Vendor & Contractor Management
When everyone owned a spreadsheet, no one owned the truth.
A research-led case study: how nineteen interviews reframed a dashboard request into a shared operating model.
I led discovery end-to-end, reframed the brief, and designed one shared operating model — with a focused view for every role.
- My role
- Research lead & design partner
- Scope
- Discovery → strategy → shipped product
- Outcome
- Shipped · in production use
Scope of the problem
Why this was hard
Across teams, the same data looked different — and decisions suffered.
Fragmented data
Vendor and contractor information lived across spreadsheets, emails and shared folders.
Low confidence
Every decision needed manual verification before anyone would act on it.
Manual, error-prone work
Reconciliation happened outside the system, by hand, every month-end.
No shared ownership
Nobody trusted one source enough to stop keeping their own.
- 12
- stakeholder groups
- 6
- user archetypes
- 1
- shared operating model
The problem was never a missing dashboard. Trust in the shared data had broken down — so everyone rebuilt the truth by hand.
Method
Five moves from insight to a defensible direction
- 01
Understand
On-site ethnography, role by role.
- 02
Diagnose
Data quality and broken hand-offs — not a missing screen.
- 03
Set principles
Trust, clarity, accountability.
- 04
Explore
Benchmark, concept, validate with real users.
- 05
Prioritise
Sequence by impact and effort.
Research synthesis
Nineteen interviews, clustered on one wall
Which number is correct?
We don’t trust the source
Different teams, different reports
Too many spreadsheets
I keep my own report
No single place to go
Not clear who owns what
Finger-pointing, slow escalations
Who changed what?
Re-entering the same data
Approvals are slow
No visibility into status
One place for everything
Role-specific views
Real-time & trustworthy
Fig.Reconstructed affinity wall — notes grouped into the themes that became archetypes and priorities. Dot-votes mark what the room agreed mattered most. Interview IDs anonymised.
Product thinking
How the problem reframed itself
Initial assumption
They need a dashboard.
Research insight
They have a trust problem.
Product pivot
Design a shared operating model.
Final strategy
A decision platform, per role.
Principles the evidence earned
Every principle traces to something we saw
Reduce ambiguity
Teams argued over which number was right.
One governed definition for every metric.
Respect role boundaries
People ignored information irrelevant to their job.
Dedicated role-specific workspaces.
Preserve flexibility
Every team had bent the process to fit reality.
Configurable views, not a rigid flow.
Governance in the workflow
Offboarding failed because it was an afterthought.
LDAP locks & approvals inside daily actions.
Strategy
Three strategic product decisions
Don’t replace spreadsheets — replace fragmented ownership.
Why
The spreadsheets were a symptom of broken trust, not the disease.
Business implication
One governed source the whole organisation could stand behind.
Design around roles, not data.
Why
One screen can’t serve six conflicting needs without becoming noise.
Business implication
A focused workspace per role on a shared spine.
Treat governance as part of the workflow.
Why
Offboarding and approvals failed whenever they were left to admins.
Business implication
Compliance and audit-readiness by default, not by effort.
One trusted source, many purposes
Role-specific views on a shared data spine.
Not one bloated dashboard — a focused view per role, drawn from one trusted, governed source.
One data spine. Many role lenses.
Each role gets what they need to act — nothing more, nothing less.
Pillar Head
Strategic overview
contracted value
Finance Controller
Spend & accruals
spend YTD
Delivery Manager
Performance & utilisation
utilisation
VMO Lead
Vendor & demand
vendors · 11 at risk
HR Manager
Lifecycle & headcount
headcount
Contractor
Personal profile
my utilisation
Trusted data spine
Governed, validated and continuously updated.
Single source of truth
Eliminates duplicate data and conflicting reports
Faster decisions
Role-specific insight cuts cycle time
Lower risk
Consistent governance and audit readiness
Stronger collaboration
Everyone works from the same trusted data
Information architecture
The structure held; only the fidelity changed
SketchRapid exploration WireframeHierarchy stabilised AnnotatedInteraction validated Final UIVisual system applied
Fig.Sketch to shipped UI: hierarchy, navigation and information architecture stayed constant. The visual system came last.
The outcome
In use. Trusted. Adopted.
In use
The single source of truth for vendor and contractor data across the org.
Trusted
Teams act on the platform’s numbers instead of re-checking their own.
Adopted
Rolled out across regions — and the private spreadsheets were retired.
“For the first time, we can answer critical contractor questions in minutes, not days.”— Pillar Head
Reflection
Research was the product decision.
I began believing the challenge was interface complexity. Research showed the real problem was organizational fragmentation — six teams, no shared model, and no reason to trust a central system.
So the work shifted from screens to a shared operating model: designing for confidence, governance and decision quality, not just usability. The UI came last — and only because the trust beneath it finally held.
One operating model.
One trusted source.
One product teams finally believed.
- Research
- Synthesis
- Product
- Governance
- Adoption
This project wasn’t about replacing spreadsheets. It was about giving six teams a shared system they trusted enough to replace them.