A flagship telecom research product suffered from late deliveries and poor quality several years after its acquisition by a premier media research firm. Clients were losing confidence in the product and sales were dropping.
The existing subject matter experts in the operations and product management groups continued to leave the company, key resources were working excessive overtime and “burning out”, and the parent company wanted to transition all operations and IT to its FL location.
As the newly-hired Operations Manager, I did a rapid assessment of the existing team members’ skills and experience, and realigned responsibilities. By tracking metrics on process interruptions, technical outages and quality escapes, the team quickly brought focus to areas needing improvement and acted on them. Experienced team members worked with and mentored new associates. A total documentation effort resulted in a robust, online repository of end-to-end ‘how-to’ documents, reference material and other artifacts essential to knowledge transfer.
As a result…
- The product achieved 11 consecutive months of on time delivery with 50%+ reduction in overtime and 99%+ quality in the same timeframe.
- The new team, located in the FL office, completed the transition and took over the operations responsibilities within 6 months.
- Three members of the existing team were promoted and successfully took on vital operational leadership roles.
