Customer Solution Case Study
Business Consultants Capture Dynamic Client Sessions with Digital Note-Taking Program
Overview
Country or Region: Finland
Industry: Professional Services
Customer Profile
Founded in 1967, Capgemini provides consulting, technology, and outsourcing services. With headquarters in Paris, the company is one of the world’s leading IT services and consulting companies.
Business Situation
The Helsinki Accelerated Solutions Environment (ASE) group of Capgemini Finland had difficulty capturing complete and accurate client information and organizing it later to deliver in final reports.
Solution
The Helsinki ASE group deployed Microsoft® Office OneNote® 2003 to help it collect, organize, and share information in client workshop sessions and produce final documentation.
Benefits
n Time savings of 27 percent
n Reduction in work hours
n Improved knowledge management / “OneNote can help us reduce long work days by reducing unnecessary work. That makes us very happy.”
Jukka Puustinen, Main Facilitator for Helsinki ASE, Capgemini Finland
Capgemini provides consulting, technology, and outsourcing services to clients worldwide. To collaborate with clients, the company has developed a network of Accelerated Solutions Environments (ASE). The Helsinki ASE team facilitates large scale collaborative sessions that help clients solve complex business problems rapidly. Group facilitators would capture discussions, process mapping, and presentations from client sessions on whiteboards, paper notes, audio and video recordings, and photographs, requiring careful organization. The sheer volume of this information collected in various formats was difficult to manage and reproduce to meet ASE’s needs. In March 2005, the ASE group started using Microsoft® Office OneNote® 2003 to capture these discussions. Using OneNote 2003, ASE is capturing information more quickly and improving the quality of information captured.
Situation
Capgemini is a global provider of consulting, technology, and outsourcing services. With headquarters in Paris, the company employs almost 60,000 people worldwide. Capgemini uses a collaborative approach that allows companies to capitalize on the benefits of cooperation and realize higher levels of productivity and faster, more sustainable results.
The Helsinki Accelerated Solutions Environment (ASE) team of Capgemini Finland, a division of Capgemini that employs more than 500 people, uses a unique three-day offsite workshop process, called ASE DesignShops, to help senior executives and project leaders from a client company solve complex business challenges that can otherwise take months to accomplish. Participants, including decision makers, influencers, and implementers, emerge from the event with plans that are ready to be executed, blueprints that have already been approved, and a commitment from key personnel to act. The ASE model is extremely successful and highly sought after because it creates an environment in which months of work can be produced in three days.
The ASE Model
Jukka Puustinen, Main Facilitator for Helsinki ASE, conducts workshops that range in size from 50 to 100 participants. Many different backgrounds and perspectives converge to share in forming the solution. During a typical session, the large group is divided into smaller teams of 5 to 10 people working parallel to each other in breakout areas. When reporting results from breakout sessions, all participants congregate in a large room referred to as the Radiant Room. (See Figure 1.)
In each breakout session, ASE representatives capture the essence of what the groups create in the form of written notes, digital photographs, and audio recordings. Later, they will be challenged with the task of organizing the material to deliver to the back-office producers who assemble the final report for the client.
With so much happening at once, it’s difficult for the ASE representatives to keep track of so many details, including a chronology of events, and who said what and when. Notebooks and folders full of information are produced in the breakout sessions, making it essential to have an effective way of organizing the information and material.
The ASE group’s greatest challenge is to merge the large quantities of material produced by 50 people or more into a unified, logical report in a very short amount of time—within three days of the close of the event. Part of this report is in the form of a Web Journal, containing everything presented by the breakout groups, chronologically organized. Upon reviewing the Web Journal, participants must be able to find the work they did in the workshop, including whiteboard drawings, conversations, and presentations. “We capture a lot of information, and we need to know who did what, at what point, and why. And we need to keep all that information together and make sense out of it,” says Puustinen.
Until recently, ASE representatives took notes on paper and transcribed them at the end of each day before delivering them to the production group. To capture brainstorming sessions or group projects, ASE representatives also took photographs of the whiteboards in each breakout area and later added notes and comments about what was being expressed on the whiteboards. When working with 50 to 100 participants, the group had to be very careful to match the right photographs to the right notes when the digital images were later downloaded onto computers in the production room. It was a time-consuming process.
Even in light of all these challenges, the ASE group’s process has proven over many years to be a success. Though Puustinen and other ASE group facilitators knew their process could benefit from higher levels of efficiency, they were uncertain as to what the best solution was to help solve some of their business challenges.
Solution
In March 2005, Puustinen and the Helsinki ASE team of 15 people decided to use the Microsoft® Office OneNote® 2003 note-taking program on portable computers and Tablet PCs as one tool to simplify their information-gathering processes and speed production work. After less than an hour of training, ASE representatives were using OneNote 2003 to capture information in client sessions.
Recently, they used OneNote in an event for more than 50 government professionals who work at different Finnish ministries and local bureaus. The participants were focused on solving the challenges of IT services inefficiencies. Wide representation from many government departments was necessary to identify common solutions.
Gathering Research Prior to the Event
In order to help a client arrive at a solution in such a short amount of time, the ASE group must research a topic carefully before each session. Using OneNote to research the government project, Puustinen and the ASE team collected and organized information in their OneNote notebooks, including presentation slides created with the Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2003 presentation and graphics program and links to other supporting documentation. “OneNote is an excellent way to collect research,” says Puustinen. “The ability to pull in PowerPoint files and include links to other documents helps us consolidate important information and share it efficiently.”
Before using OneNote, each group member conducted research by photocopying information, gathering e-mail messages, and printing articles and entire pages from Web sites. It was time-consuming to organize and share this information because it was spread out across so many different places, including file folders, folders on group members’ hard drives, and spiral notebooks. Now with OneNote, ASE representatives are capturing this information from e-mail messages, Web research, and various other documents and putting it all in one place. Research is expedited by using side notes, a feature of OneNote that allows the user to quickly open a miniature window to take notes on the side. Even while working in other programs, a OneNote user can enter information into a side note to be automatically saved in the user’s notebook. Later, the information can be organized within the larger body of research.
In addition, OneNote helps make the important information discovered by one group member available to be shared with all, because the process for sharing is so easy—as simple as clicking the e-mail icon on the OneNote toolbar.
Capturing the Information from Presentations
One method used at the ASE events for sharing information efficiently within large groups of people is to conduct parallel rounds of twenty-minute presentations about specific business issues. The presentation material typically consists of large papers attached to the wall to graphically illustrate an issue. The audience captures their own commentary on comment papers. The comments are used as reminders for the audience in the debriefing discussions held immediately after the presentations. During the recent session for the Finnish ministry and local government workers, ASE representatives used the handwriting tools in OneNote to capture the main topics of the presentations on the wall. These notes were later used in the debrief discussion in addition to the comment papers. This gave the participants an opportunity to keep the presentation contents fresh in their minds throughout the discussion.
Tuomo Saikkonen, an ASE representative says, “With OneNote, we can combine the drawings and the notes and send the whole thing to the production group in real-time via e-mail or by publishing to shared locations. It’s much easier this way to keep track of the order of presentations,” says Saikkonen. The ASE group is using the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client to share their notes instantaneously as well as publishing their notes to Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 sites.
Capturing the Breakout Sessions
Breakout sessions typically consist of 5 to 10 participants and one ASE representative responsible for capturing the presentations and discussions that occur in the smaller groups. In the past, ASE representatives took notes on paper and photographed the diagrams on the whiteboards using a digital camera. The use of graphical metaphors throughout these events are an integral part of the process for describing participants’ issues, goals, obstacles, motivations, and the relationships among these elements. Thus, ASE representatives include many illustrations in their notes.
Leena Hietala, an ASE representative particularly skilled at using imagery to describe group dynamics, now uses OneNote to take notes in the breakout sessions. “With three or four discussions going on at once, it’s hard to take notes quickly and effectively on paper. OneNote helps us move between discussions, combining drawing, writing, and typing to capture the important points, and refer to our notes later to help structure the final documentation,” says Hietala. “Our team also has to adhere to clearly defined roles in supporting the client. Sharing this information and tasks in real time with each other is essential.” (See Figure 2.)
Working as a Team on Production
Before using OneNote, ASE representatives transcribed many pages of notes after the sessions and then had to match them with the proper images, including diagrams, PowerPoint 2003 slides, and photographs of participants, before delivering them to the production group to create the Web Journal. Because the time frame is so compressed, the production group begins to assemble the final documentation while the ASE session is still in progress.
Using OneNote, ASE representatives can instantaneously share information from the breakout sessions with the production group. Once a page of notes is complete, it is sent via e-mail using Outlook 2003, saved to a shared folder on the network, or published to a SharePoint site where the production group retrieves them for incorporation into the Web Journal.
In addition, the search feature in OneNote helps speed the production process by eliminating the time that used to be spent flipping through pages and pages of paper notes to find key items. “OneNote saves us a lot of time by making it easy to find information later, and since we don’t have to transcribe notes anymore, we’re more efficient than in the past,” says Hietala. Once production is completed on the files, they are saved to a SharePoint site for further collaboration and review at any time.
Benefits
Capgemini Helsinki ASE employees believe that OneNote provides concrete benefits to their workshop process. “It’s a challenge to bring a new tool into a proven process” says Puustinen. “But OneNote makes it easy by complementing and enhancing our work, allowing us to capture client sessions more efficiently.”
Time Savings of 27 Percent
After only six weeks of using OneNote, Capgemini Helsinki ASE users are reporting a 27 percent time savings in all information- gathering and note-taking activities, saving almost two hours per user per week. This is estimated to save Capgemini $517 a year per person, primarily due to shortening project execution time. (See Figure 3.)
Reduction in Work Hours
The Helsinki ASE employees are perhaps as excited about the potential OneNote holds for making their workloads more manageable as they are about the overall benefits to their client sessions. OneNote eliminates much of the transcribing the ASE group used to do. In addition, the program’s powerful search function allows them to spend significantly less time trying to find information because they can now search for key words in their notes throughout their entire notebook or within a particular section. This improved efficiency results in a reduction of several work hours per session. “OneNote can help us reduce long work days by reducing unnecessary work,” says Puustinen. “That makes us very happy.”
Improved Knowledge Management
Helping clients solve business problems requires sharp insights into the issues and the ability to distill the most important aspects of the work produced in the ASE sessions. “Our need is to discover the key things that will make the client successful and arrive at a solution. OneNote is a perfect tool for this because it allows us to see everything in order, in one place,” says Puustinen.
In addition, because OneNote helps his group gather information more efficiently, adhere to the progression of the discussions more effectively, and combine information captured through different mediums more accurately, “OneNote has a qualitative impact on our work,” says Puustinen. OneNote improves a group’s ability to capture knowledge as it was originally expressed and incorporate this knowledge into other documentation.
Future Plans
Due to his group’s success with OneNote, Puustinen plans to further integrate the program into the ASE DesignShops. His vision is to have all the facilitators in the breakout sessions equipped with OneNote on a portable computer or Tablet PC, taking notes that will more effectively capture the entire gamut of perspectives present at the event. Plans are also in the works to use the OneNote shared-session feature more frequently—where team members can collaborate on a virtual whiteboard—as well as their SharePoint site for improved collaboration. The ASE’s facility is equipped with a wireless network that complements the solution of using OneNote in DesignShops even more. The ASE group also plans to use the video-recording feature of OneNote to record upcoming seminars. The video and typed or handwritten notes will be synchronized and located in one place, so that ASE representatives can quickly review the video recording associated with any portion of their notes to discover any information that may have been missed in the note taking.