How does totaliQ help companies? Read this Case Study

Case Study : Getting value out of totaliQ

A common problem

One of the largest multi-disciplinary construction companies in Canada had a problem: they were suffering from the same issues over and over on their projects and it was costing them – a lot. This is a common problem in the engineering and construction sector, where every mistake can be a big one, with costly materials and field labor hanging in the balance, not to mention the reputation of the company.

In search of a solution, they partnered with totaliQ as an early adopter of the platform.

This company wanted to use experience and learnings from the construction site to better estimate costs and avoid mistakes on future projects. In short, they wanted to create an environment of continuous improvement. They had a Lessons Learned process that wasn’t as effective as it could be, and wanted to improve it to actually leverage the information gathered to de-risk projects and put together better project estimates.

Their existing Lessons Learned process relied on project managers to fill out forms in meetings at the end of projects, which would then be manually transferred to a SharePoint-based lessons database. The process also called for those involved in a bid to review this database for relevant content when bidding new work.

This process was not effective. Only 20 % of staff had even accessed this knowledge database, with only 7% having found useful content. There was no incentive for staff to contribute to the database. Personnel moving between projects before the lessons learned meeting took place was a recurring barrier for collecting these learnings. The quality of the content was short form and difficult to get value from, and it was not easy to find content relevant to the next project being planned. Furthermore, there was no process in place to leverage the content in the database into actionable tasks that would improve future projects.

Does this sound familiar?

It was unanimous within the organization that getting this process to effectively generate quality content would have a ‘huge’ impact on the business. This data would affect current and future projects, bids and proposal generation – which all contribute to a company’s bottom line.

More than Lessons Learned

This company partnered with totaliQ to do a full analysis of their current Lessons Learned process and see where they could make improvements. They revamped their Lessons Learned process by building it around the totaliQ platform.

·       Employee Engagement -they wanted to have a continuous collection of data and insights, instead of just at the end of a project. totaliQ has gamified their platform so that employees want to engage and share their knowledge, all while moving up levels and aiming to hit individual and company wide targets. This process encouraged employees to actively contribute and was easy to measure.

·       Expertise Inventory - while the system was fun for employees, it also built a real-time expertise inventory that the company could use to maintain visibility into their operations and past experience.

·       Knowledge Sharing - with their previous process, the company didn’t know who had contributed what knowledge. With the totaliQ platform, everyone can see who contributes and who comments. This allows employees to mentor each other, cross-train and ask direct questions to another colleague, allowing for far more education and knowledge sharing. In fact, after integrating their Lessons Learned process into the totaliQ platform, this company re-branded their Lessons Learned process to the Knowledge Sharing database.

·       More efficient Lessons Learned meetings – Actions and insights can be tagged to projects as the project progresses, enabling more efficient Lessons Learned meetings. You can quickly see what insights have already been collected for the project and employees can interact with the platform in real-time to add high-value content during the meeting.

·       Relevant Content and Actionable Tasks - before, the company could not get any tangible value out of their stored information. totaliQ’s AI-enabled system is able to provide and push out the relevant info they need for proposal generation, project planning, Lessons Learned and ongoing execution support. With this platform, they were able to collect and track to completion improvement actions based on the insights shared.

More importantly – does it work?

The organization decided to trial the system by rolling it out to 50 users at first. Within 2 months of using totaliQ, 92% of employees in the pilot program were accessing content within the database. They had contributed almost as many insights in these two months as the company was used to getting in a year. 64% of employees were able to find useful, relevant content when they needed it. Perhaps the biggest win? More than a dozen actionable suggestions for improvement collected, compared to 0 previously.

“We have more valuable content in totaliQ now than we ever had in our Lessons Learned database” - Director of Project Services

The value of that data will pay off for years in the form of better proposals, more efficient projects , and better overall reputation - and ultimately, more revenue.

Contact us today to find out how we can do the same for your company!