From Access Database to Unified Workspace

Universal Creative's PPM system was the system of record for every project: its security, its budget, its contracts, and its work requisitions. Four separate controlled-maintenance tools sat on top of it, each built during a different phase of PPM's life. Nobody had mapped how they depended on the same data or evaluated their interfaces, so I did both: a data-dependency model tracing every entity each tool touched back to the shared Project record, and a heuristic evaluation of all four tools.

Together they showed one problem. All four tools wrote back to the same project data with almost no validation, before/after comparison, or error recovery, so no one could be sure a change had landed correctly. That gap produced orphan records and data mismatches IT had to fix directly. I used both artifacts to design one Ancillary Applications workspace that replaced all four tools, with no training required.

• Altering Security Permissions: lock or unlock a project's security groups and manage which users belong to them.
• Change in Commitment: snapshot a project's budget commitments at a point in time and report on how they changed between periods.
• Budget Transfer: reallocate budget across a schedule of value, change orders, or work-requisition line items.
• Contract / Work Requisition Transfer: move a contract's or work requisition's line items, and everything downstream of them, from one project to another.

Each tool had been built independently, at a different point in PPM's history. Two had at least been given a custom interface at some point. The other two, Budget Transfer and Contract/Work Requisition Transfer, had never been touched: they were still raw, unstyled Microsoft Access forms, database field names and all, opened directly by Finance and project administrators.

Before redesigning anything, I needed to understand what these four tools actually shared underneath their different screens. I mapped PPM's data-dependency model across 24 entities: every entity, key field, and relationship touched by all four tools, rooted in the same Project record as parent context, down through each workflow's configuration, entities, and derived records, to where every path converges on the same two final steps: validate related data, then commit the change to PPM. View the full model ↗

The data-dependency model showed how the tools were connected underneath. It couldn't show what it actually felt like to use them. So I ran a criterion-level heuristic evaluation of all four tools' legacy web interfaces against Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics, scoring every criterion Met, Violated, or N/A per tool, with a severity rating and supporting comment. The results were consistent almost to a fault: the same handful of gaps repeated across nearly every heuristic and every tool. View the full evaluation ↗

The data-dependency model explained why the stakes were high: every tool's changes reconciled back to the same PPM project. The heuristic evaluation explained why that was risky in practice: none of the four tools gave people confidence that a change had landed the way they expected. I used that shared root cause to argue for one redesign rather than four independent fixes, and translated the most severe, highest-frequency findings directly into what each module needed to show.

PPM Workspace · Ancillary Applications

Instead of four separately-branded legacy tools, I designed a single Ancillary Applications workspace: one landing page, one visual language, and four clearly-labeled modules that each still map directly back to the tool it replaces, with a consistent card pattern, icon, and one-line description for each.

Budget Transfer: now you can see the change landHigh severity

The legacy tool gave no clear model of source, destination, or amount moved, one of the most severe findings from the audit. The redesign surfaces current, revised, total-change, and net totals before Recalculate Budget runs, and again on a dedicated confirmation screen once the transfer is saved.

Contract / Work Requisition Transfer: related records, one screenCritical severity

This tool had the highest concentration of severe findings: contracts, schedule-of-value items, change orders, and invoices split across independent windows with no unified navigation. The redesign brings all of it onto a single scrollable page under one project and agreement context, with the destination project always visible.

This project was less about redesigning any single screen and more about recognizing that four separately built tools shared the same underlying problem. Mapping the data-dependency model first meant I wasn't simply fixing what looked confusing; I could show why it mattered: every tool ultimately wrote back to the same project record, so a validation gap in any one of them posed a risk to PPM data, not just to the usability of an individual screen. The heuristic evaluation provided evidence for that argument rather than opinion. It also answered the question that started the project: the assumption was that users needed to get better at using the tools. The research showed the opposite, and the immediate, training-free adoption of the redesign reinforced it.

To comply with a non-disclosure agreement, some confidential details have been omitted or generalized in this case study. All analysis and opinions are my own and don't necessarily reflect the views of Universal Creative or NBCUniversal.