Angela Livingstone
Global IT Consultancy
Angela works for a global IT consultancy, which has experienced
rapid growth through mergers and acquisitions resulting in
many disparate organisations with different
reporting and operating practices. This growth
created a competitive culture where projects undertook similar work and even bid
for the same tenders. Contributing to the knowledge hording
culture of Angela’s company was the actual nature of
its business for in IT consultancy the main asset of an organisation
lies in the knowledge of its consultants and project teams.
Angela realised that the organisation as a whole needed to
strengthen its ability to share their knowledge, experience
and best practices if success was to continue and the culture
was to change. Angela determined that everyone in the company
need to be aware of:
- Which projects are being undertaken,
- What skills and expertise are available,
- What risks the company faces across its projects,
- How well project practices are understood, and,
- What sales commitments are being made.
Angela looked to solve these problems through implementing
a global project and knowledge management solution called
Protocol, the virtual project room. Angela choose Protocol
because it was easy to implement, did not require IT staff
to learn new skills for supporting and maintaining the system
and it was deployable across the various platforms and different
IT infrastructures of her organisation.
Protocol allowed all of Angela’s staff to share their
knowledge and expertise across global boundaries though a
simple virtual project room. The room’s library accommodated
the storing of project briefs, solutions provided, and the
experience and knowledge of each individual. Plus, all of
this information was searchable and accessible by the entire
organisation. This allowed departments and divisions to be
aware of what solutions or products each other were providing,
enabling a cohesive approach on bid negotiation, strategic
marketing and delivery of projects and consultancy.
The different reporting, procedural and operating practices
had hindered Angela’s organisation in working together
in the past, yet Protocol eroded this barrier without requiring
a move away from existing practices or IT investment. Protocol
achieved this though providing a cohesive mechanism to monitor
progress, control budgets and risks and review best practices
in a consistent manner.
The success of Angela’s organisation lay not in solutions,
experience and knowledge of a single region, department
or division but in the ability through Protocol to capture
the different strengths of each region, department and division
and transfer this knowledge across the entire organisation
ensuring all gained!
Hear others experiences of Protocol
“Knowledge
based competitive advantage is sustainable because the more
an organisation already knows the more it can learn"
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