how lexisnexis accelerated their project turnaround with attask

TURNING AROUND FASTER How LexisNexis increased their turnaround from 68% to 88%

LexisNexis

•  Industry: Professional Services

•  Department: Custom Web Visibility

•  Location: Jersey City, New Jersey

•  Employees: 18,000

•  120-person, agency-style group builds and maintains websites for lawyers, receiving hundreds of requests daily

CUSTOMER BACKGROUND

Small cross-functional teams within the group worked out of a homegrown solution and spreadsheets to track and report their work.

NEEDING GLOBAL VISIBILITY

Unfortunately, the teams and their tools made it difficult for management to see what the group was working on and how resources could be better used between their teams in the States and India.


The homegrown solution tracked tasks but lacked due dates, email notifications, or alerts. The individual teams were inconsistent in how they maintained their spreadsheets.


As a result, the group director couldn’t even see what projects were in the queue, how many were late, or where they were in the production process.


Some teams were more productive than others, but the director didn’t have the visibility to shift resources across teams to optimize group productivity.


Delivery of customer websites was erratic, and the group’s project turnaround rate languished at 68 percent.


“What we didn’t have was global visibility. At any given time, a manager wouldn’t be able to say how many builds were in the queue or how many projects were in the queue, how many were late, where they were. We relied on the individual teams to publish that information and keep up their spreadsheets.” –Frank Grippo, Director of Web Services


A FAST, FLEXIBLE SOLUTION

At this time, the director discovered AtTask. The solution could combine their various work scenarios into one system of engagement. With all the data gathered in the AtTask relational database, the director could build customized reports and queues.


Best of all, the solution could be implemented to fit the group’s requirements in just a few weeks. Among other options, AtTask emerged as the clear winner and they started with the solution in July 2010.

“With AtTask, we could create custom data points and tons of reports. We could say how many tasks were created per day, how many we were closing. By adding in some functions, I could compute the age of a task and see what percentage of the time we were meeting our SLA.” – Frank Grippo, Director of Web Services


The director adapted AtTask to be the group’s primary ticketing system, and the visibility the team had needed began to emerge.

TURNING THINGS AROUND

Reports told in real-time what the group was working on in invaluable detail: how many new orders were coming in; the average age of websites in progress; average time from one milestone to the next; how many tasks had closed by individual—whatever the director wanted to see.


He even built a report to compute the age of a task against the group’s 48-hour service-level agreement (SLA) and how often they were meeting their SLA.


This visibility made it easy for the director to shift resources and improve the team’s productivity.


Unfinished requests the group had received in the morning could be pushed in AtTask to their team in India to finish the request overnight.


With AtTask, the group soon exceeded customer expectations, delivering on requests in half the time their SLA’s required.


Using AtTask data, the group streamlined their QA testing process and increased their turnaround rate from 68% to 88%.


“Tickets get assigned to us at 8:00 eastern time in the morning. With AtTask, if we can’t get to it by the end of the day, we push that over to India and then India works on it. The next day, the work is done. So, even though we have a 48-hour turnaround time, we get most of our work done in 24 hours because we have two teams working in the same system in AtTask.” –Frank Grippo, Director of Web Services


Summary


The group became fully integrated with team in India.

Delivery time decreased to 24 hours, half of SLA.

Group turnaround rate grew from 68% to 88%.

how lexisnexis accelerated their project turnaround with attask

Technology

group director

director didnt

homegrown solution

director of web services

individual teams

custom web visibility

flexible solution best

group productivity