Executive Summaries

[naishahmistry]

Overview

Onboarding is a core component of NER's semesterly recruitment cycle and is essential for creating opportunities for new members to contribute to the team. This initiative aims to house the full onboarding process within FinishLine to automate tasks for leadership, streamline the process for new members, and provide custom feedback/guidance on becoming involved in NER.

Stakeholders

Product Stakeholder: @naishahmistry, @laylasheikh, Danielle Que
Software Stakeholder: @chpy04, @walker-sean, @wavehassman
Reference Users: Matt Clarke, Will Laroche, Andrew Berkovich, Kevin Giordano

User Story

1. As a member of E-Board, I want to quickly access an overview of the team's performance across organizational and vehicle development functions across seasons so that I can understand the motivations behind a specific season, gain a holistic understanding of the team's performance, evaluate the team's growth across seasons, and develop data-driven plans for future seasons without having to filter all of FinishLine and access individual tabs.
2. As a member of E-Board, the Operations Team, and the Finance Team, I want to clearly examine the team's performance in terms of competition documents, budget, and recruitment & membership over time so that I can clearly identify trends, blockers, and successes in our initiatives and propose realistic improvements.
3. As a Head/Lead, I want to see a snapshot of how my team/subteam influences the team's performance in terms of vehicle development, competition performance, budget, and membership so that I can identify opportunities for improvement, understand the rationale behind E-Board's and my Chief's decisions, and remain aligned with organizational goals.
4. As a general member, I want see a year-over-year view of the team's general performance across competition and organizational aspects so that I can gain clear context on how the team has been performing, how I can contribute to my division, and the rationale behind the goals and decisions for the current season.
5. As a member of the Operations and Project Management Plan Presentation Team, I want to have a year-over-year view of the team's organizational and competition-based performance to show that we are making data-driven decisions (regarding strengths and weaknesses, specific timeline/budget choices, etc.) and have a collection of visualizations supporting our decisions so that we can present our rationale in a digestible manner to judges, provide a link/printable of this page for them to interact with this data on their own, and highlight our commitment to team sustainability and growth.
6. As an administrator on FinishLine and a member of the Operations Team, I want to be able to add our goals, strengths, weaknesses, competition performance, and notes so that we can have an up-to-date overview with sufficient context to explain specific trends in data for all members.

Success Metrics

The Executive Summaries feature will be complete when all outlined functionalities are implemented, users can access accurate data, and the feature is actively used for long-term planning. Some features will be lower priority than others and can be added in future semesters. The primary features to be implemented in the first iteration of this feature include the annual Executive Summaries, the Overlays, and the editability of the Overview section, Notes, and Competition Performance. After that, the "View More" pop-ups should be prioritized, after which any additional hover functionality can be implemented.

Rollout Plan

This feature is projected to complete the design process by May 20, 2026, and will be released to the development team in May/June 2026. E-Board, Heads, and selected existing members will be asked to test this feature in Spring 2027. This feature is expected to be fully adopted by May 2027 so that it can report complete organizational data (including competition performance for the 2026-2027 season) and can be leveraged during summer planning for the 2027-2028 season.

Out of Scope

Future enhancements that were out of scope for the current design include pulling data for competition performance directly from Confluence and storing data on new member sign-ups in FinishLine rather than requiring users to manually input the data or import standardized CSVs in Admin Tools. This would ensure that all quantitative data is automatically populated without user input.

Background / Context

As Northeastern Electric Racing grows into a more established team with multiple cars and a strong competition record, the organization has a significant amount of data regarding vehicle development, competition performance, and organizational logistics across all of these cars in FinishLine. This data has become increasingly complex to compile, making it difficult to gain a straightforward, holistic understanding of how the team has been performing as a Northeastern organization and as an FSAE team. Current users need to filter through multiple pages (Finance, Gantt Chart, Projects, etc.) on FinishLine with very dense and specific information to understand vehicle development processes. They also need to refer to Confluence and the team's SharePoint to gain insight into the rationale behind specific vehicle development decisions, the team's organizational structure, the team's recruitment initiatives and membership results, and competition performance. While these resources are well-maintained and organized, they still contain hundreds of documents and datapoints that team members need to filter through to find the most insightful and relevant information that tells the big picture of the team in a given season. This makes the summer planning process more cumbersome for the leadership team because, in addition to coordinating knowledge transfer between leadership teams across seasons and preparing for competitions, both leadership teams need to go through these three resources to find information relevant to their division/team to develop informed strategies and goals for the new season.

To simplify this process, promote transparency among team members, and provide a digestible snapshot of the team's performance, we are creating an Executive Summary Dashboard that will centralize annual/seasonal data regarding team goals and overall performance, vehicle development timelines, budget, recruitment & membership, and competition performance. This dashboard is also designed to aid general team sustainability and our Project Management Plan by having clear year-over-year views of the team's performance across multiple aspects, the rationale behind specific decisions/outcomes, and our strengths and weaknesses.

Acceptance Criteria & Mock-ups

Executive Summaries

This entire feature will be hosted in a new tab on FinishLine's sidebar called "Executive Summaries". When users navigate to this tab for the first time, they will be presented with the screen below, which is an incomplete Executive Summary for the most recent year. In general, clicking on this tab should direct the users to the Executive Summary for the most recent year, which should be fully completed once the Operations Team, a member of E-Board, or an Administrator on FinishLine adds the missing information.

• The vehicle development graph can be filtered by team (similar to the Gantt Chart) and will show the progress of all projects under that team for that season. The first date indicates the start date of that project, and the date at the white dashed line indicates the original/proposed end date of the project. If the project goes past the original deadline, then the number of days that the project went over by is represented by the dark red stacked bar, and the final end date is written at the end of the entire bar. If the project finishes before the original deadlines, then the light red bar will finish before the dotted white line, and then the actual end date will be written at the end of the light red bar in green (demonstrated by the Chassis bar in the mockup above).
• If the user clicks on "View More" under "Vehicle Development", then the user will be directed to the Gantt Chart with the filters set to the team of interest and the season/car that the Executive Summary was set to.
• If the user clicks on "View More" under "Competition Performance", then the user will be directed to the Operations Dashboard #3850 for the season of interest.
• The structure for the "Spring" tab under "Recruitment & Membership" and the "FHE" tab under Competition Performance should be the same as the "Fall" and "FSAE" tabs, respectively.
• If the user hovers over a segment in the donut chart in the "Budget" section, then there should be a pop-up that describes which division the segment refers to and the value/budget for that division.
• If the user hovers over a bar in the "Recruitment & Membership" section, then there should be a pop-up that outlines which

UPDATE THE MOCKUPS WITH THE X-AXIS LABELS FOR THE RECRUITMENT & MEMBERSHIP CHARTS.

To edit the unpopulated "Goals", "Wins & What to Improve", "Notes", and "Competition Performance" sections, users can click on the corresponding pencil icons. The mockup below shows the version of this screen if there is no data populated and the user clicks on the pencil icon for each section. If a user clicks on a pencil icon for only one section, then it should only show the editing functionality for that specific section. If the user is editing when the data is already populated (ex. they are updating a competition performance time), then the old data should be displayed in the text boxes.

• The "Goals" and "Notes" are all empty text entry boxes that should be able to support sentences and bullet points. The boxes for "Endurance Laps" and points earned from specific events under "Competition Performance" should only support integer data types. The boxes for time-based event performance under "Competition Performance" should only support MM:SS data.
• The "Competition Documents" section is currently designed to be auto-populated from the Operations Dashboard #3850. If the Operations Dashboard is not implemented at the time of implementing this feature, then both datapoints can be manually inputted by clicking on the pencil icon corresponding to "Competition Performance" and using text boxes that only support integer inputs.
• The numerator in the donut graph corresponding to competition points will be updated when the "Total Points Earned" field is updated.

Below is an example of a fully populated Executive Summary after entering information in the text boxes above.

Overlays