Case study Product & Project Management Case Study with Diana Grauer, Hoerbiger

Diana talks about using SharpCloud to implement a clear strategy for product and project management, leading to improved transparency, accountability and efficiency across the organisation. 

What was the business problem that needed to be solved?

We have an incredibly innovative engineering team, but we were lacking direction and priority for projects. Each of our efforts was ad hoc and we were suffering from not having a clear strategy for product and project management – we were lacking a roadmap.

SharpCloud has supported the implementation of our roadmap, as well as product management, development, and introduction practices.

Why have other tools/software not solved this problem?

There was a significant amount of confusion within our engineering organization that I believe was compounded by sharing spreadsheets and documents without clear traceability of the information. This confusion was further compounded by a lack of understanding of our processes and of each step to complete the process.

With SharpCloud, we have implemented clear processes and use SharpCloud for our forms and templates for clear traceability within our projects and portfolio. 

How is SharpCloud solving the problem?

All information on our portfolio, projects, and development processes are housed in SharpCloud. We use SharpCloud to display and leverage data from other line of business tools; JIRA, JIRA Confluence, MS Office Project, CRM system and SAP. This provides us with a single source of truth.

SharpCloud allows us to collaborate in real time. Project information and updates are now accessible online and offline to both key stakeholders and the product development team. Everyone is on the same page.

What are the key differentiators that set SharpCloud apart from other tools you have used?

SharpCloud allows our team, no matter what their location, accessibility and visibility of information. The platform allows us to collaborate and gather ideas from both small and large teams. We can then share this information in real time to our key external stakeholders.

What are the benefits of using SharpCloud, to you personally, and to your organization?

The SharpCloud platform allows me to create data driven presentations for complex processes and information. SharpCloud provides an intuitive presentation format for internal teams and external customers – it is incredibly easy to create an exciting and interactive presentation.

As we collaborate in SharpCloud, my presentation information is always up-to-date and available to my entire team. My organization uses SharpCloud to drive our weekly project meetings and monthly customer project updates.

Are you seeing any quantifiable results from using SharpCloud?

My organization uses SharpCloud to manage our product development projects, resulting in a 10% increase in efficiency.

We also use SharpCloud to manage our value engineering (VAVE) initiatives addressing design cost, quality, and manufacturability. SharpCloud allows the team to track processes and tasks.

Use of SharpCloud for these programs has directly contributed to a total VAVE savings equalling a 3% savings of product introduction cost year over year.