More Effective Project Management

The Project Managers at a technology company were responsible for on-boarding new client businesses: taking them from the sales team and ensuring everything was done to get them live on the system.  When they started consulting with Sean, the Project Managers worked in competition with each other. All of them needed cooperation from the same areas of the business, and so they vied with each other for the time and resources of the various other departments.

As a result of their work with Sean, the Project Management Team held a meeting where they agreed that rather than work competitively, they would operate as a single unit.This new Project Management Unit produced a list of tasks required of the other departments in the business, with concrete times for completion. The benefits were twofold. Because they were no longer working against each other, the Project Managers now had more time to spend onboarding new customers. And rather than having to deal with the demands of a whole group of Project Managers working individually, the other departments in the business now had to deal with just one single bloc – a bloc that provided them with a longer term view of what needed to be done by when, allowing them to plan accordingly.

This result was particularly interesting because the Project Managers took the decision themselves. They looked at the framework they had been given, thought about what the business as a whole was trying to achieve, and were confident and influential enough to design a more effective way of working and persuade others to let them implement it.

 

Continuous Improvement – Customer Service

The logistics manager at a raw materials wholesaler called a meeting with the sales team to discuss how to improve customer service.

As the meeting progressed, the group began to focus on the exact circumstances in which a customer received an order. It became clear that the sequence in which the raw materials were packed onto pallets was very important for customers. Murphy’s law would have it that the item the customer needed first would always be sat at the bottom of the pallet under a pile of other heavy items.

The logistics manager arranged for him and the packing crew to receive a copy of the order acknowledgement the account manager usually sent to the customer on completion of a sale. This would help the packing crew see what the customer was going to make with the raw material, so they could choose the best way to pack it on the pallet.

A side benefit of this was that the packing crew could double check if an order truly was complete: knowing what the customer wanted to make meant they could see if any bits were missing.

When Sean was working with him the logistics manager had instituted this procedure with five key customers, and was set to roll it out across the business.

 

Reducing Paperwork; Saving Time

Every time an underwriter at an insurance firm wanted to write a particular type of risk, he had to complete a three page form for the risk management function. Early on in their engagement he told Sean that most of the form was redundant, and he’d tried to persuade the risk management people to cut it down on numerous occasions.

He approached the risk management group one more time, organised a structured meeting on “how we can make our jobs easier?” and succeeded in reducing the form to a single page. Both sides were satisfied – there was less work for the underwriter to do, and the risk people still had all the information they needed to protect the company.