Case Study: Innovest Group
THE PROBLEM
Our company, an investment research and advisory firm with about 40
employees, needed an easy-to-use
timesheet program to track our hours. With staff in offices in
New York, London, Paris, Toronto and Madrid (and multiple projects
on the go), we required a solution that was flexible enough to allow
individuals to track their own hours while also allowing for a degree
of central coordination. At the end of the day, we needed to know
the aggregate hours spent on a given research project and how those
hours were split by employee, office and time period.
THE SOLUTION
2ndSite delivered. In my efforts to get our staff started on the 2ndSite timesheet program, I had organized a global teleconference to provide basic training on how to use the site. The day before the meeting I started receiving emails suggesting that such a meeting would be a waste of time: the staff had reviewed the site and determined they could figure out how to use the timesheet program on their own.
Initially, we used the timesheet program for two projects involving four employees in New York and Toronto. Two months later, we were running five research projects involving a dozen employees in four countries. Contrary to what we had expected, the uptake of the 2ndSite program was driven not by management "push" but by a "pull" effect where word-of-mouth helped transfer the program from office to office.
THE RESULTS
So what did Innovest's use of the 2ndSite platform do for our company? Fundamentally, it allowed us to get a much more accurate handle on the time spent on our various research contracts and how that time was apportioned between different employees. After using the system for only a short period we were able to:
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Better understand how our current project
billing aligned with actual research-hours spent |
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Better match future project billing with anticipated research-hours spent |
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Achieve an easy transition away from a patchwork of Excel-based timesheets to an efficient, reliable, accessible, web-based system |
Devin Crago
Research Analyst
New York, New York
USA
Devin is a Research Analyst at Innovest, where his primary
responsibilities include analysis of the mining, energy and
telecommunications sectors.
About Innovest - www.innovestgroup.com
Innovest Strategic Value Advisors is an internationally
recognized investment research and advisory firm specializing
in analyzing companies' performance on environmental,
social, and strategic governance issues, with a particular
focus on their impact on competitiveness, profitability,
and share price performance.
Partial
Client List
Innovest research has been used by the following
companies and corporations: Pfizer, Rockefeller &
Co, ABN Amro, Mellon Equity, World Bank, Deutsche Telecom,
ExxonMobil Corporation, Lucent Technologies, Texaco and
United Technologies. |
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