Project Brief
As a rapidly growing company communication, team building, and project management was becoming a challenge. A solution was needed to reduce the complexity of a growing number of applications while connecting siloed staff members across the globe. With internal communication taking place between email, text messages, group chat apps, and a varying number of project management software systems, the goal of unifying communication under one software application was the driving force behind this project.
Initiating Phase
As this project was transforming company-wide communication and project management, requiring a significant change in habits, it was determined early on in the project charter that proof of concept had to take place within one operational city and one corporate department before rolling out to the entire company.
Planning Phase
Stakeholders were reduced during the phase one testing, enabling far more flexibility as the system developed. With a working knowledge of the enterprise environmental factors, nearly a dozen software applications were already in use, my planning for this project focused on the collection of requirements. Additionally, the challenge of catering to the entire company, from C-Suite leadership to local managers and customer service reps to operational field techs, each with different needs and complicated risk analysis.
Executing Phase
The execution process for this project encompassed two main objectives:
- Testing and selecting the appropriate application
- Application build-out and procedure development that would guide adoption and continued use.
To achieve these objectives, project team acquisition was an essential step, and three stakeholders would be the core steering committee. Utilizing the customer service manager familiar with the difficulties of immediate communication to field techs, an operations manager familiar with the ongoing tasks that comprise regular operations, and myself, familiar with c-suite challenges, particularly ease of communication upline and downline and project monitoring, ensured most stakeholder perspectives were covered with as few “chefs” as possible.
The core project team was quickly able to test a number of products, based on the goals outlined in the project brief, selecting an appropriate platform in which to implement. From there, procedures were built, tested, tweaked, and finalized within each of our departments over a few weeks. Phase 1 concluded with a three-month pilot period before the start of Phase 2, rolling out the software to the entire company, department by department.
Project Outcome
The result of the two-phased, nearly year-long project, delivered a single platform for communications, project management, file sharing, and unexpectedly led to a number of morale-boosting teams within the software itself. The company became more efficient and tight-knit, with professional relationships being sparked often between associates more than a thousand miles away.
Department by department, internal email was nearly eliminated. Operations teams, previously just one or two members within each, now had a few dozen to better approach problem solving and sharing of procedural efficiencies. Marketing, often a secondary task for local managers, was enhanced with best practices and shared workload led by larger markets that could afford professional marketing staff. Customer service benefited from the ability to task action items to local field techs, and management was able to monitor the ongoing education of customer service reps with the implemented accountability systems.
Overall project management, task management, employee education and training, regular communication, and morale improved for the company, which at the time of implementation operated twelve offices in two countries with approximately 100 employees.
