IBM - Collaboration Solution – New

Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Collaboration Solution – New

Nomination Title: Event Tracker

Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, explaining the features, functions, benefits, and results to date of the nominated new or new-version product or service, OR a written essay of up to 650 words describing the same? (Choose one): An essay/case study of up to 650 words

The Challenge

Global Sales Incentives (GSI) is a worldwide team of approximately 900 IBMers who are responsible for motivating 30,000 IBM sellers and paying their commissions. We follow a strict process to ensure sellers have sales plans in place and deadlines are met to deliver timely payments.

Before deployment of the GSI Event Tracker Tool, worldwide teams maintained their calendars separately. As a part of the GSI Transformation, it became apparent that utilizing one global calendar would be more efficient andmuch more collaborative.

The Solution

Event Tracker is a web-based tool created and deployed by GSI in 1Q-2019 as a solution to our calendar efficiency problem. It was developed using AngularJS, Java Persistence API (JPA), and DB2 to host multiple GSI calendars on a single platform.

Event Tracker was designed to be role-based, meaning every calendar has a predefined set of roles. Users can request access to a specific calendar by updating their roles.

While there is still a need for multiple calendars because of multiple organizations, having all calendars on a single platform allows for sharing across all of GSI. This minimizes conflicts and sync activities as appropriate. As new events are created, users have the ability to add dependencies between activities.

For every calendar, there are three views available –Tabular View,Calendar View, andDetail View. The tabular view provides a line-by-line view of activities, while the calendar view helps users in visualizing which activity is due on which date. Users can easily navigate to the next year/next month. They can also see the calendar in monthly/weekly/daily views. For each activity, there is also a detail view that provides the user with all dependent activities.

Users can filter the calendar activities specific to each process within GSI. They also have the option to filter based on sales cycle, and filtered events can be easily downloaded into a comma-separated values (CSV) file. More importantly, users can see the broader picture of activities across GSI in a single view, which was not possible in the past. This allows for greater collaboration and better decision making.

Today, GSI has deployed three primary calendars for worldwide use:

Deployment Calendar – GSI’s primary calendar drives timely execution and getting sellers on plan at the beginning of each semi-annual sales cycle.
Operational Calendar – Used by the GSI Transformation team to drive process improvements and transformation projects.
Strategic Tools, Analytics and Robotics (STAR) Calendar – Used by STAR team to drive requirements for new tools, analytics dashboards, and automation activities

Although some features are standard among all of these, each of the calendars is customizable.

During development, it was apparent that the need for collaboration between GSI teams was being met. The challenge, however, was communicating with the team, understanding their requirements, and then prioritizing them.

A SLACK channel was created to overcome this challenge, where users posted technical issues and new requirements. In addition, our development team scheduled demo meetings before each deployment to manage expectations and gather feedback using agile methods

The Results and Benefits

Approximately 900 GSI employees have 'Viewer' access to Event Tracker.

Of those, 114 employees have a unique role apart from 'Viewer,' depending on which calendar they want to use. Maintaining their schedules via Event Calendar saves users approximately 1 hour per week. This has led to a full year's savings of nearly 6000 hours for the IBM Corporation, which translates to a real savings value of almost $250k.

Feedback from users has been extremely positive with comments such as:
“This tool has allowed the teams globally to collaborate on key activities. I know that quantity of meetings have decreased and constant corrections have decreased.”
“Great time saver as things from Deployment calendar copied to Operational Calendar”
“The communication is clean and people can instantly see updates, there is no version control issues.”
“So easy to navigate!”