Background

The Army Enterprise Cloud Management Agency (ECMA) serves as the driver for enabling data, software and processing information to be shared in a secure global cloud ecosystem across the Army. 

ECMA supports Army readiness by providing cloud solution architecture to store and access data, enable rapid development, and share computing resources around the world. ECMA  stands to transform traditional processes and automate time consuming processes by utilizing a cloud ecosystem and achieve flexible infrastructure to deliver secure, functional tools to our warfighter.  

ECMA was created by the Army and serves as one of the largest enterprises in the world – 1.4 million people globally distributed and a mission that spans across all classifications and networks. Given the broad distribution of users and networks, this makes ECMA's initiatives are incredibly challenging. Dealing with years and years of legacy code created in a fixed architecture and stand alone environments, ECMA is challenged to develop solutions to migrate data to be shared across the enterprise. 

In my time serving ECMA, I worked as the lead designer and researcher in the CSMS division managing the product and design initiatives. Working with a relatively new startup enterprise had its own set of challenges, and required a lot of self starting and creative problem solving. 

While contracted with Army ECMA, I served as the lead UX designer and researcher within the CSMS division, managing product and design initiatives.  I led design efforts to streamline processes across key ECMA platforms, ensuring alignment with operational needs and usability standards. My contributions included driving design strategy, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and advocating for user needs across all levels of the organization.

Other design initiatives I contributed to at ECMA:

• Developing user-friendly workflows for seamless procurement and device management experiences
• Designing scalable interfaces to support seamless access to essential tools and resources.
• Enhancing operational efficiency by creating intuitive dashboards and data visualization tools for stakeholders.
• Envisioning innovative solutions for future-state capabilities in military technology systems.

• Articulate and map out product vision, discuss in weekly stakeholder meetings
• Facilitate bi-weekly product road map reviews 
• Work closely with product managers to plan upcoming development sprints

• Facilitate design feedback sessions
• Conduct extensive user research to build personas and unpack customer problems

• Lead weekly retrospectives to keep the team motivated, learning and growing
• Facilitate design workshops to tackle complex design problems and accelerate innovation.
• Collaborated with engineers to build user flows, prototypes, and final product specs.

Through user interviews and other asset management tools analysis, we uncovered all the areas and requirements our users needed in the tool. Many users spent hours managing license renewals and budgets in spread sheets. We needed to build an IT asset management tool that automated these time consuming tasks.

Because we were building a tool from the ground up, I wanted to make sure every possible scenario was clearly articulated and mapped out before designing anything. We found these journey maps to be very helpful to share out my ideas with the broader agency. I created many visualizations to keep the teams aligned and transparent with the agency. 

Recognizing the significance of clear communication, we leveraged journey maps as a highly effective method to disseminate my ideas throughout the broader agency. With clear visualizations and weekly sync ups, everyone remained synchronized with our objectives and progress.

Throughout the course of this project, numerous valuable lessons have been learned:

• Recognizing and addressing low-hanging fruit expedites progress, particularly by defining a  Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for early user engagement.
• Regularly scheduling sessions with development teams for planning future initiatives.
• Defining requirements and prioritizing tasks is essential, particularly in instances where direction may be unclear.
• Engaging in brainstorming sessions with the team yields diverse perspectives and reveals potential design gaps that may elude user awareness.