Business-Driven 365

The Situation

A Regional VP voiced frustration about having a difficult time finding details of an action item she knew she had been assigned. She was on multiple committees and each committee tracked assignments differently, leading to a lot of confusion and waste for her and her peers.

One...

The Situation

The most inefficient time spent by one Senior Vice President each week – and his most dreaded – was spending up to four hours every Sunday afternoon building his weekly report for the COO. He had a face-to-face meeting with the COO each Monday morning at which he...

The Situation

Soon after the merger that doubled our company’s size in 2012, the Senior Vice President of Power Generation Operations informed his Regional Vice Presidents that he needed a “Weekly Report” by Sunday morning each week so that he could in turn, compile and present...

The Situation

The company had been hit with a couple of untimely negative news stories in national, state, and local news. One was the result of a serious environmental event due to a pipe failure. Executive management conducted a risk assessment to identify potential future disasters having low...

The Situation

While on a large conference call, a general manager asked several dozen employees to email their shirt sizes to his administrative assistant because the organization was going to buy polo shirts for employees on a special occasion.

Being one of the employees on the call I realized...

The Situation

In 2005, employees at our largest coal power plant (and the third largest in the country) used various, inconsistent means to request “Lockout Tagout” before working on equipment. “Lockout Tagout” is a process by which mechanics, electricians, and other...

The Situation

Due to very negative publicity resulting from an environmental issue in early 2014, the company began an effort to increase oversight of all activities having any risk of environmental consequences. It was decided that all such activities first be reviewed and approved by a team...

The Situation

After the 2012 merger, and with a workforce of more than 5,000 employees in just the fossil-hydro generation section, the fossil-hydro organization was struggling to match those with technical needs and issues with the people responsible for high-level technical decisions and...

The Situation

One large generating station conducted a regular weekly meeting in which recent barriers to efficient maintenance work were discussed and actions planned to eliminate such barriers in future work.

These barriers were such things as mechanics getting the wrong parts due to incorrect...

The Situation

At one point during my career, I was the only SharePoint support person for more than 5,000 employees and contractors, about 90 locations, and more than 300 SharePoint sites. What compounded the difficulty of this situation was the fact that I also had to serve as developer,...