ABSTRACT
Our biggest program component had some really ugly deployment snafus. The configuration and setup of the collaboration software was not quite right in production and, as a result, the workflows automatically kept emailing the fields sales staff every four hours. Barbara spent numerous late evenings and weekends struggling with the team and vendor to set this right. However, once these issues were sorted out, the sales staff enthusiastically embraced the new collaboration space. Why would they not? It reduced clutter in their email, they were able to find their proposals quickly, understand where or who had the proposal in the process, and the best part was that they could collaboratively update a proposal. No longer did they have to rely on tedious version control and laborious
consolidation of edits. At the click of a dashboard, they knew exactly where their proposal was in the process. Surprisingly, we found that the majority of the bottlenecks were with the creators of the proposal assets themselves. It was not legal or the top management approvals that were thought to be the bottlenecks. In this case, having real data on the life cycle of the proposals provided real insights into what needs improvement.
