Case Study 02
Idea Hopper Application
Contact Energy Limited is one of New Zealand’s largest energy companies, with both a Generation & Development (G&D) and Customer (retail) arm. G&D has over 300 staff and operate 11 power stations around New Zealand.
THE PROBLEM
G&D was keen to develop a digital platform where staff could suggest business improvement ideas or raise challenges and enlist help to solve them. After looking at ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions, Contact approached DTL to see whether it was possible to create a custom solution utilising their existing platform, and in doing so, make it easy for staff to access it through a single sign-on.
WHAT WE DID
DTL ran the project using Agile Methodology, with a combined team of the DTL technical team and a Contact-assigned Product Owner and Business Analyst to ensure that the business needs were well represented and developed correctly.
Contact’s requirements included:
- The ability for staff to pitch improvement ideas and raise challenges easily
- The ability to track and proactively manage idea progression through various stages to completion
- Systems-generated communications
- The ability for staff to collaborate on business challenges.
“DTL guided Contact staff in the implementation of Agile – helping us write better User Stories, and ensuring we understood the responsibilities of being a Product Owner and the impact that role could have on the project. It was fun, effective and provided Contact staff with professional development along the way.”
The Idea Hopper was developed using new technology (a React JS single page application hosted on Contact’s existing SharePoint platform using SharePoint APIs to populate the data required for each of the five stages of idea progression. Simple, smart screen layouts were utilised to make it easy for staff to submit ideas and interact with business challenges.
Additional features included:
- Automated workflows to proactively progress ideas, avoiding potential risk of hold ups through the assessment and delivery process; and,
- A summary dashboard to visually display the number of ideas submitted and the business value achieved.
THE OUTCOME
The Idea Hopper was extremely well received by Contact Energy, with positive feedback from the Product Owner throughout the delivery process. The Product Owner was highly engaged, resulting in quick turnaround of business questions and UAT feedback cycles – all benefiting the project flow and final delivery.
Having a fully engaged DTL team meant the Idea Hopper was delivered on time and on budget, and by levering existing Contact technologies, no extra ongoing costs were incurred to the business.
Operationally, the G&D team has embraced the use of the Idea Hopper (fondly known by staff as ‘The Hopper’) and have adopted its use into their standard operational processes.
Since Contact began recording & tracking the progress on improvement ideas with The Hopper, the G&D team has received hundreds of ideas from their staff, and progressed 160+ into deliverable projects, resulting in calculated business value in the millions of dollars.
“DTL guided Contact staff in the implementation of Agile – helping us write better User Stories, and ensuring we understood the responsibilities of being a Product Owner and the impact that role could have on the project. It was fun, effective and provided Contact staff with professional development along the way. DTL suggested the use of existing Contact infrastructure (i.e. SharePoint) to build the product – we would never have worked that out on our own !”
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