Background

We were engaged to help an entertainment firm subject to numerous audits improve its tracking and response to them. The process remained the same for many years, and the team tracked audit responses via an antiquated Microsoft Access database and email threads. No one was happy with the existing process, and audits often took months or even years to close.

Project

Our philosophy is to create a continuous process improvement cycle. We began the project by reviewing a series of documents and recordings of interviews with the stakeholders prepared before our engagement. We then developed a presentation outlining the policies, procedures, and pathways that took an audit from initial demand to completion.

We conducted a second round of interviews to seek the audit response team members’ thoughts. We developed our recommendations based on the interviews with the audit response team, the support teams that provide the audit response team with data, internal senior management, and the external organizations that requested the audits. Bright Triangle made our recommendations after evaluating the input from all stakeholders.

No one likes change, yet change was the only option to improve the satisfaction of all involved. One of the essential tasks was to convince the team of the value of the shift from tracking requests made to other teams in a ticketing system rather than long email chains. We held a series of listening sessions for stakeholders to accomplish this task. Below, you will see an image from one of those presentations.

We created this image to convey how long an actual request made to a support team took to complete. On day one, a staff member on the audit response team contacts a support team member for data on four separate claims. Each yellow dot represents an email. At the top of the graphic are emails from the support team, and at the bottom are messages from the audit response team. The timeline is to scale and is over 90 days.

Only two of the four requests were complete even after 90 days. With the information buried in long email chains, management could not know the status of any of these requests. Bright Triangle’s infographic was pivotal in achieving buy-in for the transformation project.

Solution

We delivered the revised process with patience, thoughtfulness, and enthusiasm. The key to the transformation was mapping the fields from the existing Access database into the ticketing system while adding new fields to capture missing data from the current process. We helped the client to migrate all their historical data into the new ticketing system.

We created a detailed training document and recorded a series of short training videos explaining the key components of the new process and system. The videos were a big hit because we took a very light-hearted approach to delivering what would otherwise have been very dry content.

Some of our challenges included a development team with little knowledge of the audit response process. The development team also saw multiple personnel changes throughout the project, but Bright Triangle kept it moving forward.

The transformation was a huge success. The audit response team embraced the new ticketing system, and senior management now has the tools to adjust resources. The new system’s data and reporting allow the team to quickly identify bottlenecks and long-overdue requests. With a wealth of new data, management can intelligently reallocate resources.

Not only did Bright Triangle tackle the technical challenges of this project, but we also finessed the soft challenges of obtaining buy-in, training users, and embracing change.

Update

The client reports, “The result of Kevin Holliday’s dedicated efforts was nothing short of a resounding success. One of his standout attributes was his exceptional capacity to translate the nuanced requirements of our business team into language that the development group could readily grasp and execute. Simultaneously, he excelled in conveying the technical intricacies of the implemented software to our business and project management teams in a simple and crystal-clear manner.”