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Phyllis is a salesperson and an experienced traveler. She works late almost everyday and is always looking for new ways to make her daily job more efficient, especially for tasks that do not directly impact her performance at her job. She has three kids, and therefore wants to maximize the amount of time she spends at home. She is comfortable with using the internet from for her daily job, but she is not necessarily up to date with the newest cutting edge technology. She finds that doing reimbursements is the worst part of her day, and most of the time has to take care of her expense reporting at home, because she is not allowed to bill those hours to her work. Phyllis wants an interface that is easy to use and will save her a lot of time.
Lessons learned from a business consultant (Traveler persona):
Things already done well for expense reporting:
- Company has their own homegrown system for business expenses
- Air, hotel, car rental was automatically input from company AMEX
Things that are not done well with regard to expense reporting:
- For mileage: "we end up estimating." This is likely a source of inaccuracy (at best) and bilking the system (at worst).
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Juan is an auditor who has to deal with multiple systems. Juan works in the finance department and has to transfer the data from expense reporting to the financial software used by the finance department for bigger expenses. Juan enjoys his job because of the analytical aspects that he enjoys doing and also enjoys finding mistakes that people make. Juan's primary role is to look at expense reports and compare line items to insure that there is nothing wrong between the receipts and expense reporting. Juan also analyzes total travel expenses for all employees across the whole company and is always looking for incremental ways to improve travel expense reporting.
Lessons learned from auditor (Auditor Persona):
Things that are not done well with regard to expense reporting:
- Very manual process of comparing line items on spreadsheets and written documents to ensure correctness
- Tracking down the sources of discrepancies when people make mistakes is very time consuming
- They usually work with multiple applications at once. One for reporting, one for tracking, and generally excel for numerical analysis.
Mary the Approver
Mary is a sales manager who cares about dealing with her budget. She has ten direct reports (including Phyllis) and just wants to see the big picture to see how her employees are spending money. She generally only cares about big ticket items but will appreciate reducing waste in her budget as long as she does not have to put in any extra effort. She is very busy at work and with kids, and she does not have time to analyze individual line items but yet has to approve every expense report. She consults with the traveler to help them plan where to go. She is part of the initial process and a user of the system herself. She likes her job, which she has held for 30 years. She is less tech savvy than Phyllis.
Lessons learned from a VP of Sales (Approver Persona):
Things that are not done well with regard to expense reporting:
- Manager hand signs approvals. Need a quick way to make sure that no line items are completely inaccurate
- People end up submitting all reports at the same time, and the system gets crowded all at once, therefore need a solution that can handle high volume and allow the person receiving the high volume to be able to deal with all the expenses.
Andy the Assistant
Andy is the business manager of the office. In addition to his own responsibilities, he is often called on to handle expenses for executives of the firm. Andy hates his job, particularly the repetitive paperwork tasks he has to do day in and day out. He also hates how a lot of clerical work (like expense reports) get dumped on him on Friday, as the executives leave for the weekend. Andy is relatively young for the office, and has ample experience with web-based applications due to his browsing activities during work hours.
Lessons learned from a Business Manager (Assistant Persona)
- Mileage reimbursement was the worst part of expenses. Every leg had to be entered into an excel form and printed out on mapquest, and often required multiple conversations with busy bosses so that they could remember every leg of their trip.
- She also had to look up the mileage reimbursement rate on a regular basis, because she would forget.
Task analysis
There are a few main tasks involved with creating MileageManager. These tasks include:
- Creating Create a trip
- Approving the Approve a tripAnalyzing the
- Analyze a trip
Create a triptripe
Goal: Enter a trip into the system for eventual approval
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- Many times a day
Domain analysis
The administrator can create, read, update and delete accounts. These accounts can be: "Traveler Account", "Approver Account" or "Auditor Account".
Travelers can create, read, update and delete trips.
Approvers can approve or reject trips.
Auditors can analyze trips and export reports that contain information about the trips.
