Enterprise Migration

When life was less complicated, Cisco priced communication services by the number of devices (e.g. phones) required by a customer. Now, with a lot more software offerings to integrate (e.g. WebEx, among other complexities), our services had become less device-centric, and we needed to move to pricing per-user.

As you may have guessed, a large number of our long-time customers did not keep their device ownership tables perfectly up-to-date. Moving directly to a per-user charge would risk angering our customers with downtime or overcharges.

The Device Assignment Tool was born to help client admins automate proper device assignment, ensuring a smooth transition.

As a humble upgrade tool, no detailed metrics were collected across customers, but we heard that this was one of the most well-received and reviewed applications to come out of the Unified Communications team.

This was a straightforward, standalone product but with a lot of technical complexity outside of my own expertise.

I spent an initial period learning from the lead engineer about the mapping process itself, then rapidly iterated through an initial set of wireframes to make sure we were starting off on the same page.

This was a one-time use tool for users with high domain expertise, so I wanted to make sure to use language in the UI that customer admins would be familiar with, and that the tool fit seamlessly with and referenced other Cisco admin tools at their disposal.

I ran a user study with a small set of admins, and uncovered several concerns that would have escaped my attention if not for the close partnership with our lead engineer.

I took findings back to the broader team, made updates and resolved technical questions, and delivered final wireframes and guided them through visual design and development phases.