How Columbus Global uses Klaxoon to build transformation roadmaps

Headquartered in Denmark, Columbus Global is a premier international IT consultancy with over 1,700 employees worldwide. As an elite Microsoft and Infor partner, Columbus Global specializes in implementing massive ERP, CRM, and cloud data systems that keep global manufacturing and retail supply chains moving.

To ensure these multi-million dollar investments succeed, Toby Mankertz, Manufacturing Industry Director and Business Transformation Advisor, leads a specialized team focused on the human side of technology. By prioritizing stakeholder engagement and rigorous organizational change management (OCM), Toby’s team ensures that clients actively adopt software to drive business value.

The challenge

Large-scale enterprise software rollouts are notoriously high-risk. When an organization invests $5 million or more in a new ERP system, the technical installation is only half the battle. The real challenge is achieving absolute alignment across a complex web of departments, business units, and geographies.

Without a structured, visual method to capture input, critical foundational requirements often get lost and executive leadership remains disconnected from the day-to-day realities of their teams. To bridge this gap, Columbus Global needed a centralized, interactive workspace to bring diverse teams into the same conversation and turn abstract goals into structured action.

A methodology built around structured workshops

Columbus Global developed a project management methodology called OnTarget, and every engagement begins with a phase called Define. The goal of Define is to help the client understand, collectively, why they are embarking on a project and what it will take to succeed. Klaxoon is central to how that phase works.

The process starts before any group session. Toby's team identifies the key stakeholders for a project and asks each one the same questions in a brief one-on-one conversation:

• What would be the best outcome?
• What do you see as the biggest challenges?
• How ready do you think people are for this?
• How will it impact your customers?

Those conversations give Columbus Global a picture of where each person stands before anyone is in a room together.

From there, the team brings the group together for a four-hour design thinking workshop run on a Klaxoon Board. Participants brainstorm, identify areas of agreement, work through problems, and then use a difficulty-versus-importance matrix to prioritize what matters most. Every contribution is visible to everyone in real time, which keeps the conversation grounded and makes it harder for disagreements to go unnoticed.

"Klaxoon is a fantastic tool for us because we can deliver workshops like that in person, entirely remotely, or in a hybrid session, where we've got some people in different geographies joining online and a few of us are in the room," Toby said. Columbus Global has run approximately 200 of these workshops over the past five years.

Going deeper with each business unit

The executive-level workshop sets a direction, but Columbus Global often follows it with a series of department-level sessions. Finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and other teams each work through the same framework, focused on the challenges specific to their part of the business.

Those sessions give employees at every level a chance to contribute before decisions are made, which makes the eventual changes easier to accept. They also reveal a more accurate picture of what is actually happening inside the organization, which sometimes differs from what leadership believes.

During each session, participants log their thoughts directly onto a Klaxoon Board. Inputs are color-coded and grouped as they come in, so patterns become visible quickly. Because Boards stay accessible after each session, participants can also add ideas or review what others contributed on their own time.

For one data governance and ERP integration project, this process produced 3,918 ideas across 10 workshops. A single session with the manufacturing and engineering team generated 121 ideas, 30 of which were prioritized and grouped into themes that shaped the project roadmap. "In one workshop alone, the team generated and analyzed 157 ideas related to business value and transformation opportunities," Toby said. "Klaxoon's visual whiteboards helped the team cluster these into actionable themes, which were then used to shape the transformation roadmap."

From whiteboard to real-world execution: The Smartsheet and Jira bridge

The biggest pitfall of traditional whiteboard brainstorming is that the energy and ideas generated in the room often evaporate once the session ends. Columbus Global eliminated this issue by integrating Klaxoon directly into their execution workflows.

Once the team has captured and organized thousands of ideas on Klaxoon the output is immediately operationalized through a seamless downstream pipeline:

• Early-stage tracking: The visual outputs are directly exported into Smartsheet for initial tracking, structuring, and strategic prioritization.

• Technical task assignment: The prioritized lists are then transitioned into Jira, where they are converted into actionable tasks, mapped to strategic value levers, and assigned to designated change leaders.

• Structured governance: The Organizational Change Management (OCM) team tracks these active change activities across five key categories: policy, people, data, process, and system.

By linking every visual sticky note directly to execution tools, Columbus Global ensures that stakeholder input is directly responsible for driving the final transformation roadmap. "People in the organization begin to feel like they've been consulted," Toby said. "Change is being done with them and for them, and that's really psychologically important."

Building the infrastructure for trusted AI adoption

With AI top of mind for global enterprises, Columbus Global is also utilizing Klaxoon to help clients map out practical AI deployment.

Rather than chasing AI as a buzzword, Toby uses Klaxoon to run targeted AI Discovery sessions. Using Microsoft AI discovery cards overlaid onto process maps built in Klaxoon, they identify exactly where AI can enhance workflows, such as speeding up a finance month-end close.

“We meet a lot of customers who say, ‘I want AI,’ but when you ask them what for, they say, ‘I don't know, I just want it,’” Toby shared.

Empowering a culture of participation

The collaborative framework built by Columbus Global proves a fundamental truth of business transformation: people engage with what they help create.

By replacing long, dry requirements forms with interactive, visual whiteboards, Columbus Global helps clients transition from siloed decision-making to a transparent, data-driven approach.

“Klaxoon is our north star,” Toby concluded. “It helps us move from unstructured ideas to structured project plans, giving teams a truly enjoyable, collaborative way to engage with their company’s future.”

Are you ready to align your stakeholders and turn creative chaos into a structured roadmap? Discover how Klaxoon’s visual collaboration tools can elevate your team’s alignment with a free trial.