Radius: Compliance Tracker

Background

Radius is an expansion and global growth experts, offering a full suite of applications for companies that have expanded operations internationally. One of these services includes tax compliance, and they have a team of professionals ready to assist their clients so that they file the proper paperwork on time and meet their obligations in each country from which they operate. The company already had an existing application for Radius employees to help track client events, but it had many limitations, was difficult to use without proper training, and had a number of design flaws with no easy fixes. The next version needed to be more robust, offer an intuitive design, be brought into the Radius branding fold, as well as support the legacy compliance data from the first version of the application. Because this was for employee use only and was limited to the Compliance Team, we were given permission to experiment with a new layout and navigation tools. What we learned here would then be used to guide future changes to all applications if it proved successful.

Approach

My tasks included:

• Business analysis included scope definition, requirements gathering, use case identification, technology research, gap analysis, and requirements documentation delivered via Confluence and JIRA (personas had already been established).
• Collaboration and strategic planning with the product and project manager to devise an incremental feature launch roadmap.
• Rapid prototyping of "happy path" walk-throughs for initial executive and user feedback.
• Creation of additional support documents that detailed all use-case scenarios.
• Execution of clickable walk-through proof of concepts, presented to steering committee for final approval, and then on to stakeholders for feedback.
• Creation of hi-res mocks, as well as all visual assets for consumption by Engineering team during development phase.
• Style guidelines and periodic review of all front-end development completed by remote team in Eastern Europe.
• Voice-overs and demonstration of finished application in a series of instructional videos offered to end users in the Compliance Team.
• Manage and collaborate with business analysts in Mumbai office to gather post-launch user feedback, propose enhancements, schedule feature releases, bug triage with Engineering and QA teams, and to author release notes.

Outcome

Initial feedback was very positive - ease of use led to improved success rates, and accountability is now easily pinpointed for bottlenecks and missed deadlines through the introduction of Milestone steps for each Compliance Event, which were assigned to specific team members. Breaking the application into distinct modules proved beneficial, as did the enhanced admin module, which is used to tailor the application for users based on their role and regional expertise. User interviews were conducted shortly after release to identify and prioritize additional enhancements, creating a steady pipeline of fixes and features. The success of this project has led to the addition of a client-facing compliance tracker, which offers additional company metrics, and it keep the user apprised of upcoming milestones and completions. Additionally, other teams within Radius have requested applications based on Compliance Tracker, which would allow them to track other sorts of events unrelated to Compliance, and these are now in the design stage.