A Cloud Platform for a Nation's Defence Force

F-FDTL's personnel records lived in a Microsoft Access database on one central computer. Updating or maintaining it meant physically being at the Dili HQ; a cloud-based solution would let authorised staff log in and manage the database from anywhere.

The project ran alongside the development of F-FDTL's Logistics Management Platform, and both were built into One, Similie's ERP platform, so the new system had to extend an existing product rather than start from a blank page. An initial series of MoSCoW workshops with key stakeholders established the needs and requirements for both systems. The stakeholder landscape was genuinely complex: a national defence force, an international defence cooperation programme, and a distributed product team, working across languages and cultures. And beyond the interface itself, the project asked an organisation to change how it worked, which meant the design process had to bring people along, not just produce screens.

I worked with all of the key stakeholders throughout, from the MoSCoW workshops through card sorting, usability sessions and training. During development I worked closely with the product manager, sharing responsibility for regular meetings with our remote team, performing QA, and providing feedback on the build. Staying present across the whole arc, rather than handing off after the design phase, kept trust high on the client side and quality high on the build side.

This was designing for an organisation as much as for individual users, and the design work and the change management were never really separate. The biggest lever wasn't a screen; it was the combination of making the platform's structure editable by the client and staying involved from the first workshop to the last training session, which changed the project from "deliver a system" to "hand over a capability."