Gray Construction is a large-scale American construction contractor that is a part of the broader Gray family of companies. Providing a wide range of construction services including design, engineering, and project management, Gray Construction has completed projects both domestically and internationally in several industries like data centers and commercial.

Gray Construction recently faced a lot of challenges with internal resource management and knowledge sharing, with many of its project management teams complaining about not being able to find templates for documentation easily on their existing platforms.

This led to an RFP from Gray Construction to Deloitte Digital, where a creative director and I were tasked with designing a simple intranet site using Microsoft’s Sharepoint to create an intuitive internal knowledge transfer platform for their teams in just 3 weeks.

At the start of the project, Gray Construction showed us their current internal site, consisting of multiple file types that acted as templates. However, each of these files was supposed to be organized by different functional groups - such as Field Operations, Project Management, or HR - based on what information was most relevant to each group.

For example, “Design Management” teams were only interested in seeing blueprint guides while “Finance & Accounting” were only concerned with budgeting templates.

To complicate this further, Gray Construction requested that each file also be able to be sorted underneath different “stages” of the construction management lifecycle: Pursuit, Estimate, Engineering & Design, Execution, Commissioning & Startup, and Project Closeout.

At the start, the creative director and I sketched and brainstormed different ways to organize all these templates together through diagrams and wireframes. We explored two different methods of organization (shown above):

• Organizing files by functional groups that can be filtered by lifecycle stages.
• Organizing files by lifecycle stage that can be filtered by the assigned functional groups.

After presenting both these options, the client after much deliberation advocated for the former (which was also our recommendation), due to there being more functional groups than lifecycle stages and the discovery that most teams hardly view files outside of their functional groups.

After this, I began creating higher fidelity mockups that matched the Microsoft design system of patterns and components - since this was a Sharepoint site. These mockups explored different options for interface component combinations and placements.

After reviewing the options with the client’s Sharepoint developers to determine what was most feasible, I produced the final designs (shown below) that were handed off to the client.

The landing page of the Gray Construction intranet shows a recently viewed files section followed by a quick links bar, both of which were desired by the client. On the left is the main navigation menu, which shows a list of all functional groups and subgroups that the user can click on to view a list of all templates under each respective group.

When viewing the list of templates, the user can filter these by their assigned Lifecycle tag using the component underneath the search bar.