Administrative Services Workflow Automation

A federal government agency had recently developed and implemented a Salesforce application to increase transparency, improve efficiency and enable automated performance reporting of its recruiting and personnel security processes.

The user interface of the application had been developed quickly in a manner that replicated the agency’s legacy, manual tracking system.

Both customers and agency staff complained that the application’s user interface was too complex and asked for too much information.

The application was not able to provide an accurate performance report because of the large amount of missing or incorrect information.

We worked with recruiting and personnel security experts within the agency to understand the essential steps of both processes. We also clearly documented the hand-offs that needed to occur within each process.

We worked with agency leadership to determine 3-5 milestones per process that needed to be tracked in order to provide an accurate report of the agency’s performance.

We documented and secured buy-in on four main objectives that the Salesforce application needed to achieve: improve communication between stakeholders of the processes; enable real-time sharing of required documents; provide real-time information on the current status of recruiting and personnel security actions; and provide real-time reporting to ensure performance targets were being met.

Using the information gathered above, we developed a wireframe of the redesigned recruiting and personnel security application interfaces using three key philosophies: simpler user interfaces are better; required fields must be populated before users can move to the next step; and milestone dates will be auto-populated by the application.

We worked with the application developers to redesign and implement the Salesforce application.

After implementation of the redesigned application, both customers and agency staff began using the application more effectively; which improved the efficiency of both recruiting and personnel security processes.

After implementation, the Salesforce application was able to generate reports that accurately reflected the agency’s performance.