Defense Privacy and Civil Liberties Office (DPCLO)
 Department of Defense (DoD) - Crystal City, VA

The brief:
The client needed a secure way to collect, track and report on privacy and civil liberties breaches across the DoD, and they came to our company for the customized software to make it happen. I co-located to the DPCLO office for the better part of year while working on the project to really understand their needs and their context. My first step was to interview, gather requirements, and start managing relationships with the stakeholders from thirteen different DoD departments.

Process flow took 3 meetings and countless emails to get 13 people to agree on

1st challenge:

There was a great deal of tension between the heads of the different offices regarding the requirements, and one office in particular absolutely refused to join the program, citing the current software they used which could not be shared with the rest of the DoD without exorbitant costs. I was able to get some one-one time with that department head to listen to his issues in depth and come up with a solution. I was able to map the differences between his system and the rest of the requirements and found only 4 items for which his system did not yet collect data. The department head agreed that they could add those 4 data fields to their current software, and once a week send a data package to the DPCLO for integration into the new database.

2nd challenge:

Due to some sticky budget issues we lost the shared server that had been planned for hosting the new software and database. Knowing that other government offices had servers that weren’t fully engaged, I was able to hunt down a very low cost host server at the Pentagon we could use for two years, or until our partner office’s budget was restored.

3rd challenge:

One of our main requirements was that service members with any level of clearance would be able to enter and submit breach notices online, which would automatically be routed through the correct evaluation flow. Unfortunately, the host server at the Pentagon which would not permit data submissions from low clearance levels. Our pivot for this wrinkle was to create an official breach submission document (fillable PDF with an automated send feature) which needed to be approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) before it could be used. The automated send in the PDF functioned through the service member’s military email account and was automatically routed to their officer who had the official clearance to upload the PDF to the database for tracking and resolution.

Delivered on budget and on time!
I loved this project and the people I worked with to get it done, we still keep in touch. The DPCLO office which is mandated to report to Congress quarterly on privacy and civil liberties breaches now creates the reports in an hour which used to take 4 people over a week to compile. This is the only government project I’ve worked on that came in on budget and on time. Plus, I had the pleasure of installing it onto the Pentagon server myself!

My role :

• Manage team relationships among stakeholders
• Gather and refine requirements
• Troubleshoot technical and budget issue constraints
• ​Create low and high fidelity interactive wireframes and visual designs
• Create and administer qualitative and quantitative user testing
• Learn OMB official document regulations and accessibility development for 508 compliant PDFs
• Basic project management
• ​Software installation and testing
  

We tested several layout designs based on user's mental models for speed and accuracy