Projects for an Efficient Workforce

The Workforce Efficiency Module later renamed to "Projects" was designed to help organizations understand, allocate, and forecast their workforce with confidence especially in labor-heavy, deskless, and project-driven environments.

This module sits at the intersection of projects, people, cost, and time, pulling data from Paismo's Timesheets, Payroll, Performance, Recruitment, and Analytics and in the future from Paismo's AI Copilot, to become a single source of truth for workforce planning. Something we learnt was very important for expansion into the MENA region.

As the Senior Product Designer, I worked closely with the CEO Rebecka Zavaleta and Lead Product Manager Abdullah Faisal, to define the product vision, translate complex operational needs into clear UX structures, and design a system that balances high-level decision-making with actionable depth.

Stage 1: Understanding the Problem Space

This feature came with a lot of challenges. And it wasn't a lack of data that was the challenge, it was how to effectively consolidate all these fragmented data points to build a cohesive system that allowed leadership to answer the following questions:

• Who is idle right now — and why?

• Are upcoming projects even feasible with current skills?

• What is the cost of under-utilization?

• When do we need to hire — not reactively, but proactively?

From early discovery and UAE market inputs, it became clear that companies:

• Operate multiple overlapping projects

• Employ role-, skill-, and location-based labor

• Struggle with forecasting workforce demand accurately especially for multiple site- based or project-based operations where workforce availability, skill sets, and timelines constantly shift.

• Make late hiring decisions, leading to cost overruns and delivery delays

The absence of a single system to connect projects, skills, utilization, and forecasting meant decisions were reactive, late, and often expensive.

Stage 2: Staring into the abyss

When I started working on this feature, I had no discovery, no product input and just a vague brief from the CEO. She wanted me to come up with wireframes to conduct very early testing with potential clients in the UAE. This brave move on her part, allowed us to refine the feature to fit all needs, but also to help tone it down.

I started off with a lot of research on existing project management softwares such as: Float, Runn, Hubstaff, Workstatus, Wanywhere, Zebra Workcloud and Monitask.

All of these offered a plethora of streamlined processes of how to manage projects efficiently with a workforce. But since I was not designing a project management tool per say, I had to keep in mind all of Paismo's complexities. This feature directly integrates and consolidates information from Paismo's existing modules and I had to build something that would work in perfect sync with them all.

Stage 3: How Early Wireframes Helped Us Decide What Not to Build

The first set of wireframes I designed were intentionally expansive.

At that stage, the goal wasn’t precision, it was coverage. We needed to explore how far Workforce Efficiency could go before deciding what it should be. The wireframes acted as a shared thinking surface for leadership, product, and operations to react to real flows rather than abstract ideas.

We explored four major surfaces in detail:

• An Overview Dashboard for high-level visibility

• Utilization & Allocation views for operational action

• A Forecasting layer for future planning

• A Reporting layer for reviews and exports

What Utilization & Allocation Revealed

The Utilization & Allocation wireframes were intentionally detailed:

• Heatmaps showing daily/monthly utilization

• Employee-level breakdowns of idle, billable, and available hours

• Side drawers exposing skills, assignments, and project load

• Multiple entry points for allocating people to projects

This section answered the question:
“What should I do about what I’m seeing?”

In UAT, users appreciated the depth, so we kept Utilization in a separate tab on the dashboard. But we didn't need the heatmaps, we simply needed a table with all of the employees listed with their billable, available and idle hours. This way leadership could open up their side drawer, evaluate their skills and allocate them to projects. Within the side drawer, all of employee's recent and active goals from our Performance module were also surfaced which allowed leadership to get a holistic idea of exactly how this particular employee was performing across projects.

We didn't need to Forecast (YET!)

Forecasting explored a more future-facing mindset:

• Forecast accuracy

• Capacity utilization

• Skill gaps

• Budget impact

• Scenario building for hypothetical projects

While users found the idea compelling, UAT revealed that:

• Forecasting only becomes trusted after the core data is rock-solid

• Teams first needed confidence in project setup, skill mapping, and timelines

Rather than ship speculative forecasting, we used these wireframes to identify the minimum signals that actually mattered:

• Clear visibility into upcoming projects

• Early warnings for timeline risk

• Explicit skill gaps tied to real work

Those signals made it into the final product — without overbuilding scenario tooling before users were ready to rely on it.

Reporting turned into Project Health

UAT revealed leadership needed to see the health of a project nested within the project page and not outside it. I designed a comprehensive project page that featured two tabs, one that showed project details and the second that showed it's health in a simple, easy to consume line chart and employee updates underneath. Later on this particular area can expand into a chatroom for employees to directly communicate with each other about the project.