Case Study 2: Across-the-Board Needs

The Problem

A fast-moving, fast-growing high-tech engineering consulting firm had clients, contracts, and consultants spread across the continent. Email was the only networked tool used for project management, communication, and archiving of digital files. They had no intranet or other IT infrastructure, and no way to preserve and access the unique knowledge of their senior consultants, much less organize projects and documents by client or topic. Financial projections could only be created by repetitive data-gathering on the status of each project, which pulled high-value staff off-line. This client had all elements of a good business except for a scalable ability for each element to support and inform the function of all the others.

The client was wasting two key resources:

Time: Of high-salaried expert consulting staff and contractors. Each expert had to either call around to seek information or reinvent the wheel, while valuable answers were often next door.

Knowledge: Each experts’ lifetime of subject knowledge was largely unavailable to anyone else, so it was unusable on any project except ones the expert was on. Every time someone else needed to (re-)develop a technique, or (re-)discover facts to achieve a project goal, the in-house existence of useful prior knowledge was invisible. In some cases, the underlying technology of projects was identical, yet project teams had no reliable method of knowing or using the lessons-learned by previous teams.

Further, since all this wheel-spinning lenthened each project’s time-to-completion, revenue of the entire consulting group on a per-year basis was sharply limited.

The Engagement

The COO retained Digital Places to develop requirements and support the selection and implementation of Knowledge Management tools. Digital Places saw a major opportunity to improve business processes, thus improving productivity across the company—from value-creation to support to infrastructure. It was clear that, as the networked tools became accepted, their use would create a long tail of residual value for the client, in archives of searchable expertise, lessons-learned, and project documentation.

Our Process

The client expected that he and his VP Marketing would be the only members of his company on our engagement team. In the absence of an IT department, we required a computer-system-aware employee to be on the team. We selected an employee after our Phase One interviews. Phase One consisted of reviewing their organization chart, identifing eleven interviewees at different levels of responsibility across all areas of work, and conducting phone interviews following our standard approach.

Our Findings

• Across all projects, critical information was buried in emails or employees’ heads. COO and PMs spent nearly 1/3 of their time finding people to obtain status and issues information.

• Work processes and project methodologies varied widely, due to the range of client situations, contractors working without guidelines, and minimal systems infrastructure. There were few work patterns on which to base process information or best practices.

• Valued senior contractors were often out of the loop, and their availability was not tracked.

• Client relationship management (CRM) had minimal continuity at best.

• Workers needed a basic set of networked tools to support project collaboration and Knowledge Management across: Customer and contractor relationships, proposal development, staff & resource allocation, project management, financial reporting and oversight, and institutional memory.

The Solution

Based on our recommendations, the client successfully implemented a first-stage solution with Alfresco, focusing on file management and workflow. They're extending its functionality with open-source CRM and other features. They'll go to Stage Two in less than a year.

The result is that the expertise of every senior consultant, whether staff or contractor, is available on every project. In effect, the entire expertise of the company can be applied as-needed to questions in any new project.

Project teams now have standard means of archiving and meta-tagging information, and sharing current-project information and schedules. Projects are completed more quickly, with fewer expensive post-delivery revisions. The client’s customers are able to depend on the client to be part of their institutional memory—a closer relationship that should lead to increased callbacks by customers.