Just two years ago, more than 75 percent of our implementation work was done on-site and face-to-face across the globe in places like New York, Sydney and London.  Higher gas prices, increased airline fees and travel hassles have made it far more challenging to fly or to commute long distances to deliver projects. With the cost of travel skyrocketing and with some 800 customers worldwide, our margins were getting squeezed to the point where we could no longer do business as usual.  We needed to re-think and revamp the processes for how we interacted with our customers, and communicate those changes in a way that made the customer feel more valued - not less.  As a result of this company-wide effort our on-site activity has significantly decreased to just 30 percent—at most.  So what changed?  We decided to implement the following programs and services:

1. Onsite versus online services

We started to communicate with our customers about the benefits of online instead of onsite services. Today we go onsite to meet our customers and the project teams --- to get to know one another, and to understand their needs and their business. During the initial one or two face-to-face meetings we work hard to establish trust and build the relationship so that much of the remaining work can be done remotely. Customers love it, more work gets done faster, and we are able to handle a larger number of implementations with less staff since less time is no longer wasted on travel. Our customers win by saving on travel costs and faster service delivery, and we win by having lower turnover rates on highly specialized consultants since less travel creates a more stable and happier career life for our service teams.

2.  More efficient project meetings

Disconnected systems and management spreadsheets lead to organizations that often require more face-to-face meetings to get things done. At Tenrox, we have agreed on and implemented role-based dashboards and key metrics per department. When I arrive at the office, I log into my portal and can see how every team is doing. The information I look at is not coming from the team leaders or their assistants. It is derived from data entered directly from the project contributors; managers simply have to approve or reject the data entries. Therefore the business unit performance, project costs, revenue, issues, and change requests I look at are based on actual data reported by our staff.

These reports and dashboards have virtually eliminated status report meetings. We meet to discuss strategy, to celebrate wins and review losses, and, yes, to review project progress; but at least in any such meetings people are not showing up with manipulated spreadsheets or to repeat verbatim what I could get from the dashboards and reports I already have access to.

Dashboards and project management reports based on live data, online approval workflows, and online collaboration technologies have reduced our G&A travel costs by at least 50% over the last two to three years. Not to mention the reduction of time and energy we wasted going over “design your own” spreadsheets in management and review meetings.

3. Combined events

Like many other companies today, we have a highly dispersed workforce. Our employees and outsourced teams work from various offices and homes across three continents. To make sure all of our teams are aware of the company’s mission and business plan we try and bring everyone together once or twice a year in Montreal, where the company was founded and where most of our R&D staff is located. In the last few years, we have combined all-hands meetings with performance evaluations, training, company parties and picnics into single events.  We do our best to try and make the trips as fun, worthwhile and productive as possible, while at the same time reducing the travel costs we would incur if we organized some of these events separately.

Higher Gas Prices; Greener Project Management

Using the latest, efficient technologies for professional services projects such as offering online support services, remote team and customer meetings and remote implementation processes while also using internal, automated reporting methods, has proven to offer a huge savings for us in time and expenses in addition to the environmental advantages it brings forth.  Customers and employees appreciate that the same amount of work, if not more, can get done using our new project management methods while the client-supplier relationship is still maintained.