bottle-neck into a proactive workflow, helping analysts stay ahead of schedule and maintain better coordination with those before and after them in the process.
A detailed service blueprint of the legacy event form that reveals the specific sections trapping our users in a “wait and hurry up” pattern.
RESULT
When we went live with the first version of the training and readiness event module, the response from our analyst users was overwhelmingly positive. One of our expert users said, “It feels so much more straightforward and streamlined now… This is really cool. The system seems more aligned with what’s ground truth.” The lean, first-pass release of our draft state feature especially resonated with the analysts. They told us that it gave them a headstart in outlining events before the working groups had finalized details, and they now had peace of mind and a restored sense of control knowing that they wouldn't be as likely to be blamed for delays. They also suggested next-level enhancements to this feature (such as better ways to be notified of changes and live collaboration akin to Google Docs) that gave us ideas for what could be next on the roadmap as well as validation that we were solving a good problem.
The client stakeholder who began the project as a tough critic of design’s contribution eventually became an advocate. We invited him to several user research and usability tests sessions for him to see how we engaged with our users and how users were reacting to our prototypes. In our weekly syncs, we shared our research insights, showed how those findings shaped our decisions, and demonstrated real improvement in each iteration, giving him the opportunity to see how design had a positive impact on business through reduction in human errors and time savings. In one of the meetings, he remarked unprompted that "design is a well-oiled machine" and that he “trusts 100% what they're doing.” That shift in perspective was one of the most rewarding outcomes of our project.
Homepage of the T&R Event module houses a list of events filterable by their current status and searchable via keywords.
Event edit page allows users to navigate to specific sections of the long event form and make changes to its content.
Many thanks to teammates and delivery leads from Tanzu Labs and our client organization