SSR PMKP

Smith Seckman Reid is a full-service engineering design and consulting firm with offices across the United States, working on high-stakes projects in healthcare, sports, education, and infrastructure. PMKP is their internal project management platform, and nearly every employee touches it: project managers run their work through it, and executives read the health of the whole firm from it.

By the Pixel was brought in to rebuild PMKP from the ground up, with a PM and a lead engineer on our side. I led the product design: the research, the information architecture, every screen and interaction in the new system, and the visual language it now shares with SSR's brand.

The legacy tool had aged the way internal tools usually do: screens took seconds to load, navigation had grown by accretion instead of design, and the metrics people actually managed by were either buried or missing entirely. Everyone used it because everyone had to.

SSR wanted the circle on direction kept tight, so discovery was two people: their CFO and the lead accountant who was our day-to-day contact. I led those interviews. The constraint cut both ways. Two voices meant a clear brief with no committee behind it, and it meant the design had to speak for the project managers who weren't in the room, which is why the structure below is argued from how the work flows rather than from a survey.

Underneath the surface complaints sat a structural one. PMKP serves two audiences with opposite needs: project managers who go deep on one project at a time, and executives who need the whole portfolio at a glance. The old design served neither: PMs assembled project status from scattered screens, and leadership had no view of team-wide trends at all.

The brief I set from those conversations: unify project, personnel, and financial data in one place, give each audience an interface shaped to its altitude, and make the whole thing fast enough that speed stops being a topic.

The old navigation mirrored the database: a menu of tables, with the work of assembling them into answers left to the person. So the rebuild started with structure, not screens. I mapped every task in the old tool to one of two modes, deep engagement with a single project or high-level oversight across many, and rebuilt the navigation around that split.

A bold persistent sidebar carries the primary destinations, and every view shares the same layout grammar: title, key numbers, then detail. That consistency is doing real work in a tool this dense: wherever you land, the page reads the same way, so orientation never has to be re-earned.

A manager's first question is always the same: where does this stand? The old tool answered it with a scavenger hunt across screens and exports. Each project now has a hub, one page where stakeholders read its key metrics, costs, and performance before deciding whether anything needs their attention, without a single click into a table.

People got the same treatment. A user profile collects everything assigned to a person across every project, so a resourcing conversation starts from one screen instead of a dozen exports. Hubs and profiles link into each other everywhere a name or project appears, which turns the whole system into something you browse rather than query.

In an internal tool, most people know exactly what they're looking for, most of the time, and the old PMKP made them click through hierarchy to get there. Global search fixes that: every project and person one keystroke away, from any screen.

Just as deliberate: every view has a clean, shareable URL. That sounds like plumbing, but it's an interface decision: a PM can bookmark the exact filtered view they check every Monday, and an executive can paste a link in an email instead of writing directions. Deep links turn the app's structure into something the whole firm can point at.

An engineering firm's project data is, unavoidably, tables. So the tables had to be the best surface in the product, not the worst. We built them on AG Grid: expandable subtables, grouping, filtering, and sorting, with lazy loading and server-side queries so enormous datasets scroll like small ones.

The design work was making that power feel calm. Column hierarchy and density tuned for scanning, filters that read as sentences, grouped rows that collapse to the summary a manager actually wants, and loading behavior that never blocks the page. Financials stay current through automated syncs with BST, SSR's accounting platform, so the numbers in a table are already the real numbers. Nobody exports, reconciles, or waits.

SSR had just invested in a rebrand, and internal tools are where rebrands usually go to die. We took the opposite view: PMKP is the SSR surface employees see most, so it should carry the brand hardest. The new UI sets their brand typeface, Circular, over a confident blue with a colorful accent system that gives a dense operational tool real energy.

The visual language was built as a system rather than a skin: tokens and components designed to stretch across the custom apps SSR plans to build next, so the second internal tool starts where this one left off and the whole suite reads as one product.