Cost and Asset Management

As part of the IBM Multi-Cloud Management Platform, our team was tasked to build a product that would allow IT departments and finance teams to optimize their public and private cloud spend. The solution enables the user to automatically discover their costs and utilization and build policy and analytics to optimize their infrastructure and application deployments. You can ensure that you deliver high-quality services at the lowest possible price.

Roles

Credits

Brooks Protzmann - Design Director
Joshua Kramer - Design Lead
Corentin Fabry - User Experience Design
Maia Herring - User Experience Design
Brian Rhodes - Product Manager
Komra Salo - Development Lead
Khaled Awad - Back-End Development
John Sanchez - Architecture Lead

Work done while employed at IBM

My responsiblities

Creative Direction
Cross-Functional team collaboration
Sprint planning
User Experience Design
Visual Design

Platform Overview:
IBM Multicloud Management Platform

IBM Multicloud Management Platform is a digital consumption and delivery platform with integration and orchestration layers that support multiple technology stacks across a multivendor platform.

Benefits

Optimizing cloud spend and usage
Managing services mapping and dependencies
Extending DevOps processes for traditional IT and cloud natives

Product Overview:
Cost and Asset Management

Cost and Asset Management is a multi-cloud cost optimization solution that empowers IT departments and finance teams to optimize their public and private cloud spending.

Benefits

Discover your assets and costs
Identify underused resources
View, analyze, update spending and allocation

Our users

Sonya the IT OPS Manager

She is the go-between across Central IT and the lines of business. Sonya facilitates accountability by articulating clear channels of communication and boundaries via policy administration. She’s concerned with both cost and asset optimization.

Charlotte the Billing Analyst

She oversees record keeping and financial planning as well as managing the financial risks of the organization.

Craig the DEV Manager

He leads the grassroots adoption of new technologies, standards (tools, processes), and resources related to application development and deployment.

User feedback through research

“Having a succinct dashboard with those reports that we can immediately go at the high-level org-wide or go down to a team and see what those costs are is extremely valuable.”

“One of the nice things about going to the IBM Cloud is we’re not making the same mistakes we made in AWS. Some of those mistakes are that we lumped a bunch of teams under one account...then you have to have tagging in place to extract the costs out.”

Ideation Process

To-Be journey mapping

Big ideas

Design Principles

Speed
Simplicity
Automation
Communication
Configurable
Intuitive

Mid-Fi Concepts

Manage at a glance

Understand where Total Monthly & Annual Costs in relation to the budget.

See the Top Spending Accounts by Provider

Understand the top Cost Spikes and Sinks, Usage Spikes or Sinks RI Utilization

Trends, Expiration / Capacity Trends, and which application and who is responsible for those accounts they apply to.

Manage by exception

Understand where Total Monthly & Annual Costs in Compare Top 5 Monthly Service Costs by a Single Provider and Single Account Month to Month and By The Numbers

Compare Top 5 Services with the greatest Cost Fluctuation by a single Provider and single account Month to Month and By The Numbers

YTD Budget vs. Actual for A single Asset Account

A single Service Cost and Budget for a Single Provider and Single Account Month to Month and By The Numbers

Mid-Fidelity Testing Synthesis

"Frankly, this is disappointing to see."

This was a design failure. We found that our users did not trust seeing simple numbers and "Top 5" rankings for costs or assets without manipulating the data themselves. Instead, we learned that it is best to show a budget visualization, with a complete list of assets that allows the user to manipulate using a tagging strategy and a robust filtering option.