Case Study 1: A fast-growing, digitally aware client

The Problem

A geographically decentralized company that produces and distributes corporate training content survived the dotcom bust by downsizing and revising its methods and offerings. The adjustments worked and business grew quickly. But the project management techniques that worked for a small group didn’t scale.

The client built out a VPN, an intranet, shared drives, and email, but used mostly email for project communication. Individual Project Managers used MS Project, but without shared standards and best practices. The intranet and shared drives were rarely used. They were not “owned” by anyone and teams had no requirement to use them, so files stored on them weren’t organized or updated consistently. A user could not be certain a stored file was the most current or applicable, whether it was a contract, a Flash animation, or a voice-over script.

The client’s siloed production and project management techniques were good as far as they went, but could not deliver adequate communication among teams, and did nothing to correct pervasive inefficiencies, not only in Production but also in Support, Client Services, Policy, Planning, and Marketing.

The same problems caused consistent issues with product definition, deliverables, revision, client acceptance, and time-to-delivery. Follow-on products couldn’t find and re-use content assets. Version control of content elements was improvised. The loss of a key team member after one project meant much of the expertise about a client or topic area disappeared, too.

As we often see, projects were slowed at every stage by the need for senior management to get status updates and financial projections that could only be created by repetitive data-gathering from each project manager.

Problems occurred when a Customer Services or Support issue arose; without shared access to organized, customer-relevant documents, it was often impossible for the relevant staff to know how much effort to expend. To avoid potentially upsetting the customer, support could become almost open-ended.

In addition, Customer Relationship Management was only as good as the account executive, though the Sales group did use parts of Salesforce effectively.

The Engagement

A new senior hire was an experienced Lead Project Manager who had used networked tools. He quickly found he could not locate crucial documents, and convened a senior management wiki discussion on the topic of Communication and Collaboration. The discussion resulted in a valuable list of needs, problems, complaints, and requirements.

The client retained Digital Places to analyze their Problem List and conduct an interview-driven needs analysis. The goal: a prioritized recommendation of networked tools to support and augment their work processes, and a plan for implementing the new tools.

Our Process

We conducted sixteen interviews in Phase One, on-site and by phone, per our standard approach . We found the staff professional, motivated, experienced, and dedicated. But employees in every department were spending time seeking the right file or a crucial fact so they could move a project forward. In particular, communication between departments had gaps that hindered business development and thus annual revenue. Staff were stretched thin by the need to do their jobs and somehow work around the lack of consistent access to necessary, time-sensitive information.

Our Findings

A thriving client with a superb workforce was increasingly less productive, wasting key resources:

Time: Especially in content-creation, approval, and production. Each production employee could be creating value full-time if they weren’t compensating for communication inefficiencies or helping one another find information.

Knowledge: About current and previous clients and projects.

Opportunity: The Sales group was unable to inspect client history in order to project and propose additional work, and unable to readily access files that could be used in new proposals, pitches, and marketing, whether by client, industry, or subject matter.

Assets: Content assets can not be effectively re-used unless accessible and searchable.

Further, since each project’s time-to-completion was longer than necessary, annual revenue was unnecessarily limited.

The Solution

We were able to prioritize the client’s networked tool needs into four categories: Sales, Production, Delivery (of services) and Support. Sales and Production were clearly the areas with the most immediate ROI in networked tools.

First, we provided a prioritized, ranked comparison of the top candidate tools, with feature evaluation, for a two-stage implementation in Sales and Production. The client proceeded to the demo stage and will select based on those results.

Second, using our guidelines, the client created a permanent, active Business Process Council to manage the tool selection and to ensure best practices in their use. We will do follow-up to ensure that the organizational changes are effective.

The client’s available revenue-creation hours will increase significantly when the tools are implemented. We will update this Case Study with more results soon.