Work / The Urban Institute
From reactive chaos to structured accountability.
I led the full lifecycle design and rollout of a centralized procurement system at The Urban Institute, turning a fragmented, reactive process into a structured workflow adopted across the organization. Clean submissions climbed from 42% to 68%, and weekly escalations fell by roughly 75%.
The problem
Procurement ran on email threads, spreadsheets, and verbal handoffs. Requests arrived incomplete, approvals stalled without visibility, and finance spent hours each week chasing missing information. The absence of structure created risk, delayed projects, and frustrated everyone in the chain.
My role
As systems designer and project lead, I owned the work end to end. I facilitated stakeholder workshops, mapped the existing workflow, named its failure points, designed the new system architecture, wrote the documentation, and led the change management effort that carried adoption across departments.
The process
I started where the work actually happened, then built the system around the gaps that surfaced.
Interviewed finance staff, department leads, and frequent requestors to map every step of the existing workflow and pinpoint where it broke.
Built a centralized intake with clear submission requirements, automated routing logic, and a real-time status dashboard.
Ran training sessions, shipped a reference guide, and opened a feedback loop so the system kept improving after launch.
The hard parts
A system that's advantageous for everyone in the chain.
A single source of truth needs everything documented the moment it's requested. But no one adopts a system that makes them re-type the same fields. I didn't want the inefficient doctor's office experience, where you enter your insurance on one screen, again on another, and still get handed a packet of forms at the front desk.
My moveThe request form is the database. One submission populates the central record finance and I pull from later, so everything is captured once, at the moment it's asked for, and never entered twice.
Requests used to arrive missing critical fields, and finance spent hours each week chasing the gaps before anything could move.
My moveI built validation into the intake itself. An incomplete submission simply cannot be sent, which shifts accountability upstream and erases the back-and-forth that had eaten so much staff time.
Every purchase, large or small, ran through the same heavy approval, so low-risk buys stalled behind the ones that genuinely needed eyes.
My moveI set a tiered framework that scales review depth to spend level, clearing the bottleneck for routine purchases while keeping full scrutiny where the money and the risk are real.
A large organization runs on expensive, entrenched systems: a preferred cloud store, a mandated accounting package, an established project tool. None were built to share data, and re-uploading the same document across them wastes time and multiplies the chance of error.
My moveI treated integrations as a standing beat, staying on the Slack and Airtable newsletters and tracking what connected each year as the tooling changed. Then I wired the systems together so a document could live in one place and flow everywhere it was needed.
Some steps are not negotiable. Accounting requires a PDF in a specific format, and that manual step cannot be automated away.
My moveI folded the constraint into the flow instead of fighting it. The single request routes each person to the exact format and tool they need, so one submission doubles as the email or Slack message they would have sent, and hands them everything required to act.
The quiet tax on the whole system was communication: where does this stand, did you approve it yet, who has it now. That chasing was eating hours every week.
My moveI connected Outlook to Airtable and built triggers, so an action by one person automatically notified the next. I counted every step I could delete as a win: one less email, one less nudge, one less place for the process to stall.
None of this was tooling I arrived fluent in. I wasn't an expert in the project management software the organization ran on, so I learned it the practical way, through tutorials, a lot of Googling, and iteration, until I could build the automations the whole system depended on.
Outcomes
Within one quarter of full rollout, clean submissions rose from 42% to 68% and weekly escalations dropped by roughly 75%. Staff reported far less confusion about where a request stood, and finance reclaimed an estimated 4 to 6 hours a week once lost to follow-ups. The system became the organization's model for how it approached operational redesign.
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