Case study 01 · Workflow Digitization
From email chains to a self-serve approvals portal
Operations staff were processing shared task updates through email threads and shared spreadsheets. I helped turn a fragile manual process into a tracked, self-serve workflow — starting with the people doing the work.
- Client
- Fortune 500 client · Public Service Industry
- My role
- Technical consultant · requirements & stakeholder lead
- Timeline
- 3 Months
- Team
- 2 engineers, 1 designer, client operations leads
40%
faster request cycle time
100+
manual handoffs removed
33%
fewer rework errors
01
The problem
Task handover passed through 3 various channels depending on who was sending it. Requests lived in inboxes, status lived in a spreadsheet, and nobody could answer the simplest question: “Where is my request?”
The business cost was real — average turnaround of 30 days for simple requests, frequent re-submissions due to missing information, and no audit trail for compliance reviews.
02
Discovery
Before a line of code was written, I shadowed the operations team and mapped the journey end-to-end. Three insights reshaped the project:
- Most delays weren't approvals — they were missing information. Roughly 60% of requests bounced back at least once.
- Approvers didn't need a new tool; they needed fewer interruptions. A daily digest mattered more than a dashboard.
- Compliance was the silent stakeholder. An audit log was a must-have, not a nice-to-have.
03
Scoping the MVP
The original ask was a full workflow engine. I proposed a narrower first release focused on the highest-volume request type, which let us validate an MVP approach in 6 weeks, beating the 3 month complete timeline.
| In the MVP | Deferred to v2 |
|---|---|
| Smart intake form with validation | Configurable multi-branch routing |
| Rules-based routing for one request type | Mobile approvals |
| Approver queue + daily email digest | Analytics dashboard |
| Immutable audit log | Self-serve form builder |
04
The solution
- 01Intake formRequired fields enforced up front
- 02Validation rulesCatch missing data before routing
- 03Routing engineAssigns approver by type & threshold
- 04Approver queueDaily digest + one-click decisions
- 05Audit & syncLogged and pushed to ServiceNow with MuleSoft
I wrote the user stories and acceptance criteria, partnered with our designer on the intake flow, and managed the integration component with ServiceNow so engineering could build in parallel.
05
Trade-offs & alignment
Leadership wanted every request type on day one. Instead of arguing, I brought data: the top request type represented 70% of volume. Shipping it first meant real differnce within weeks — and a pattern we could copy for the rest.
06
Outcome
- Average cycle time dropped from 30 days to 10 days.
- Re-submissions fell by 33% thanks to up-front validation.
- Compliance reviews went from a week of spreadsheet archaeology to a 2 minute export.
- The pattern was extended to 2 additional request types in v2.
07
What I'd do differently
I'd instrument the old process before replacing it. We had to reconstruct our “before” metrics from email timestamps — a baseline captured on day one would have made the impact story faster to tell and harder to dispute.