Collaboration Review and Recommendations – Consists of a prix-fixe consulting engagement with two-day strategy review and conference room site survey. The Collaboration Review takes a look at a company’s existing collaborative tools, applications, and infrastructure and makes recommendations to improve the capabilities. The Lab will work with the company’s existing systems integrator or develop a relationship with a local integrator to get budgetary costs on recommended changes and present a financial model with multiple options for hardware, software, project management, and training.
For Small to Medium Businesses
Example Engagement: Vertically Integrated Agribusiness with Multiple Subsidiaries and Locations
The Human Productivity Lab worked for the CFO and CTO to conduct a Collaboration Audit that reviewed the company’s existing videoconferencing, collaboration, and meeting room infrastructure.
The audit found that the company had aging legacy videoconferencing endpoints, antiquated room control and a cloud-based videoconferencing infrastructure provider whose offering lacked key features important to organizational productivity.
Strategy & Solution Design
The Lab made recommendations on specific solutions for both refreshing the meeting room technology and cloud-based video network infrastructure and explained in detail: “The Science Behind the Spend” to help the team understand how the ROI manifests “On the Ground”. The Lab negotiated discounts with vendors and created multiple financial models for various test bed scenarios. The Lab attended a vendor’s user conference to test multiple interactive whiteboards and made recommendations on specific collaborative applications that would improve the organization’s ability to both communicate using images, organize information, and manage complex projects.
Project Management – The Lab can help reduce the hard, soft and opportunity cost of a technology refresh or the evaluation, design and installation of new capabilities. We can step in and project manage every aspect of collaboration-related projects so your IT team stays focused. We can use your project management methodology or we can simultaneously train your team on Agile/Scrum using the visual project management app Trello as both our “Big Visible Chart” and project management software.
Agile-Scrum & Big Visible Charts – We offer training and adoption on Agile methodologies including Scrum for project management. We offer a streamlined, “pro-modified” version of Scrum tailored to overall project management vs. software development. We borrow Agile’s “best practices” of Sprint Planning Sessions, regular (but not necessarily daily) “stand-ups”, and “Big Visible Charts”.
We have applications for “Big Visible Charts” where project teams get both a “Big Picture” overview of projects and all the usual and customary project management tools including: deadline tracking, document and revision management and especially the ability to reduce e-mail by keeping comments and conversations “in-context”. Finally, our preferred tool allows for visual organization of documents, room templates, deployed hardware configurations, and other assets that scales from smart phones to video walls.
Example Engagement: We helped VBrick, a leading media management and content distribution provider, design visual collaboration environments specifically for Agile-Scrum to connect software development teams located in two different offices. The solution allowed for screen sharing of the team’s “Big Visible Charts” and the recording of Sprint Planning Sessions and daily stand ups.
Click for HPL VBrick Agile Scrum Case Study (PDF)
Click for HPL VBrick Magazine Article on Agile Scrum Solution (PDF)
Training and Adoption – The Lab will design a training and adoption program that goes above and beyond simply understanding how to use the collaborative tools but will explain the science and strategy behind using visual collaboration technologies to improve and accelerate what the organization is doing. We also include non-traditional “out-of-the-box” recommendations for 3rd party software capabilities that improve the organization’s ability to collaborate and accelerate the rate at which knowledge is created, shared, understood, evaluated, and acted upon. Example: We recommend the screen sharing program Snag-it for all knowledge workers to improve their ability to communicate using visualization and annotation that improves explanation in e-mail and written documents.