PORTFOLIO SAMPLE

Interactive Department Diagram

Challenge

How do you help new employees understand how they fit into a technology company with an unfamiliar business model and offices around the world? How do you show them the impacts of the work they hand off to other departments? These questions from on-boarding trainers and front-line managers drove my creation of the interactive Functional Relationship Diagram (FReD).

Solution

With over 40 departments, the company was too diverse for a one-size-fits-all training on company structure. On the other hand, a static document with a list of departmental relationships would not have engaged employees or shown them the web of hand-offs throughout the company. To draw employees’ interest and allow them to explore the company’s complexities at their own pace, I suggested an interactive relationship diagram.

To gather the content for the diagram, I provided questionnaires to the Human Resources department and replaced the jargon in the responses with everyday language. I fed the information into an Access database and designed an application using Adobe Flash and ActionScript that would allow employees to view the information in two ways:

1. In a flowchart that showed the process of signing business and delivering the product

2. In a wheel with spokes representing each department’s relationships

The intention was for the learner use the flowchart to develop a mental model of the entire organization. Once that model was in place, the learner could use the wheel to freely explore the organization and fill in knowledge gaps as desired.