Baselines

‍

‍

What the heck is a baseline? 

Baselines isn’t a totally new concept, it’s a capability that's offered within many traditional project management applications. Through a competitive audit, I discovered that Baselines are a vague construct, and there isn't a standard way that every competitor does them, therefore this gave us an opportunity to define what baselines mean for Smartsheet.‍

‍

A baseline is a snapshot of a project schedule at a given time. It records the start and end date as more formalized dates, so that if project dates begin slipping or are ahead of schedule, project managers can track how close they are to the original plan.

‍

‍

We set out to identify what baselines mean to our customers. How simple or robust do they need to be? Do customers require multiple baselines for one project? How are people doing this today?

In partnership with my researcher we conducted qualitative interviews with 8 customers, learned about their mental models and then shared a high level concept to get feedback

‍

What we learned

‍

Baselines mean different things to different people - and context is key

Participants definition of baselines depended on where they worked, size of the company, size of project, how mature their project management office’s process were, and if they followed PMP industry standards or not.

Customers were doing “fine” without them, however many have built workarounds to help them understand how far ahead or behind they are on a project

‍

‍

As I began Ideation and broad explorations & I to define the following:

Where should this live in Smartsheet’s overall IA?

Should this feature live in the toolbar on all views, or just grant view?

What pattern should it take form in: Is it a modal? A menu? A panel? 

Does it have a wizard stepper for someone to get started?

Do we just create a baseline for a customer and tell them we did it? 

How should this scale, if and when we have more than one baseline?

Should users select which dates within their schedule are start and end?

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

From ambiguity to clarity

Through ideation and concept exploration I gained a perspective on what Smartsheet's baseline capability should be:

1. Set up should be seamless, we should show a preview for the customer

2. Users can create 1 baseline, however they have the ability to reset it if need be

3. Users can toggle on/off baselines bars in within gantt view

4. Less is more until we learn from customers on what complex features are valuable

‍

We landed on a modal that displays the existing start/end date metrics from their project sheet. By displaying these dates upfront, we're showing customers a preview of the schedule, and in usability testing customers identified that the dates listed in the modal were reading their first start date and last end date on their project sheet, As this feature can be  pretty technical, especially to users who are not project managers, we wanted to do the heavy lifting for customers and keep the v1 experience simple.

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

Baselines was a really interesting project for me to navigate ambiguity and define clarity. As it's an existing construct, and I had the ability to define what it meant for Smartsheet. I had so many questions at the beginning of the project and during ideation, however the moment we began speaking with customers we learned that a simple solution (1 baseline, with the ability to reset) would likely be enough for most of our customers, and that we knew there were more complex use cases out there that would be more appropriately addressed as V2 work and beyond. If I were to do anything differently, I would have done additional research up front on those more complex use cases to totally future proof the feature, however timing and resources were a constraint for us.

‍

‍