Success Story
Maintaining Operations When Key Employees Leave
How do you ensure continuity if employees with vital knowledge leave the company?
Challenges
Mountaintop Consulting works with companies to transform their marketing efforts, client outreach, and leadership capabilities.
The consultancy's approach to projects, while very effective, was mostly undocumented. The project manager knew the key stakeholders, responsible parties, milestones, and tasks that had to be performed.
However, that knowledge didn't exist elsewhere in an organized way. If the project manager were to leave Mountaintop Consulting, the company would have to reconstruct all of this information, creating a real risk to its business.
Xavier's Approach
Mountaintop Consulting brought me on to establish clear business processes and to streamline its documentation for project and relationship managers.
I performed an analysis of the existing resources for client engagement. These included a trove of notes, templates, documents, and emails.
Based on my review of this information, I held several working sessions with the company's leadership. Together, we defined what processes should include, which employee roles should handle these tasks, and deadlines for deliverables and key milestones.
Solutions
Documented business processes for client engagement
I created documents to cover the company's key processes. Together, they identify stakeholders, responsible parties, milestones, and best practices. This information allows other employees at Mountaintop Consulting to step in quickly and take over a client engagement if needed.
Digital project management software
I converted business processes into a workflow that employees can access through Teamwork (the company's project management software). The digital workflow helps keep projects on track; tasks are auto-assigned to the responsible party and have a corresponding due date.
As the consultancy grows, both the documentation and the project management software will aid in faster and more efficient onboarding of new employees.
Documented 5 Processes
to create consistency and establish accountability
“Xavier was a great thought partner for our team. He really got to know our business and was insightful in translating general best practices to our specific software and business model. We look forward to working with him again.”
Precious Williams Owodunni, Founder & CEO, Mountaintop Consulting
"Xavier has been a great resource to our consulting firm. His ability to see both the big picture and translate that into the necessary details has been instrumental to our success of our 'process mapping' project. Overall, we highly recommend working with Xavier for your business consulting needs. Xavier is a fantastic thought partner who delivers work on time, communicates effectively, and does it all with a smile!"
Claire Holmes, Project Manager, Mountaintop Consulting