Skip to main content
Planning reliability through professionalised project planning

Planning reliability through professionalised project planning

07.12.2021 Blog

Change management often takes a lot of time. However, accelerating process changes is sometimes important, especially when it comes to keeping a company profitable. This is exactly what the company (specializing in designing customer-specific software and hardware solutions) needed in order to achieve greater planning security.

Planning reliability through professionalised project planning

Low planning security

The new CEO of the company, which designs and develops customer-specific software and hardware solutions, installs them for its customers and supports them during ongoing operations, found that there was little planning security in his own company. This resulted from inadequate project planning and uncontrolled customer change requests. He contacted Top Fifty with the aim of eliminating the legacy and introducing a functioning project management in order to remain successful in the market.

 

Method for capacity planning developed and project management software evaluated and implemented

In a first step, the interim manager from Top Fifty conducted forty interviews with employees from all departments and analyzed the capacity and resource planning. In close consultation with the employees involved, he developed a new method to compare capacity supply and demand. With this method, the company was given the opportunity to either prioritize demand if the order volume was too high or to increase the available capacity with additional (internal or external) employees.

 

The second task was to evaluate a functioning project management software and to introduce it in the company. This required a team of employees from all departments to record and prioritize the requirements for the system. Six providers demonstrated their project management software, and two systems were selected for a test run. The team developed a functional and commercial comparison matrix as a basis for decision-making and presented it to top management. After a thorough review, they unanimously selected the new software. The interim manager closely accompanied and guided all these steps, including the final contract negotiations and the subsequent introductory phase.

 

Focus sharpening and open questions

Our interim manager considers the fact that the customer focus has been sharpened from time to time to be particularly important for the success of the assignment. The fact that he was able to quickly understand the challenges and tasks with direct and very open questions in the forty interviews, was something he deemed important as well. He says: "Overall, the problems and solutions are usually more or less known to individual players in the company." Saying what the employees think but don't say is one of the tasks of an interim manager.

 

Change management not only takes time, but also the commitment of everyone involved. Our interim managers are used to bringing employees on board and involving them in such a way that everyone pulls together and finds solutions together. Contact us at office@top50interim.com oder +41 (0)41 412 02 02

 

‹ back to the overview