April
2002 Newsletter
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The power to change
your world
That’s the slogan of Aggreko, the company
responsible for supplying temporary power for mission
critical functions like broadcasting, security, timing
and results operations, and information technology at the
2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
The eighteen-month effort involved deployment of 107 employees, 250 transformers and 350 generator sets.
We were hired by their marketing department to develop a system to track jobs and budgets as well as the results of their telemarketing and trade show efforts.
It was in Aggreko’s initial Discovery Meeting that one of their project managers said, “Once all the information to start a job has been collected, I’d like to push a button to notify the team that a job has been opened.”
We thought about that for quite a while after the meeting. New project information typically trickles in over days or weeks. Basic data is required before work can begin. But a client is likely to think a project begins at first contact, not a week or two later when all the details are in.
So we developed a Jobs database to track their advertising, direct marketing, collateral, promotion, trade show and Web projects.
Then we “cloned” it, altered its color scheme and renamed it “Requests.” It’s an electronic scratchpad for all potential Jobs.
Requests become Jobs only when all the information necessary to get started has been collected.
When users click the “Activate” button, Request data is copied into the Jobs database and an email message is automatically addressed to all interested parties.
The new system tracks projects from their inception through production, and stakeholders are regularly updated on the status of their jobs.
Clients are engaged and informed throughout the process, and less likely to make presumptions about progress.
It works great. Forty jobs were opened in the first week, and over 80 are active a month later.
We’re confident this new system will continue to serve these logistics experts well into the future. And we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them employed at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino.
Evaluating Schedules
Creating and maintaining schedules for
hundreds of jobs is a monumental task, but we have a
client does just that.
Last Fall, we replaced their dysfunctional “automatic” scheduling system with a manual one.
We’ve just taken that system to the next level. Click a button labeled “Due Today,” and you get a report of all the steps in each schedule that’s due that day. There are similar buttons labeled “Due Tomorrow,” “Due Today & Tomorrow,” and everyone’s favorite, “Past Due.”
A report for any given Date Range is also easily generated.
At last count, there were 245 active jobs in their system, most of them with about ten scheduled functions each.
The new tools facilitate the monitoring and maintenance of these schedules, ensuring accurate information is disseminated to the various project stakeholders.
We hope we’re given the opportunity to continue refining this system that is vital to this large corporate marketing department.
Presentation, Anyone?
We updated our presentation for a recent
luncheon engagement for the Houston Production
Manager’s Association.
It’s entitled Managing Jobs in High-Volume Marketing Environments, and it includes a live demonstration of many of the project management functions described in this issue.
We take a look at some of the tools commonly employed to manage projects, from job logbooks to forms to Microsoft Project and Excel.
We even provide an outline that can help you start developing your own system.
It’s gotten rave reviews, and we’d welcome the opportunity to show it to you. Give us a call or drop us a line.
Let’s stay in touch…
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