The Problem
The team was working with complex, undocumented system workflows against an extremely aggressive timeline, with a small group of developers responsible for reindexing millions of items in Oracle eBusiness Suite. Documentation existed in fragments, and non-technical warehouse staff had no reliable single source of truth to work from.
Goals
- Improve usability through a complete overhaul of the indexing system, covering over one million unique items
- Produce clear documentation of completed work that developers and non-technical staff could both rely on
- Support adoption of the new system across multiple warehouses
What I Did
- Created user guides and training materials, and translated technical workflows into simple, user-friendly language to build a single source of training material
- Collaborated directly with developers and stakeholders to verify documentation accuracy against actual system behavior
- Maintained timely submission of security requirements and tests to keep the project on schedule
- Continuously updated documentation based on evolving user needs and system changes
- Facilitated Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Sprint Reviews, and Retrospectives for the cross-functional team
Results
- Created standard SOPs for testing and security approval, later standardized across all non-technical users
- Maintained the project timeline despite constantly shifting variables and requirement changes
- Used the Scrum framework to document work and optimize workflow for the developer team
- Improved the onboarding experience for internal users adopting the new system
What I Learned
Clear communication is critical in technical environments — understanding the user matters just as much as understanding the system itself.
The hardest part of this project wasn't the technical complexity — it was keeping the timeline intact when priorities weren't aligned and communication broke down between the different customer bases we supported. That experience is exactly why I default to over-communicating scope and timeline risk early, rather than waiting for a deadline to surface a misalignment.
Skills Applied
ScrumBacklog BuildingTechnical Writing
Oracle eBusiness SuiteProject Management