The Context

At GRTgaz, France's main gas supplier, the legacy environment had evolved over years through departmental workarounds, resulting in fragmented workflows, incomplete operational records, and heavy reliance on phone calls and manual coordination. The newly hydrogen initiative presented a different challenge: there were no existing systems, established workflows, or user behaviours to learn from. Success required balancing operational continuity, regulatory compliance, and long-term scalability while aligning multiple departments with competing priorities.

Breaking Down Departmental Silos

The real system behind the system.

The biggest challenge wasn't the software itself. It was the disconnect between how departments believed work happened and how it actually happened.

To uncover these gaps, I conducted:

• 18 stakeholder and user interviews
• 5 focus group sessions
• Field observation with operational and proxy agents
• 3 departments' workflow analysis

Reducing Friction In The Intervention Lifecycle

Data quality was a workflow problem.

Departments consistently reported incomplete intervention records. Initially, stakeholders viewed this as a training issue. When I conducted field research, I observed that users were navigating fragmented workflows that required entering information multiple times across disconnected systems. To keep operations moving, teams created informal workarounds and often postponed documentation until later. As a result:

• Intervention records were frequently incomplete
• Traceability suffered
• Teams relied on phone calls to verify information
• Operational risk increased

Redesigning the end-to-end intervention lifecycle.

The design decision I made was to introduce the new workflow: 

• Shared operational terminology across departments
• Standardised intervention statuses
• Context-aware data entry
• Improved visibility of intervention ownership
• Centralised intervention tracking

 A key design principle was reducing cognitive load while improving data quality. Instead of presenting users with lengthy forms upfront, information was progressively disclosed based on context and task stage. This reduced friction for field operators while ensuring critical information was captured at the appropriate moment.

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Breaking Down Departmental Silos

Calls compensated system inefficiencies.

Teams spent significant time calling other departments to verify intervention status. The root problem was a lack of shared operational awareness.

Surfacing a shared monitoring experience.

Rather than relying on manual updates and phone calls, teams could access the information directly within the system. This became one of the primary drivers behind reduced operational coordination effort. Working closely with operational stakeholders and engineers, I designed a shared operational visibility that provided:

Aligning Stakeholders Around A Shared Process

Beyond the product itself, I translated individual workflows into a service blueprint illustrating dependencies across departments. The blueprint exposed:

• Process bottlenecks
• Duplicate activities
• Information handoff failures
• Opportunities for automation

I conducted a kick-off workshop with stakeholders to converge diverse visions around shared success metrics. This alignment proved crucial for securing buy-in across departments that had previously worked independently. These key success criteria directly impacted service reliability and safety. The resulting framework directly influenced modernisation priorities and future roadmap decisions.

Greenfield Hydrogen Initiative

Alongside modernisation efforts, I worked on hydrogen infrastructure programs where there were no existing products, workflows, or user behaviours to observe. I helped establish the design foundations for future hydrogen information systems through:

• Facilitating UX maturity and product discovery workshops
• Creating functional ecosystem maps
• Defining future-state operational journeys
• Identifying information flows across emerging hydrogen operations
• Establishing a structured discovery-to-delivery process aligned with Lean Portfolio Management
  

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Operational Workflows Outcomes

The redesigned operational workflows delivered measurable business impact:

Organisational Alignment

• Established a shared operational model across three departments
• Secured executive support for future modernisation initiatives
• Accelerated stakeholder alignment and decision-making by an estimated two months