Helping an Air Force organization modernize weather systems through design capacity building
Summary
The U.S. Air Force (USAF) Weather Systems Program Office (WxPO) is transitioning all of its weather applications to the cloud. We’ve been working with the Weather Applications Rapid Production/Prototype (WARPspeed) group, which manages those applications, to adopt human-centered design (HCD) practices at scale as they both migrate and modernize their systems.
The challenge
WxPO’s mission is to enable weather and environmental operations across the Department of Defense (DoD) and beyond. DoD meteorologists, air traffic controllers, pilots, the intelligence community, and civilian forecasters leverage WxPO’s applications and data to predict weather patterns, prepare forecasts, and communicate weather information. To support these critical operations, WxPO needs to be able to deliver modern user experiences with speed and quality.
As part of the DoD’s modernization imperative, WxPO initiated a plan in 2017 to migrate more than 75 applications and services to the cloud. They aimed to complete the migration, deprecate on-prem servers, and create a single user interface — called BIFROST — for all of the applications and services by 2025. Along with the opportunity to leverage all of the benefits of operating in a cloud environment (e.g., enhanced scalability), the effort also prompted a push to reevaluate and improve how users experience WxPO’s portfolio of applications.
To manage the migration of applications to the cloud, WxPO established a software factory, WARPspeed. At its inception, though, WARPspeed lacked the internal design capacity, including design infrastructure (e.g., Figma), to deliver the modern, user-centered products that WxPO envisioned. With one designer for the six teams within the organization, design couldn’t keep pace with development cycles. For example, when mockups were provided, they were made in outdated tools like PowerPoint. This caused a number of issues, such as putting undue burden on developers to translate design direction into working software, which ultimately led to delays in delivery and an accumulation of design debt.
The six teams within WARPspeed were also siloed and hampered by outdated processes. Unreliable communication and a lack of shared workflows often resulted in rework, a failure to account for dependencies, and differences in user experiences between applications.
The solution
Building on our success in accelerating WxPO’s cloud migration through service design, the WARPspeed group engaged us to help develop the design capabilities necessary to deliver better user experiences across their portfolio of weather applications.
To achieve this, we’ve implemented a “player-coach” model, embedding our experts within various WARPspeed teams while simultaneously building internal capacity. This dual approach enables us to deliver hands-on improvements to application user experiences and enhance the organization’s core practices, operations, and infrastructure in user research, product design, content design, and agile product management. Our efforts thus far have included:
- Growing HCD skills in all phases of development by pairing and collaborating with staff members on different WARPspeed teams, like BIFROST and Environmental Workflow Application
- Introducing new design and agile product practices by publishing an HCD Playbook, offering “lunch-and-learns,” and sharing a series of “Tip Tuesday” lessons
- Scaling design by developing a WxPO design system, fostering a design community of practice, and teaching design skills, such as prototyping and user research, across the organization
- Upgrading and streamlining tool usage by recommending organization-level design tooling best practices, including training designers and developers on Figma; cleaning up WxPO’s Confluence; and onboarding more staff to Jira
- Optimizing delivery team structures and processes by recommending backlog management improvements, defining product manager and requirements manager roles and responsibilities, and suggesting improvements for integrated software testing
- Making organizational-level recommendations to leadership to improve cross-team collaboration, such as conducting a workshop to map cross-team dependencies, introducing a strategy and integration role at the WARPspeed level, and facilitating new product management activities
Through these comprehensive support activities, we’ve significantly improved the quality and efficiency with which WARPspeed teams deliver modern user experiences across their portfolio of applications. As a result, WxPO is better equipped to support critical weather operations across its community of users.
I’ve been in this business for a while, and this is the first time I’ve seen people advocating for users at this level, and also seeing stakeholders buy-in. We’re headed in the right direction and our users are seeing that.
WxPO Leadership
The results
- Strengthened HCD and agile product management capabilities within three WARPspeed teams, verified by a comprehensive maturity assessment
- Introduced and trained staff on modern design tools, such as Figma, improving user testing and reducing design and technical debt
- Improved backlog management processes, including writing detailed stories that allow developers to more easily implement features, increasing ticket status visibility across teams, and bringing user needs to the forefront
- Facilitated organizational culture changes by educating staff members on user advocacy, how to positively receive and respond to user feedback, and the importance of incorporating user research early and often into the development process
- Accelerated the developmental process by increasing cross-collaboration and integration, identifying dependencies, and fostering alignment on timeline