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City of Ottawa

Stroomt teams with SAP to help City of Ottawa

Background

The City of Ottawa was implementing the SAP Asset Lifecycle Management solutions. However they wanted an increased level of usability over their previous experiences with their installed SAP software. SAP Consulting is one of the leaders in business process re-engineering but User Experience design is not one of their core competences. They were seeking help to find leaders in the User Experience field to help them develop of a strategy to address these issues. Then, someone was needed to help convince the City of Ottawa (CoO) that the proposed strategy would work and deliver a project plan that could be executed on by a third party design team.

The solution

Stroomt responded by proposing to write up for SAP Consulting a proposed UX Strategy document. The document would outline the best practices in UX that would be required. The document also outlined:

  • A short introduction to User Experience explaining:
    • Basic UX concepts
    • Short description of UX best practices as they relate to enterprise software
  • Metrics CoO should require to objectively assure usability goals were being met
  • UX Team member recommendations
  • Activities and processes in a project plan timeline that could imported directly into the City of Ottawa's project management tools.

The process

The project process we followed was as follows:

  • Background discussion with SAP Global Consulting in order to determine:
    • critical success factors
    • CoO current experience with SAP software and causes
    • SAP Global Consulting's team and CoO's level of UX savviness
  • Interview stakeholers to determine:
    • Barriers to software adoption
    • Level of UX staffing required
    • Client usability and UX requirements
  • Proposed outline for a UX strategy document to assure accurate reflection of requirements.
  • Iterative delivery of UX strategy document and project plan deliverables
  • First iteration was a fleshed out outline to make sure the requirements and stakeholder needs would be met.
  • Second iteration was a first draft this was the first draft that was shared with CoO. Our approach was to under deliver for the deliverables and let the stakeholders request the extra information, so that the document was never overwhelming or opaque. This transparent and iterative approach allowed us to deliver quickly and turn around iterations with increasing stakeholder value.
  • Resulting UX Strategy document was widely distributed throughout the CoO and became the basis for the SAP implementation.

Who was involved

Jonathan Arnowitz was the User Experience Strategist and document Author.
Iwan Cuijper and Simone Stroomer assisted on the project. Iwan as liaison with client and Simone with the document editing.