How to save 3 months of project management with collaborative workshops

The challenge: adapt the ordering process to digital in 43 countries

ALD Automotive aims to carry out transformation workshops in 43 countries, and transform the ordering process of leased cars from their partners such as Smart or Tesla, thanks to a new platform: International Digital Framework (IDF). 

Throughout these workshops, teams have to move from a manual process to a digitalized process.

For Valérie's team, they first needed to succeed this international transformation in 2020, in a context of health crisis where constraints were strong: limited traveling, new working practices due to lockdowns, etc. It was therefore necessary to rethink the format of the workshops, which until now had been conducted only in person.

This initial format used to bring the teams together in a room, with rolls of physical kraft paper hung on the walls so that each participant could share their ideas on sticky notes. To make it evolve, Valerie needed a complete tool that would replicate the interactions and visual sharing of information in remote work.

Putting the activities at a distance during the lockdowns allowed Valerie's team to discover Klaxoon's Board, and to carry out their workshops remotely thanks to this whiteboard. This format proved to be much more effective than face-to-face workshops, so Valerie extended it to the workshops that followed, even when it was possible to conduct them on site.

Valerie and her team digitized all of their workshops using mainly Board, combined with Surveys directly in Klaxoon to support the transformation.

The solution: a suite of collaborative tools combining participation and flexibility in remote work

In concrete terms, Valerie organizes one workshop per country, entirely remotely, with all the stakeholders concerned by the changes:

• Sales people
• Operations
• Finance
• Partner manufacturers
• IT specialists,...

The objective of this workshop is to present the new digital process ("TO BE"), and to collect "business" information on the existing process (AS IS) for developers and technical analysts.

With Board, Klaxoon's online whiteboard, the team in charge of the transformation simply creates a Board template, which they duplicate whenever they need to deploy the workshop in a new country. 

The workshop process, inspired by Lean Management

Valerie uses Lean Management practices to run her workshops. 

Lean Management aims to improve a company’s performance and, more specifically, its production’s quality and profitability.

This method allows to analyze all the steps of a process, to evaluate the added value of each step, and to optimize the work of operational teams.  

In practice, this involves some concrete actions before, during and after the workshop: 

Before the workshop, Valerie defines on the Board the current process (manual), confronts it with the future process (digitalized), and integrates the various questions of the developers and technical analysts.

After this stage, the Board is ready for the workshop.

Then, Valerie and her team gather the 8 to 15 participants concerned for the 2-hour videoconference workshop on the Klaxoon Board. 

This Board then becomes a shared space for project documentation. Stakeholders can find all the information about the project, at any time and from anywhere. In addition, people who cannot join the workshop at the time it is held can still join the Board asynchronously afterwards, and share their functional specifications if necessary.

During the synchronous phase, the workshop is divided into 3 key steps:

1. Analysing the existing process (AS IS)

The first step is to analyze the existing process. On the Board, it is represented by the phases and steps of the process in columns, and the different actors of the process in lines.  

With Klaxoon, the process is presented in a very visual way, and all the useful information is centralized in the same tool. Participants can share photos of the stakeholders in each row, and use connectors to structure the process. The group also adds visuals to illustrate the different sub-phases.

2. Presentation of the future process (TO BE)

The second step consists in presenting the future process and how it will impact the stakeholders on a daily basis.

On the Board, Valerie first shares a video introduction to the new process. Then, she presents the steps in a visual way. Participants can easily picture themselves through each step of the process, with a clear representation of the different phases and interdependencies.

3. Question and answer session

The last step consists of asking the participants to answer questions from the developers and technical analysts.

For this, synchronously at first, the facilitators explain: 

• What answers are expected from the participants;
• How to share an idea on the Board;
• How to use categories, color codes and dimensions.

Then, participants answer the questions asynchronously, on their own. Thanks to this asynchronous way of working, even other teams (external to the project) can join the Board during the process, to add questions or ideas without directly having to ask Valerie's team.

As categories, the aim is to identify the subject concerned by the question:

• Website;
• The configuration of the leasing vehicle; 
• The quote;
• The credit check,...

To further specify each shared question, dimensions are used on Klaxoon to define:

• Which question each idea answers;
• Whether it is a question or an answer;
• The author of an idea.

The result: 3 months saved on project management 

For Valerie and her team, Klaxoon has been a time-saving tool in the digitalization of their workshops. 

Klaxoon allows to centralize all the information, and to prepare the workshops beforehand in a clear, visual and structured way. This phase is very simple, because the BPM team has a ready-to-use Board model for it. It is a custom template, which they can reuse when transposing the process in a new country. This greatly reduces the time spent redesigning the structure of each new workshop. 

Then, during the session, the prepared framework helps to focus people's attention. This means that on a Klaxoon Board, participants can easily follow the facilitator where they activate the Synchro tool. They can also ask Questions, and thus get very quick feedback from participants.

There is also a significant gain in the time it takes to deliver a presentation. With Klaxoon, there is no longer any need to make a report at the end of the workshop, because everything is directly centralized and available. All the content is preserved, and the ideas shared during the workshops are not lost. This is also valid in case someone joins the project along the way.

According to the feedback from the director of the International Digital Framework (IDF), the implementation of the workshop and the use of Klaxoon allowed them to save 3 months per project, from the preparation to the steps following the workshops.

From now on, Valerie also uses Klaxoon to lead her face-to-face workshops, because it's more fun, the tool crystallizes all the topics they want to address, and the participants are quickly mobilized around the topics that require their attention the most.

When you're live with Klaxoon, it's great! That's what we did in Morocco during one of our latest projects, and we saw only huge benefits.