Mike Oustamanolakis, PhD

Five companies, one rule

A group of companies had no shared way to file or find its contracts, patents and agreements. The programme meant to fix it was failing.

~18h/w → 2h/w

searching and meeting about documents

combined across the group; 15–20 hours a week before (estimate)

BeforeAfter
No shared way to name or file documents across five companies and a board
One naming rule: a file’s name says whose it is, what it is, and when
15–20 hours a week searching, calling and meeting about documents
About 2 hours a week
Companies in the group duplicating work without knowing
“Active projects” visible to all: duplicated work stopped
A programme failing under its previous manager
Back on track, and adopted immediately

Hours: estimate, combined across the group.

The search, re-created from the original design. Company and project names are invented.

Who

Client
The board of a group of five companies
Region
Macau, Taiwan, Guangzhou and Hong Kong: four legal systems
People
About 50, of whom about 40 in mainland China and Macau
My role
Programme Design Lead. Brought in to rescue the programme.

What

Each company kept its documents its own way. Finding one agreement for an audit meant asking around, calling and meeting. Companies in the group sometimes worked on the same thing without knowing. The programme to fix this had stalled: designers wanted freedom, engineers wanted structure, management wanted savings, and nobody held them together.

How

The naming rule that makes the search work: every company files the same way.
  1. Started with the board, not the backlog. We went through the brief line by line, cut what they did not need, and agreed what could actually be delivered.
  2. Gave each team its own brief inside the shared plan, with short check-ins every three days, under strict confidentiality.
  3. Made one rule for naming every document in every company, so a file’s name alone says whose it is, what kind it is and when it was made.
  4. Added one field everyone could see: active projects. Each company could now see what the others were working on.

Impact

Time spent across the group each week searching for documents and meeting about them: 15 to 20 hours before, about 2 hours after. Hours a week, across the group searching for documents, and calls and meetings about them Before 15–20 After about 2 Outlined part of the bar: the range of the estimate.
Estimate, combined across the group.