Rethinking Collaboration in a Digital World
DMAT team ditches paper for apps to improve communication and collaboration
COVID-19 has thrust teams into a new way of working with social distancing, working remotely, and other safety practices in place. The Production Technology Support Group from DENSO’s Athens, Tennessee location started shifting its approach to work before the virus, but when COVID-19 hit they had no choice but to rethink their approach once again – going from a paper trail process to an electronic, automated way of working.
Building the Board
Back in 2019, the group – often referred to as PTSG – started experimenting with new ways of visualizing and tracking their projects, work requests, and each team member’s workload using what many know as “The Menlo Way.”
Menlo Innovations, a software design and development company, is well known for its unique approach to agile work and mission to bring joy to the workplace. Many teams across DENSO in North America have partnered with Menlo to understand this Menlo way of working and see how we can transform our approach to work and culture.
When it comes to an agile methodology, Menlo relies heavily on visualizing work through different project or task boards in order to improve transparency, communication and overall project management. The boards bring people together, give everyone a clear and quick visual on work required, roles and responsibilities. It’s a way to break down silos, and create a more transparent, flexible and efficient team.
PTSG was well on its way to building a strong board to help their team manage incoming requests and projects at hand. As a team of five, supporting all of DMAT, strong project management is key to their operations and overall sanity.
Then, COVID-19 happened. Physically separated, the team was working remotely, and the board – abandoned.
“The few months that we used the board, our team did start to see improvements in our overall workload and our team meetings,” said Scott Bennett, advanced production engineer specialist, PTSG. “The board gave us visibility into each job, ensuring that nothing fell through the cracks. Each team member also had a strong understanding of what was expected of them, what they needed to do.”
The team didn’t want to lose the progress that they had made, so they immediately put their heads together to see how they could transform their board for their new digital life.
From Paper Trail to Digital Suite
Luckily, during COVID-19, DENSO introduced Microsoft Office 365 across North America, offering a new set of tools to explore and support digital collaboration. PTSG immediately jumped at the opportunity to dig into the new tools.
James Wyatt, senior specialist in the group, was tasked with getting the group started by building out a SharePoint Online site. Through a great deal of trial and error, and exploring ideas online in the Microsoft community, James not only built a solution to replace their basic Menlo board – he built an integrated platform that supports PTSG project management, team communication, customer collaboration, electronic work requests, automated approval processes, and more.
Through his use of Microsoft SharePoint Online, Teams, Planner, Flow, Forms, and PowerApps, the PTSG site is a one-stop-shop for the team and their customers – improving project transparency and collaboration. The site includes all the key points of their board, now available online and through mobile – project timeline, milestones, estimated time required to completed tasks, project documents, notes, and more. Other DMAT teams who need PTSG’s support can view all this information, and also submit requests for their projects.
The site has additional capabilities and features their board didn’t have, including ability to capture historical data, lessons learned and time required to complete similar tasks in the past, allowing the team to better plan their approach, resources, and timeline for future projects.
“While the Menlo board did improve our team’s process, it wasn’t perfect. There was always a risk of information getting lost as we handed off a paper request from one team member to another. Or, we would run into challenges sharing electronic documents with our customers because they didn’t have access to a specific file drive. With Office 365, everything is in one spot and shareable – you can make one change and it updates the information across all applications. You can even update from mobile. It’s easier to work on projects together,” said James.
The PTSG team is now testing their site to make sure it meets all their needs. They hope to launch the site to their DMAT customers by the end of the calendar year. The site will be accessible to all those in North America who have access to O365, and the team welcomes others to take a look, get inspired, and share your ideas with them!
Learn More
Click here to watch a video of Scott explain their new site. For more information about O365 tools, including training guides, how-to videos and more, click here.
Share the Knowledge
Scott, James and the PTSG team are excited to learn more about the new tools, support other groups who want to explore the new tools, and bounce ideas off those who are also experimenting with O365. If this sounds like you – reach out to Scott at scott.bennett@na.denso.com, or James at james.wyatt@na.denso.com.
Share your Story
DENSO globally introduced Reborn 21, an initiative to help guide all of our efforts on actions that will help the company survive and thrive this year and beyond. Learn more about Reborn 21 and how teams are rebuilding quality and changing the way we work, here (password: denso2020). All associates play an important role in helping the company survive and thrive – to share your story or ideas, email Communications@na.denso.com.
BEFORE
AFTER
The new PTSG site replaces a paper-heavy project board and process, making collaboration and communication with teams easier as more of us work remotely.
“Dedicate time to learning and developing new tools. It’s easy to ignore or put low priority on activities that don’t come directly from an OE customer request – non-value added activities. But, if we don’t take time to develop ideas and tools now, we’ll fall behind. We need to prioritize learning and development – even just a couple hours each week is a good first step.” – Scott Bennett
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