Doug Coutts, Partner, OTB Solutions

“Using Groove 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007, we’ve seen a bump in productivity of between 5 and 10 percent. As a small company with revenues just shy of U.S.$10 million per year, that’s a significant increase.”

Consultants from OTB Solutions used to travel each week to work at customer locations. To minimize expenses and recover lost work hours due to extensive travel, the company began using Microsoft® Office Groove® 2007 for its collaboration needs. Since using Office Groove 2007 and other Microsoft Office programs such as Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, the company has experienced significant productivity gains due to simplifying the way distributed teams work together.

All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published November 2006

Business Needs

Based in Seattle, Washington, but with consultants working from several United States locations, OTB Solutions provides IT consulting services to Fortune 500 companies in the healthcare, life sciences, and high technology industries. In order to keep overhead low, the company maintains no physical office space. Consultants work from their home offices and on site part-time at customer locations. To assemble the most effective combination of skills and experience for each unique assignment, OTB has developed a team work system it calls “worknet.” A worknet is a team that includes company consultants, members of the customer’s staff, and specialists drawn from a pool of prequalified IT partners located in the United States, Canada, and offshore.

In the past, OTB consultants worked primarily at customer locations, to which they would travel at the beginning of each week. The extensive travel costs were a strain on company profitability, and the distance was a challenge to working effectively as a team. Dispersed consultants relied on e-mail to share, review, and revise project documents. “E-mail created version control problems,” says Doug Coutts, Partner at OTB. “Each time a document was changed, a new copy was sent out to the team. People then had multiple versions of the same document and no easy way to discern which was the most current.”

The company needed a solution that would improve internal collaboration and communication and allow worknet members—whether OTB consultants, customers, or partners—to easily work together, remain productive from any location, and stay up-to-date on projects. Security was also a top concern. “The customer information we deal with needs to be maintained in a very secure way,” says Coutts. “We needed an effective, low-risk tool to support our emerging model of remote teamwork,” says Coutts.

Solution

In early 2005, OTB began using Groove® Virtual Office version 3.1, now part of the Microsoft® Office system, as the primary tool for internal and external collaboration. It has recently upgraded to Microsoft Office Groove 2007. Internally, OTB relies on Groove 2007 for lead tracking. “The Groove Forms tool made the customization of our lead tracking workspace very straightforward,” says Coutts. “We have a record for each customer prospect or active account, and consultants participating in developing the account can update the status and next steps within the workspace, and it’s easy to sort and view the status of each lead.” OTB consultants store thousands of records in this workspace.

For customer projects, worknets use Groove 2007 workspaces to work together, share and manage requirements documents, technical specifications, user interface prototypes, and many other types of in-progress project materials. Many of the documents the team works on in workspaces are created using the Microsoft Office Excel® 2007 spreadsheet software, the Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007 presentation graphics program, or Microsoft Office Word 2007. “The Microsoft Office system is one of those key bridging technologies for our worknets,” says Dick Federle, Solutions Architect at OTB. Also of great value to the highly dispersed teams are the Groove 2007 presence features. “We rely heavily on development teams in India,” says Coutts. “The presence icon shows us when a colleague who may be many time zones away is online at the same time, giving us the opportunity to send a message and communicate, in real time.”

OTB also uses Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 in conjunction with Groove 2007 for customer projects. “The document management capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 complement Office Groove 2007,” says Coutts. Many OTB customers have project stakeholders, such as a CIO, who may also be a stakeholder in other projects. Instead of asking that person to be involved with 10 or 20 workspaces, OTB can just publish specific materials out to SharePoint sites for review.

Benefits

Coutts and Federle say that the Groove 2007–based collaboration infrastructure has enabled their company to operate on a global scale without the overhead of a larger company, resulting in a measurable boost in productivity.

n Less travel. OTB consultants now work primarily from home offices, with some consultants working from customer locations when deployed on long-term assignments. “Groove 2007 has made it easier for OTB to attract and retain high-caliber individuals because we can offer a work/life balance that allows them to pursue a career they love without being continually on the road,” says Coutts.

n Better communication. “With Groove 2007, our project team, tools, and information are in one place and we spend much less time on the phone trying to manage version control,” says Coutts. “And the offline capabilities have been great for internal meetings. Consultants who can’t attend in person join in by phone and have access to the same workspace information on their laptops that we are looking at and discussing in the meeting—even if they don’t have an active Internet connection.” Changes made to Groove 2007 workspaces are automatically synchronized once an Internet connection is established, making it effortless for team members to stay up to date and always have the latest information.

n Enhanced security. OTB is highly confident that Groove 2007 is safe for sharing sensitive information, such as client and personnel records or patented technology information. “Not only is using Groove 2007 easy for our customers and partners, it’s highly secure because it uses an invitation-based model for security,” says Federle.

n Higher productivity. Groove 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 enable OTB worknets to accomplish more work. “Using Groove 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007, we’ve seen a bump in productivity of between 5 and 10 percent,” says Coutts. “As a small company with revenues just shy of U.S.$10 million per year, that’s a significant increase.” Coutts also claims that Groove 2007 has “brought back some of the water-cooler effect to communication. I can always see who is online in the workspace, and immediately send that person an instant message—ask a question, discuss an issue—even when that person is located halfway across the world.”