The Perfect Blend: Learning and Technology at a Major Beverage Distributor

Situation

An American coffee and beverage leader planned to implement Planview Enterprise One functionality to help execute its corporate project financial and resource planning business processes. The organization needed assistance in their rollout of Planview and to accomplish key objectives, including:

• Making the best use of the organization’s resources
• Removing low-value projects from the portfolio
• Ensuring all new and existing projects are aligned with the organization’s mission, goals, and objectives
• Developing and maintaining a comprehensive list of all projects the organization is undertaking
• Developing a big-picture view and a deep understanding of the project collection as a whole
• Creating an objective methodology for identifying, ranking, prioritizing, and selecting new projects
• Ensuring a healthy balance is maintained across different types of projects with regard to cost, schedule, complexity, and risk

Develop blended learning that works for the organization’s entire user base.

Challenge

The organization was under significant internal pressure to change its program for reviewing and approving new projects. They chose to implement Planview in order to accomplish the following:

• Reduce the review and approval cycle from 50 to 22 days.
• Change the non-transparent nature of the review and approval process.
• Gain a corporate-wide view of where the organization spent its project money.
• Track project execution to be able to continue to fund successful projects, defund unsuccessful projects, and use the data from all projects to inform the approval of new projects.

In addition, most of the distinct business units were opposed to a corporate structure of project governance. At the time, projects were being approved by individual businesses that were not aware of whether their project was similar to projects in other businesses, which led to waste and inefficiency. The organization was also concerned that most project leads had never used any project planning technology. Many were still using spreadsheets.

The organization’s project management office had neither long lead times for training development nor a lot of time for training delivery. The training solution needed to be:

• Built relatively quickly
• Modularized to account for all different end user groups, based on company divisions
• Efficient, blending eLearning and instructor-led training

The enterprise adoption solution was largescale and required precision to implement properly

Solution

The organization brought GP Strategies in to develop a blended learning solution adaptable to the company’s different end user audiences. Delivery of the training was to be a mix of eLearning, instructor-led training (ILT), and one-on-one workshops. They also wanted a distinct curriculum developed for all the different end user audiences.

In response, GP Strategies developed a blended learning solution adaptable to the different audiences.

ELEARNING | GP Strategies developed eLearning that could be applied consistently across divisions for the various end user groups.

The organization also imposed an accountability process to ensure employees completed the eLearning and passed the related assessments.

ILT | The team developed ILT for in-depth subjects, for tasks performed frequently, for tasks considered difficult, and for tasks that had significant business impact. ILT courses were kept to a half-day maximum.

WORKSHOPS | GP Strategies created workshops for subjects with small end user populations. Sessions covered the most controversial changes taking place.

Workshops were limited to 1 hour, and the team designed them so they could be presented in a small conference room or deskside.

In addition, a different training curriculum was developed for each end user audience. Each audience had its own blend of eLearning, ILT, and workshops.

The end user audiences included:

The solution was large-scale and required precision to implement properly.

Results

With the help of GP Strategies’ training strategies and materials, the organization was able to successfully roll out Planview. In addition:

• Project costs over each project lifecycle decrease dramatically.
• Projects are now more carefully proposed, resourced, funded, and approved.
• Overlapping projects have disappeared.
• Key stakeholders involved in approving and managing projects see more consistency in the ways all projects are managed and reported.
• GP Strategies’ involvement allowed the organization’s project manager to:
  • Engage the correct end user groups with the correct type and amount of training.
  • Use the training to help communicate the benefits of the new system.
  • Use the training to help sustain end users’ understanding of the new system after it went live.