Understanding High Friction Reports
This work was created in my professional capacity and is owned by my employer. Due to its proprietary nature, the artifact itself is not available for public viewing. The case study below tells the full story of the work.
THE BRIEF
Manual reporting quietly drains hours across teams, but leaders often guess at which reports hurt most, and guessing leads to misdiagnosed problems, partial fixes, and eroded trust. This one-pager was designed for leaders in a digital transformation environment, and the learning objective was to equip them with a data-over-narrative approach: identify the true sources of reporting friction through team input rather than assumption, target automation where it returns the most value, and understand their own role as data-informed leaders.
THE PROCESS
This product was designed as a scannable, standalone job aid that a busy leader can absorb in a couple of minutes and act on the same day. The content is organized as a complete argument in panels: why data beats narrative; how manual reports drain mission readiness; how to surface the true pain point through a quick, anonymous team survey; what effective leaders do with that information; and the operational and cultural payoff of automating the top offender. Color-coded panels create a clear visual hierarchy; concrete anchors, like the three to five hours per week that a single automation can return, make the case tangible; and the closing message reframes the whole practice around its human purpose: supporting the people who support the mission.
THE OUTCOME
Leaders walked away with a repeatable diagnostic practice rather than a vague mandate: ask the whole team, identify the report that consumes the most time and causes the most frustration, automate or streamline it, and communicate progress. The piece also gave them the language to connect automation to outcomes leadership cares about, from improved readiness data and hours returned to the team to higher morale, greater trust, and stronger buy-in for future modernization.
SKILLS DEMONSTRATED
Instructional design through a self contained job aid that compresses a full decision framework into a single page; adult learning theory through immediately applicable guidance that respects leaders' time and autonomy; UX thinking through color coded panels, scannable hierarchy, and iconography that guide the eye through a logical argument; and stakeholder collaboration through translating digital transformation goals into a practical tool leaders can act on without additional training.
