Allocadia - Manage Carryover Items

 

The Challenge

A hierarchy* in Allocadia is set up according to the current fiscal year, and a new hierarchy is created as each new fiscal year begins. For the rollover process, a hierarchy is copied over to next year as part of transition to the next fiscal year and a new folder is created for a new fiscal year.

Often customers have activity/subscriptions/financials that span across multiple years. As per the existing data model in Allocadia, all data in hierarchy is relevant for the current FY. The present structure is rigid and if the customer has carryover items (items that span beyond the current FY, it is very difficult to do so). During rollover, internal teams such as Customer Success, Support teams invest weeks of effort to copy all the items in the hierarchy and then go back in and delete all the items that they didn’t want to copy. This makes the process tedious, inefficient and time consuming.

*refers to organization’s budget structure, including folders, sub-folders and budgets

The Team

1 UX Designer, 1 Product Manager, 1 Engineer Lead, 2 Developers

My Role

I was responsible for building a shared understanding of the problem space through problem framing, sketching workshops, creating mockups and interactive prototypes.

  • Conduct stakeholder interviews, literature review to understand the problem space.

  • Facilitate workshops to build alignment and drive participation through ideation exercises.

  • Design a solution to help marketers complete the task quickly and efficiently

  • Make the feature intuitive and easy to use

  • Validate the solutions and design decisions with usability testing

Pain Points

Research helped to understand the context and identify the pain points for the users

  • Time Consuming and labor intensive - Once the internal teams get a list of carryover items to be copied to the next year, they spend 60-70% effort to copy all the items in the hierarchy and then go back in and delete all the items that they didn’t want to copy. Next, teams manually recreate the line items in the new FY and make sure that the metadata associated with the line item is correctly copied over.

  • Inconsistency and error prone with multiple IDs - Each activity has a unique ID associated with it, valid for 1 year. When the activities are carried over to the next FY, the system creates another ID for the same activity. This results in 2 separate IDs for the same activity. There is no way to link the same activity across multiple years. The internal teams had to create a column ‘Old year FY ID’ in the budget field to identify the items that belonged to previous year and link items to new year.

The Solution

  • Create Persistent ID: Persistent ID is a unique Allocadia ID associated with Category, Sub-category and Line items that remains same across multiple years. This will help to link the same carryover item across multiple years.

  • Ability to mark/unmark carryover items including bulk marking: Marking /unmarking of carryover items will help to determine what needs to be copied/not copied over during hierarchy copy. Bulk marking will allow multiple items to be marked for carryover, making the process convenient, efficient and less time consuming.

The Process

Discovery - User Research

During the discovery phase phase, I conducted a kickoff workshop at the beginning to align with the key stakeholders about the objectives of this phase. I collaborated with business, product manager, engineering leads and other internal stakeholders to:

  • research the landscape and get a clear picture of the users and their goals

  • define the challenge and the right problem to solve

  • gather insights about the existing workflow and align on the first steps

Through qualitative user research methods such as stakeholder interviews, I gathered insights about the business goals, technical constraints, scope and domain specific knowledge. I also conducted literature review and user interviews to understand the users, context, how and why of the problem. With these insights, the team has a shared vision of the problem space, empathy for the users and the challenges that they face.

HMW statement: HMW help the internal teams to reduce the time spent in managing rollovers

User: Internal Teams - Support/Customer Success

Goal: Maximize internal efficiency

Success Metric: Reduce the time and effort to manage rollovers by 50%

Considerations:

  • Unique ID- Each activity has a unique ID associated with it, valid for 1 year. When the activities are carried over to the next FY, the system creates another ID for the same activity. This results in 2 separate IDs for the same activity.

  • Performance - Layout may lead to UI rendering issues and lead to performance lag

  • Reporting - Items marked for carryover should be available for reporting for the internal teams and customers

Exploration

The next step of the design process involves the whole squad including the product manager and engineers to ideate and create the best possible solution. To gain more empathy and design better solutions, I walk them through design exercises such as:

  • Journey mapping and constructing context scenarios

  • Brainstorming

  • Sketching

Sketching and Voting

As part of the design process, I conduct usability testing with internal stakeholders and users to validate design decisions and identify any unforeseen usability issue.

 
 

Improvised solution:

 

Bulk marking of carryover items

Error handling (File validation)

  • Duplicate headers - The header ‘Allocadia ID’ already exists. Please make sure all headers are unique.

  • Data Parsing Errors:
    Invalid ID - The Allocadia ID ‘6%4321’ that you have entered is invalid. Please check and try again.

  • Data Validation Errors:
    Empty file - This file contains no data and cannot be uploaded. Please check and try again.

Results:

The enhanced functionalities and capabilities have helped internal teams to deliver speedy rollover for customers. The team could reduce the time and effort in managing carryover items by 50%.