Context
A governmental agency needed to track OKRs across 9 departments; but years of shared-spreadsheet chaos had made reporting slow, inconsistent, and largely ignored. The General Manager wanted near-live visibility; security constraints ruled out external tools; and teams refused to leave Excel.
The core constraint
No workshops; no tool change. The system had to work with existing habits; and prevent errors by design.
What I built
- A standardized department template workbook
- Validation rules; locked structure; clear error signals; an auto-updated “Issues” panel.
- A consolidation workbook
- Pulls all departmental submissions into one master table; eliminating manual merging.
- Two dashboard layers
- Agency-level view for leadership; department-level view for each head.
Adoption design
I treated Excel like an app: isolated workbooks per team; guardrails that catch issues during data entry and at submission; dashboards that require no walkthrough.
Deliverables
- Standardized input process across 9 departments
- Consolidated single source of truth with role-restricted access
- Refreshing dashboards for leadership and departments
- Documentation plus role-specific video walkthroughs
Key takeaways
- Behavior design beats training when training is not allowed.
- Validation and UX choices are the difference between “a spreadsheet” and “a system.”