Customer Story: Discover the Power of Remote Collaboration
Several years ago, Jennifer Herron, the CEO of Action Engineering was using traditional paper sticky notes as a method of group brainstorming and working through projects and challenges as a team.
As a consulting firm with clients all over North America, Jennifer tasked her staff with finding a digital alternative that would allow for remote collaboration — and that's when the team at Action Engineering discovered Stormboard.
About Action Engineering
Colorado-based Action Engineering is a consulting and training company that helps their clients across Canada and the United States break away from traditional methods to transform their manufacturing practices.
“Action Engineering helps organizations large and small achieve their Model-Based Enterprise goals by motivating stakeholders, delivering training, and providing business planning and implementation consulting services.”
The challenges — collaborating in a virtual environment
The team at Action Engineering are no strangers to collaboration. Jennifer and her group of business consultants and trainers see the power of getting words and ideas out in front of people and working together to find solutions. But before finding Stormboard, Action Engineering faced a set of all-too-familiar challenges. With clients spanning the continent, and internal staff spread across the United States, the team struggled to get everyone together consistently.
Led by one of Action Engineering's own Social Scientists, the team went in search of a digital tool that could help them bring the power of group brainstorming to a virtual environment — they found Stormboard in January 2019, and according to Jennifer — they aren't looking back. "We are planning on staying more remote and definitely using Stormboard going forward."
The solution? Stormboard
Stormboard has changed the way that Action Engineering handles day-to-day work — both internally and with clients. Jennifer explains, "One of the reasons that my social scientist wanted us to brainstorm this way is because we are constantly with a bunch of subject matter experts, including myself, and I can’t get my ideas out fast enough. But I can typically type them on sticky notes fast enough to kind of throw them out in order and then you can go deeper into it."
For a business like Action Engineering, it is key that the team can adapt to the situation or client — and their tools need to be able to do so as well. Jennifer notes that Action Engineering doesn't just use Stormboard for 'traditional' brainstorming, but also to help clients with Mission, Vision, and Objectives work, Pain Point collection exercises, Retrospectives, and ad hoc tasks and meetings that fit the needs and thoughts of the client at any given time.
Internally, social scientists working at Action Engineering are consistently using Stormboard to better accommodate communication and team exercises. As an Agile team, SCRUM practices and retrospectives are a key component to Action Engineering’s success, and Stormboard’s variety of pre-built Agile templates help the team manage those practices.
Jennifer muses that the hundreds of templates available at Stormboard — and the ability to create and customize your own — are instrumental to Action Engineering's work. "We kind of make our own as we go — they are all kind of unique. They are unique for each customer and client. Sometimes we use the [pre-built] templates to spawn ideas and then we take it and modify it."
Action Engineering’s use of Stormboard extends far beyond simply brainstorming and customizing templates too. Like many Stormboard users, Jennifer has a few go-to features that she relies on to make her day more efficient. "I love the reporting feature. That data dump right away is super helpful for us because we can get all of our ideas out there and then immediately send a data dump to a client and that’s HUGE time savings for us."
“It’s the speed of data collection that has really been the most helpful for us and for our clients.”
With most of Action Engineering’s work being done remotely, Stormboard’s variety of tools are a perfect fit for a group that relies on a collaborative environment. Jennifer explains that leveraging the timer function in Stormboard is a big piece of keeping things on track, but in a world where the team is constantly combing through large piles of data on a daily basis, it is functions like Voting that shine. “We love the votes, the votes are huge for us. A lot of the time we are doing massive data collection, and then at the end of gathering all of the data, we say, ‘okay, you have three votes, there are a hundred things, go pick your top three.’”
After a session with a huge data output, Jennifer relies on Stormboard’s reports as one of her key tools. “I just dumped out two Microsoft Word Reports today, I think those ones are really nice because it allows you to just copy and paste all the materials, and then it’s already done in this formatted report.”
The Result
Adjusting to a remote or virtual setting isn't always a walk in the park, but Jennifer has found that through their use of Stormboard, her team and clients alike are finding new ways to keep work fun and interesting. "It’s kind of fun for people, I think. It’s kind of fun for people to do that live collaboration. We always laugh because whenever anyone new gets into it, they ask, 'what are those little dots moving around the screen [Stormboard's Realtime Cursor Position function]?' And we are like, 'that’s you guys!'"
Since adopting Stormboard and adjusting to life after COVID-19, Jennifer and the team at Action Engineering have not just adapted their day-to-day work, but have completely embraced the power of remote collaboration. "We actually had to upgrade our [Stormboard seat] licenses for that, because we are not traveling at all and we used to be traveling consultants — we have moved entirely remote at this point."
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