Three years to get the budget. We had six months.
The agency managed employee grievances and disciplinary appeals across multiple state departments. Their process: employee emails a form → intake specialist downloads attachment → manually types every field into a tracking spreadsheet. Scheduling a single settlement conference meant checking availability for settlement officers, union reps, management, and conference rooms across chains of emails and phone calls.
Staff spent days on overhead instead of moving cases forward. Backlogs grew. Employees waited longer for resolution. The agency had been living with this for years and had finally secured budget to fix it. My role: Scrum Master. Get it built right, get it built on time, and make sure the people who had to use it every day actually wanted to.
The interviews didn't just surface requirements. They changed them.
Before any configuration, we conducted structured interviews with intake specialists, schedulers, settlement officers, and supervisors — each role, separately. The goal wasn't to produce a requirements document. It was to understand how work actually moved, where it stalled, and what "fixed" would feel like to the person doing the job at 2pm on a Tuesday.
Those conversations shaped the scope directly. Some things the agency thought they needed turned out to matter less than they expected. Other things — particularly around how cases got routed and how staff communicated with parties — were bigger pain points than anyone had named upfront. The interviews let us cut what wasn't necessary and go deeper where it actually mattered.
Training was where the feedback changed our approach most. Early assumptions about how to onboard staff turned out to be wrong. The interviews told us which roles needed hands-on practice, which needed reference guides, and what "ready to use this independently" actually looked like for each team. We built the training around that — not around a generic rollout plan.
The before/after: five manual steps replaced by five automated ones
What we built
Built on Salesforce Government Cloud. Chose it for security credentials, flexibility, and long-term sustainability — the agency would own a system on a widely-supported platform, not a proprietary black box.
Operated on two-week development cycles with continuous demonstrations of working functionality. Validated design decisions early. Adjusted based on user feedback.
The scheduling interface: pending cases in the sidebar, drag to an available slot — coordination that used to take hours now takes minutes
The case record: every detail, status, and history in one place — no more spreadsheet hunting
Settlement officers called the system user-friendly. Intake staff described it as something they loved working in. Staff who had operated on a legacy system for years were enthusiastic about handling conferences, closing cases, and managing escalations through the new platform.
The coordination bottleneck that had capped how many conferences the team could schedule per day — gone. The hours intake specialists spent re-typing data — redirected to actual case review. The manual report compilation — replaced by a dashboard click.
We also planned for the end from the start. Complete documentation, role-based user guides, administrator training. Any Salesforce partner can support future development. The agency owns this — they don't depend on us to run it. That independence was always the goal.