SSR PMKP

Smith Seckman Reid is an engineering design and consulting firm with offices across the US, working on healthcare, sports, education, and infrastructure projects. PMKP is their internal project management platform, and nearly everyone at the firm uses it. Project managers run their projects in it, and executives use it to see how the whole firm is doing.

By the Pixel was hired to rebuild PMKP from scratch, with a PM and a lead engineer on our side. I led the product design: the research, the information architecture, every screen and interaction, and the visual language, which now matches SSR's brand.

The old tool had aged the way internal tools do. Screens took seconds to load, navigation had grown one addition at a time, and the numbers people actually managed by were buried or missing.

SSR wanted to keep decisions about direction to a small group, so discovery was two people: their CFO and the lead accountant who was our day-to-day contact. I ran those interviews. That had an upside and a cost. Two voices meant a clear brief with no committee behind it. It also meant the project managers weren't in the room, so the design had to account for them, which is why I argue the structure below from how work moves through the firm rather than from survey results.

Under the surface complaints was a structural problem. PMKP serves two audiences who need opposite things: project managers who go deep on one project at a time, and executives who need the whole portfolio at a glance. The old design worked for neither. PMs pieced together a project's status from several screens, and leadership had no view of trends across teams.

The brief I wrote from those conversations: put project, personnel, and financial data in one place, give each audience an interface built for the level they work at, and make it fast enough that nobody brings up speed again.

The old navigation mirrored the database. It was a menu of tables, and people had to assemble the answers themselves. So I started with structure before drawing any screens. I sorted every task in the old tool into one of two modes, working deep in one project or overseeing many, and rebuilt the navigation around that split.

A bold persistent sidebar holds the main destinations, and every view follows the same layout: title, key numbers, then detail. In a tool this dense that consistency matters. Wherever you land, the page reads the same way, so you don't have to get your bearings again.

A manager's first question is always where a project stands. The old tool made that a hunt across screens and exports. Now each project has a hub: one page with its key metrics, costs, and performance, so someone can tell whether it needs attention without opening a table.

People got the same treatment. A profile gathers everything assigned to a person across every project, so a staffing conversation starts from one screen instead of a dozen exports. Hubs and profiles link to each other wherever a name or project appears, so you can follow a thread from a project to a person to everything else they're on.

In an internal tool most people know exactly what they want, and the old PMKP made them click down through a hierarchy to reach it. Global search puts every project and person one keystroke away from any screen.

Every view also has a clean, shareable URL. That sounds like plumbing, but it changes how people use the tool. A PM can bookmark the filtered view they check every Monday, and an executive can paste a link into an email instead of writing directions.

An engineering firm's project data mostly lives in tables, so the tables had to be the best part of the product. We built them on AG Grid, with expandable subtables, grouping, filtering, and sorting, plus lazy loading and server-side queries so huge datasets scroll like small ones.

My job was making all that power feel calm: column hierarchy and density tuned for scanning, filters that read like sentences, grouped rows that collapse to the summary a manager wants, and loading that never blocks the page. Financials sync automatically with BST, SSR's accounting platform, so the numbers in a table are the real numbers and nobody has to export and reconcile them.

SSR had just paid for a rebrand, and internal tools are usually the last place a rebrand shows up. We argued the opposite: PMKP is the SSR screen employees look at most, so it should carry the brand most. The UI uses their typeface, Circular, on a strong blue, with a colorful accent system that keeps a dense tool from feeling gray.

I built the visual language as a system, with tokens and components meant to stretch across the custom apps SSR plans to build next. The next internal tool starts where this one left off, and together they look like one product.