The district relied almost entirely on paper-based, manual processes across its core administrative functions. Staff navigated fragmented systems, color-coded paper tracking, physical filing rooms, and basket mail — creating delays, errors, and zero visibility into process status.With a major enterprise system upgrade on the horizon, the district needed a strategic, user-centered vision to inform how these processes should be redesigned.

Blueprints Created

Roles mapped

Departments redesigned

User Research

Roles we mapped

Conducted contextual inquiries with 17+ distinct user roles across three departments — from frontline school staff to department directors. Built synthesized mental models and detailed user profiles capturing each role's goals, pain points, desires, and behavioral patterns.

Frontline Staff

School-level administrators, financial secretaries, and support staff

Department specialists

HR, procurement, and accounting specialists handling day-to-day processing

Leadership & oversight

Directors, board members, and approvers across the chain

External participants

Vendors, contractors, and system actors mapped in process flows

Cross-functional

Investigators, evaluators, and compliance teams spanning multiple workflows

Current State Mapping

What we found

The same data entered into multiple systems and formats (up to 7 format variations in one process)
No downstream notification when critical information was shared between departments
Paper files and email inboxes used as the primary workload tracking system
Manual calculations and validations consuming hours of staff time
End users at schools with no system access, creating duplicative re-entry and communication blind spots

Dream State Design

Facilitated collaborative workshops with client stakeholders and technical subject matter experts to design 20+ future-state workflows. Key design concepts included:

Simplify

Reducing complexity at entry points

Unified digital forms

Replacing 7+ paper/digital format variations with a single configurable form

Smart validation

Using business logic to prevent errors at the point of entry

Self-service portals

Empowering external users (vendors, school staff) to submit directly into the system

Automate

Removing manual handoffs

Automated routing

Sending requests to the right approvers based on transaction type and value

Automated notifications

Replacing manual email distribution and follow-ups

Connect

Bridging systems and roles

Role-based views

Aggregating open tasks and eliminating paper tracking systems

Integration architecture

Connecting previously siloed systems for automatic data flow

Procurement

The request-to-purchase-order flow redrawn to the project's proposed future state on the updated software: smart forms that show only what applies, documents and routing set by business rules, and approvals that adapt to the purchase.

1. A school raises a requisition

Replaces

Guessing which of seven forms to use and how many quotes to get, then finding out you were wrong after the paper packet reached Purchasing by basket mail.

2. The buyer's role-based worklist

Replaces

The five-copy color-coded paper trail and a personal Excel tracker per buyer, with aging requests hidden until they were already late.

3. Requisition becomes a purchase order

Replaces

Hand-assembling PO packets, entering data twice, print-sign-scan, and no idea what a field like "commodity code" means.

4. Approval, set by the purchase itself

Replaces

Basket-mail handoffs of one to two days per stage, wet signatures, and a fixed approval chain that often ignored what was actually being bought.

5. Signing off from a phone

Replaces

A signature that could only happen at a desk, holding up a purchase for days.

Three Workstreams

Each workstream was treated as a full service design engagement - from research through current state analysis, dream state design, and actionable recommendations.

HR Personnel Management

Redesigned the process for managing employee lifecycle actions (new hires, transfers, separations, role changes) across 7 existing format variations and 8+ tools. Designed a unified digital workflow with configurable approvals, automated downstream notifications, and consumer-friendly forms for non-HR users.

7 format variations

8+ tools

5 user roles

Procurement

Mapped 10+ procurement flows from school-level purchases to complex competitive bids and construction change orders. Designed an end-to-end digital procurement experience including smart forms with auto-population, a vendor self-service portal, digital signatures, and real-time contract tracking dashboards.

10+ flows

7 personas

Color-coded paper system

91-page vision book

Travel & Expense

Redesigned the reimbursement process from paper forms and manual mileage calculations to an automated digital workflow with integrated mapping software, real-time budget validation, pre-populated employee data, and automated status notifications.

Paper-based

100-200 biweekly submissions

Manual mileage calc

Recommendations

Each workstream was treated as a full service design engagement - from research through current state analysis, dream state design, and actionable recommendations.

System Limitations & Usability

Improvements to address gaps between user expectations and system capabilities

Visibility & Tracking

Enhancements for real-time status visibility across departments

Paper-to-Digital Transitions

Workflow redesigns eliminating manual, paper-based processes

Redundancy Elimination

Removing duplicate data entry and parallel tracking systems

Training & Knowledge Gaps

Solutions for institutional knowledge loss and onboarding

External User Engagement

Self-service portals for vendors and school staff

Impact

60+
‍

Recommendations directly tied to system capabilities and business process changes

6,000+
‍

Employees across 130+ schools served by the redesigned processes

Work directly informed the technical configuration and change management strategy for the enterprise upgrade.

“

The strategy book will be really helpful in directing our efforts in the right direction.

- MOJ, Director

“

"Getting everyone to come together to share how tech helps them do their job and unanimously agree to what needs to be done is a major piece that has been missing for me."
‍

- DOR, System Analyst

“

"A lot of my work is telling new hires, transfers and temp how to work with our systems. And correcting the errors they make. I am so happy to be done with all of that."

- JR, Purchasing Technician

What I Learned

Blueprints don't speak for themselves

Most employees don't interpret service blueprints or process flows intuitively. I learned this after the first validation session and shifted my approach — either running a brief familiarization walkthrough before each session or simplifying the visual language to meet people where they are.

Representing complexity takes iteration

A public school district of this scale has robust, compliance-driven systems that are deeply intertwined. Untangling these processes into clear, elegant visual representations took more iterations than I anticipated. Sometimes it takes several drafts of slicing and structuring a process before you arrive at the most effective representation.

No single person holds the full picture

The processes were so complex that no one individual understood them end-to-end. This meant building the complete picture required multiple rounds of validation across different user roles — each person filling in gaps the others couldn't.

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