Case Studies
The organizations I’ve helped vary from small community-focused teams to Fortune 50 goliaths. While the solutions might vary, the underlying principles and methods guarantee results in any situation.
Media Arts Council
Challenge
The Media Arts Council (MAC) is a non-profit that actively supports local artists and integrates a wide range of arts into the life of the Media, PA community. Started as a small artist’s collective, MAC has grown over the years to cover many diverse programs run by a small staff and a multitude of committee volunteers.
MAC asked me to help when they realized that their ad hoc approach to their team operations was becoming more of a hindrance than a help. Email threads became too long to clearly follow. People were being left out of conversations. Files were being misplaced. Knowledge was being lost. They were asking email to do more than it was meant for.
Solution
Ultimately, what MAC needed was a team collaboration solution that would unify their conversations, ensure new members could catch up on past decisions, and create a shared space for sharing files and tasks.
I had several special considerations while identifying MAC’s solution. The users in question had a broad range of technical ability. They are also almost entirely volunteers, so their time and/or willingness to learn a new system was limited. Additionally, as a community-supported non-profit, budgets were tight.
Basecamp was our solution of choice for several reasons:
It focuses on creating broad contextual awareness for a project team
It has a very straightforward feature set and even allows interacting through email
Flat-fee pricing with special non-profit rates
Beyond simply identifying the platform, I also helped MAC to launch it to the organization. I established project structures within Basecamp as well as a repeatable onboarding program for new members to help orient them to the team’s ways of working.
Outcomes
MAC has been running on Basecamp for over three years now. Having a go-to location for all project conversations and assets has helped them streamline their operations and take on more and bigger initiatives. Grant writing (an essential part of their fundraising) has been simplified by having an easily accessible archive of past achievements. Leveraging volunteer time is easier due to better visibility and coordination across projects.
Even with Basecamp’s special pricing, the cost of the platform is significant for MAC. That said, the value derived makes it a strong investment in the organization’s ability to execute on their mission of bringing the arts to Media and Delaware County.
Digital Consultancy
Challenge
A successful digital design consultancy found that their studio-based ways of working weren’t scaling as they’d grown.
- More and more employees were working remotely or didn’t even live within a commutable distance
- Clients who had excellent experiences with one project team were surprised when the engagement team operated in an entirely different way
- Employees were feeling like they spent all their time in Slack without time to actually do work
- When they were working, employees found it increasingly hard to find mission-critical files and information
This was a thriving organization with many teams doing great work. They didn’t need new ways of working as much as an underlying structure to unify all their efforts logically.
Solution
Working with key team members, I crafted a communications architecture to help create a framework within which each team could work flexibly but within a unified structure. This approach:
- Provided a shared understanding of what platforms should be used for what kind of information
- Made room for the fast and informal discussions they were used to
- Established a consistent location where project teams could look for assets, reconstruct a decision-making process, and catch up on recent conversations
- Set expectations for how long-term documentation should be written for both client and internal projects
Beyond simply establishing these guidelines, I also helped roll out the approach. This included crafting a team agreements approach, which gave teams a framework to develop the ground rules and expectations by which they’d work together asynchronously and synchronously.
Outcomes
Upon launching this approach, internal email usage dropped dramatically, reducing a typically noisy channel and moving those conversations to more inclusive channels.
The team agreements also created immediate results. In one instance, it helped a critical strategic team uncover misaligned expectations around response times. Addressing this led to more precise expectation and deadline setting within that team—essential in the company’s strategic planning.
Project teams reported that the use of team agreements led to better meeting practices, including the use of agendas and shared notes. They also helped identify cases where meetings weren’t necessary.
Finally, these practices helped the company more easily incorporate remote employees into their teams and ways of working, effectively growing their potential pool of new hires nationwide.