Judith Sol-Dyess

The client provides professional consulting services to businesses across many industries including banking & credit unions, capital markets, private equity, insurance, healthcare, life sciences, energy & utilities, retail, manufacturing & distribution, and technology.

Their M&A division performs due diligence on target companies that may be acquired, merged, or broken off. The tool we build them during our dual-track agile project allows team members to capture thousands of data points. round-robin style, during site visits. The data is available for immediate reporting of specific benchmarks that signal possible risks to flag in reports. Exports allow final deliverables to be produced from a single source of truth, rather than everyone's individual laptops and tools. Ultimately, the data is aggregated into a central ETL and warehouse tool the client owns, for reporting across all levels in the organization.

The application supports some offline mode (in case of lost connectivity at the client site, or while on an airplane). It's a React front end that leverages Survey.js and a Rails back end.

We facilitated a multi-week design thinking workshop for Tyson Food's Innovation Lab. I participated in several ethnographic research sessions.

The team identified several new products across new and existing brands. We "prototyped" food (I actually got to make it with my own hands in the Tyson test kitchen!) and the product went to market just months after our design sprint - talk about getting our to market fast!

Project Contributions:
• Pivoted into the Medicaid market through an SMS-based rewards program.
• Laser-focused the MVP that got us to market within weeks, not months.
• Redesigned a customer portal that could be integrated with familiar services like Fitbit.
• Reduced the complexity while improving performance and transparency.
• Helped the client nearly triple its annualized revenue.
• Worked on an agile development project included user research and Google brand sprints.

Project Contributions:
• Enabled publishers to send customized push notifications to their subscribers.
• Collaborated with their dedicated product owner to iterate through new features.
• Developed a highly flexible pricing model integrated with Stripe.
• Integrated notifications with the Drip API.
• Scaled the infrastructure to support a rapidly growing subscriber base.
• Allowed custom scheduling by time zone, campaign, and product.
• Separated the WordPress marketing site from the application.

I delivered various wins for the wonderful folks at the Doerr Institute for New Leaders.

Project Contributions:
• Facilitated a five-day Google design sprint with their team and our designers.
• Planned and facilitated a joint project kick-off with Doerr Institute leadership, the Rice University IT department, and our team.
• Coached members of the Rice IT team on agile practices.
• Fully immersed their developers into our team to ensure minimal disruption at launch.
• Managed the project from inception to launch, on time and on budget.
• Successfully managed a considerable reduction in budget mid-project.
• Ensured successful launch and transition to their IT department.

The university employs around 1,500 faculty, fellows, staff, and temps, all of who are funded differently. A faculty member can be paid from six different sources, for example. Our system allows payroll staff to split salaries accurately across monthly and bi-weekly pay periods, for fiscal and academic years, and across grants with changing requirements, such as NIH caps. Users see discrepancies right away, and we also support prorating for changes mid pay period and for multiple salaries across jobs and fiscal years.

This was a 14-year-old Pearl application we redesigned and redeveloped from the ground up, though user interviews and design sprints. it was a dual-track agile project. We used React and Rails and integrated it with the university's Shibboleth single sign-on.

The primary challenge was helping Chicago Ideas pivot its user experience to match its transformation. It was shifting from a week-long idea festival—with a site meant to showcase events and sell tickets—to an organization that finds and spreads the brightest ideas year-round via its content, videos, and other programs. The new site still lets users browse speakers and attend events. Yet, now, it also presents clear and concise information about CI’s initiatives and highlights its incredible library of videos from past events.

We developed a custom Ruby on Rails CMS that allows them to construct pages out of reusable design elements quickly, so they can create responsive content without having to rely on a designer to build each new page.

We created 38 reusable pre-designed blocks. The blocks can contain videos, images, and text and can even pull data from other parts of the system (such as a list of events or speakers). When the content team needs to create a new landing page, they can drag and drop a header block, newsletter signup block, text block, and image block into the order they need them. The pieces are designed to work in any combination, so CI can build the functionality that works for them.

Project Contributions:
• Coached the client's leadership and design agency about working in agile which allowed us to make continuous, visible progress.
• Built a new site from scratch by customizing an off-the-shelf CMS tool (Craft) that could be managed without developers going forward.
• Saved considerable budget by finding a commercial solution instead of customizing one.
• Iterated from providing dynamic product pages to offering e-commerce options.

Pecha Kucha’s unique presentation structure caught on quickly in the creative community. Each speaker gets 20 images and 20 seconds per image. The slides automatically advance. Pecha Kucha is not expected to be as polished as TED, it’s real people telling authentic stories in local environments. That, plus a visually rich and engagingly fast format, has helped it grow to just about every major city on earth.

In the app we built, the most popular presentations are pushed to users every day without additional burden on a limited team.

Project Contributions:
• Collaborated directly with founders.
• Managed a small team of designers, mobile developers, and Rails developers.
• Managed project scope, budget, and timeline.
• Facilitated regular client showcases for the broader PK team.

IDC uses its unique CAMEL rankings of financial ratios to determine the safety ratings of more than 12,000 banks, bank holding companies, savings institutions, and credit unions in the US. Prior to my work with them, these ratings were printed and shipped to customers each quarter. In 2015, IDC engaged my employer to develop an online portal where customers could subscribe to various digital options. As one of my first clients, I worked with IDC to implement an initial solution that evolved over several years and annual releases.

Project Contributions:
• Designed a custom online portal offering various subscription options.
• Conducted various user research sprints to inform key features and pricing levels.
• Designed a robust ETL process to move data between their proprietary back-end to the portal.
• Streamlined a fast online purchase experience.
• Integrated one-off purchases and recurring subscriptions with Stripe.
• Offered more advanced "team" account management.
• Provided simple administrative tools for their staff to review and publish quarterly data.
• Implemented multiple-factor authentication and a device management tracking system.

WomenOnCall (now Chicago Cares' program Skills for Good) connects professional women with nonprofits looking for volunteers with specific skills and industry experience.

In 2014, my employer built them a platform that matched nonprofits with volunteers best-suited for their projects, powered by an algorithm crunching location, skills, and interest.

I began working with them in 2015 when their project strategist was on maternity leave and loved working with them so much that I kept them! They remained my client through their merger with Chicago Cares.

Project Contributions:
• Conducted a lean user research sprint focused on specific personas.
• Updated the user flows to improve conversion goals.
• Refreshed their website branding.
• Improved analytics tracking using Google Analytics and Mixpanel.
• Continued improving their back-end administrative tools.
• After their merger, we collaborated with their vendor to help them build a similar user experience.
• Performed QA for their new application.
• Retained key administrative functions in place while the public-facing site was migrated.
• Migrated content after their merger.

Wait What wanted to launch a mobile app called Masters of Scale, which it ultimately accomplished. My role was to collaborate with the client's leadership and product teams to define requirements and prototype the application with a UX designer and a developer.

I managed the discovery activities, including the communication and planning aspects, and ensured team members had what they needed to do their best work. The discovery phase was a success, and the development team took over afterward.

I managed the last 10 months of a 17-month project with a final team of 8 people, although 20 people turned over during the entire project. The scope was greatly underestimated, and much of my initial work was recovering from that. We worked to analyze our gaps, process issues, unknown scope, and risks and started to mitigate everything while trying to keep the team motivated.

Ultimately, we identified the largest gaps in scope (and our biggest risks) and tackled those to give the client more confidence in our new, re-estimated timelines. I managed the client and team relationship with very soft gloves, but honestly and transparently, and went to a point where we regained the client's trust.

We then moved on to deliver a really good MVP, focusing on solving specific technical challenges, staffing the team appropriately, and increasing our value delivery nearly every sprint.

In the end, the client's leadership team was very pleased with their product, and the relationship was more than salvaged, thanks to the contributions of everyone on the team.