The Ask
Federal leadership needed a dashboard to evaluate contractor staff performance. The system had to:
- Provide a five-star rating system for quantitative assessments
- Allow leadership to add specific feedback in the form of comments on why a rating was given
- Enable monthly evaluations to track service quality over time
- Support ad-hoc feedback when contractors performed exceptionally well—or fell short of expectations
Research & Discovery
To understand leadership’s priorities, I conducted interviews that revealed:
- Six performance categories were most important to evaluate contractor staff
- Leadership needed a clear process for analyzing feedback data, so they could track performance trends over time
- The tool had to integrate seamlessly into the existing dashboard environment to reduce learning curves and avoid the need for extensive training or SOPs
Insight: Leadership valued simplicity, consistency, and actionable insights over complexity.
Execution
To deliver on these needs, I:
- Built the dashboard within the existing toolset for familiarity and ease of adoption
- Designed drop-down menus and form fields that made feedback quick and intuitive to submit
- Centralized all responses in a single repository, ensuring data was organized and easy to analyze
- Maintained a consistent look and feel with other dashboards, so users could focus on the task rather than learning a new system
Outcomes
The dashboard was built, tested, and launched successfully across the directorate. Key results included:
- Increased adoption—federal leadership actively used the tool to log contractor performance feedback
- Performance trends identified—data enabled leaders to spot strengths and gaps in contractor support over time
- Improved decision-making—leadership could collaborate using the data to discuss team needs and take corrective action when necessary
Result: A simple, structured feedback system that empowered federal leadership to evaluate contractor performance consistently and make data-driven decisions.
