With employee numbers almost doubling to 780 and expansion into media monitoring in Chinese and Bahasa, Media Monitors (now known as iSentia) needed an external partner to help them manage and monitor increasingly complex projects. Here’s how PM-Partners helped to lift project management execution to support their rapid expansion.

Highlights

• Media Monitors was struggling with an extra layer of complexity after making moves into the Asian market.
• PM-Partners delivered a variety of advisory, training and delivery solutions – from organisational capability development, to project governance, consulting and delivery, and much more.
• As a result of PM-Partners input, project management skills were enhanced and ingrained across the business.
• Media Monitors was better able to respond to market forces, including leveraging the power of social and online media insights to provide clients with real-time intelligence updates.

Customer background

As Australia’s leading media monitoring, intelligence and insights solution provider, Media Monitors (now known as Isentia) decided to spread its wings and expand the range and flexibility of its products. Not only that, they chose to branch out into Asia and become a significant player in the media collection and analysis industry beyond their established borders. As this occurred during a time of unprecedented reconfiguration of the media landscape, Media Monitors needed external support to help them manage increasingly complex projects.

The challenge

Media Monitors already had a storied history of being able to change and adapt rapidly to market movements. However, with the advent of online and social media, they needed external project management support to stay ahead of rapid developments to ensure the organisation’s relevance and improve their market position.

Opening new operations and making acquisitions offshore added a new layer of complexity to managing the business. Add to that employee numbers almost doubling to 780 and expansion into media monitoring in Chinese and Bahasa, and it’s clear why Media Monitors needed an external partner to help them manage and monitor their challenging projects.

PM-Partners was identified as the ideal partner to provide the relevant expertise across a variety of advisory, training and delivery solutions.

How PM-Partners helped

After investigating the current state of the market, the media-monitoring landscape in the near term, and their specific pain points, PM-Partners provided Media Monitors with a variety of services, including:

• Organisational capability development
• Project governance
• Consulting and delivery
• Project management education, training and certification
• Electronic project management solutions
• Online tools to support new business processes.

PM-Partners also introduced governance reviews across the organisation on a monthly basis. This was to ensure all project implementations were transparent and accountable to a clear hierarchy. This transparency extended to return on investment, which was monitored with business-realisation reports that ensured robust communication from the board level down.

Outcomes delivered

Thanks to PM-Partners’ wide-ranging solutions, improved project management skills were ingrained across the business giving Media Monitors better control of complex initiatives.

The organisation was able to confidently manage its multi-regional, multi-lingual databases, as well as leverage insights from online and social media sources. Their biggest challenge was in determining how to get their products quickly into the market – PM-Partners helped improve the agility of the business to, for instance, deliver to customer groups based on industry rather than geographical lines.

One key example of Media Monitors thriving in the evolving media landscape is in how social media radically changed their business processes, particularly given the use of Twitter to broadcast updates around developing issues in real-time. With the support of PM-Partners’ training and advisory services, Media Monitors was able to provide clients with up-to-date intelligence about Twitter, with a shelf life of hours or even minutes rather than days, which historically had been the norm.

“It’s all about throughput. That is our new mantra. Our people can now see the throughput and they are getting on board.

“PM-Partners helped Media Monitors develop a strategic methodology that placed a premium on throughput. Strategy maps were designed to ensure that the methodologies used were transparent and that ‘actions are linked to the rhetoric’. We have much better control of these projects now. It is a key part of bringing agility into the organisation.”

– John Croll, CEO (former), Media Monitors (Isentia)

Thanks to PM-Partners’ holistic services, particularly in helping to set up their Strategic Review Board, Media Monitors was able to be more strategic in its selection of projects. This ensured each project was consistent with the company’s overarching strategy, was able to use the most appropriate resources, and was implemented on time and on budget.

Interested in lifting your organisation’s project management capability to better respond to an increasingly dynamic operating environment? Contact the experts at PM-Partners or call us on 1300 70 13 14 today.