Contractor Case Study – Implementing a new timesheeting system

In these contractor case studies, we provide a glimpse into the kinds of projects and results that our placed contractors from our database complete. These are real contractors that we have placed on-site in the last 12 months.

Who are you?

I’m a Change Manager and Digital Transformation Specialist. I specialize in Finance (Risk), Business development, and sales and have 15 years’ experience across a variety of sectors including banking, IT, telecommunications, and marketing. I’m an expert in delivery and stakeholder management, and I’m especially interested in product management and fintech.

What are your credentials?

• APMG Change Manager certification

What was the challenge the client was facing?

The client needed to marry across the board different business areas on a new timesheeting system that required them all to be integrated onto one platform (Salesforce). Each different business area had different needs, sometimes straight timekeeping, others around finance and revenue recognition. Given the lack of knowledge of the system, they needed a fresh pair of eyes to deal with this from the ground up and someone from a consultancy background who understood how to deal with multiple stakeholders with very different needs. There had been a lot of churn from their third-party supplier, so they needed someone who could present the program in a positive way to allow the change to be bedded down properly. They also needed someone who could do a business analyst job as well as a product manager job.

What was your role in the project?

I was brought in as a change lead to help implement a new timesheeting system. With over 7,000 users and touching on every department, the system tracks time for their developers, support staff, and salespeople. It determines how long they spend on projects for external clients, as well as internal projects. I joined after phase 1 where 1,000 users had already been implemented but played a major part in the implementation from thereon.

I successfully delivered the timesheeting system and was then moved to the Service Cloud portion of Salesforce implementation where I created a new engagement strategy allowing the business to increase the velocity of stories per sprint. I was then moved onto the Sales Cloud part of Salesforce and became Change Lead of all optimization within Salesforce.

What advice would you give to companies looking to do a similar project themselves?

1. Celebrate when high-quality work is delivered and don’t treat your contractors differently to permanent employees. I know I work best when I’m allowed to work at a very macro level where I can have an overview of lots of projects.
2. Empower your contractors and allow them to make changes. Nobody likes to be micromanaged, so being allowed to create my own engagement strategy and methodology of working based on what the stakeholders wanted was great.
3. Sometimes you have to take calculated risks. In this project, we tried some quite experimental stuff, but I knew I had the backing of the team. Change is often an afterthought, but for a successful project, it needs to be front and center.