Google Apps Case Study: Global Energy Firm

Business Situation
The human resources department of global energy firm needed to develop a new set of leadership competencies for which they needed to gain input from a broad audience of leaders in multiple locations.  Getting feedback was critical to ensure that the new competencies would be validated and also adopted across the entire organization.

The Deployment Approach
Initially, the company planned to deploy a team in the field to conduct dozens of stakeholder focus groups using Excel or PowerPoint templates  for data capture and analysis.  An internal administrator was to merge data and rollup metrics into a management report for analysis daily through a manual process.  Recognizing the effort, expense and margin for error inherent in this approach, the company decided to use Google instead.  

The Partnership
Maven Wave, directed by HR experts at the company and at TalentRISE, designed a form and a simple process using Google docs. Training time was negligible and the project eliminated nearly 20 hours a week of administrative time normally spent performing data consolidation, verification, revision and metrics rollout.  In addition, the client gained real-time ability to analyze the feedback trends by  position level, by competency and location. The data was accurate, timely and led to better decision making as well as providing a repository of validation data to support compliance audits and benchmarks that can be used for future competency work.