As a fast-paced industrial analytics startup, this leading energy-tech company is infusing data intelligence across all stages of a power production facility. Providing predictive analytics for the thermal power plant industry, creates an exciting work environment and a suite of solutions crucial for the proper maintenance of client assets. However, managing multiple projects with different stakeholders and deadlines, while ensuring timely delivery and high-quality results can make it difficult for employees to keep track of everything that’s happening.

The product development lead has experienced this fast-paced growth at his lean and budding organization. As someone who's in charge of aligning internal operations and project management processes, he had the opportunity to streamline collaboration and efficiency across 7-8 teams, involving both internal and external stakeholders. His current role requires him to work very cross-functionally since delivery impacts—and is impacted by—many teams involved in the overall project execution. The client organisation strives to create an industrial world that always performs at its peak with assets that never fail. They are helping Industries achieve this by enabling them to leverage their data for better-informed and timely decisions.

 

"As a young team of 54 people, our organization lacked solid structure and mechanisms to manage cross-functional projects. And we needed a platform to align our processes and operations."

Lead - Product Development

 

Collaboration: The Key to Successful Projects

As the company faced growing client demands and the need to constantly innovate, maintaining transparency within the team became crucial for the project manager and his team to keep everyone aligned with changes in product or procedure. This approach also allowed him to foster a culture of continuous improvement by being receptive to feedback and ensuring that the team is always on the same page as the customer.

As a company that provides predictive analytics for the thermal power plant industry, the focus is on the unique requirements of each plant. The primary challenge was to set up a process that was flexible and adaptable while still delivering high-quality results.

Predictive Analytics Dashboard

 

To keep up with the pace of innovation, the project lead approached Altudo, a leading consultancy in the space of project management services. Altudo helped his organisation set up flexible and adaptable processes that were a combination of product development, product implementation, and application development. 7-8 teams including data scientists, UI UX developers, DevOps engineers, and quality assurance analysts, have to work simultaneously on different modules to deliver high-quality products to customers.Asana’s work management solution was recommended as the ideal solution to give visibility on team responsibilities, coordinate on work across business units, and most importantly, coordinate product feature roll out to the market effectively.

 

"As a Project Manager, I'm responsible for coordinating with various departments to ensure high quality product development. The collaboration between teams was essential for successful deployment of our projects. We chose Asana for the very same reason."

Lead - Project Manager

Predictive Maintenance through Efficient Team Collaboration

The client team's deliverables are not one-size-fits-all since they work with predictive analytics. However, on a quarterly basis, they have a set of outputs that include an analytics tool, basic dashboards, predictive warnings, and efficiency calculations. Ownership of different modules is divided between different teams. The efficiency of a power plant is dependent on smooth collaboration between all teams due to varying degrees of complexities. The end product aims to provide visibility to power plants before any mechanical failure occurs.

Sprint Planning for Product Development

 

KPIs and Success Metrics

The client's predictive analytics platform is measured on early warning signals for power plant failures, AI/ML-based recommendations to improve reliability, and uncovering new insights. The dashboard provided real-time monitoring of critical KPIs like boiler efficiency and steam flow, giving the power plant team the necessary insights.

 

Highlights from Asana Implementation

• Asana + GitHub Integration

  To automatically sync GitHub pull request status updates to Asana tasks.

  The client is a product company with a lot of code repositories on GitHub. The development team wanted to eliminate any collaboration gaps that were occurring on GitHub and bring the entire ecosystem of developers onto Asana. The company wanted to have a one-stop platform for both project tracking, progress, communication and development. Asana was integrated with GitHub so that the entire ecosystem of developers could shift onto Asana. This allowed the company to have all their tools and communication integrated onto one platform, making it easier for them to manage their projects.

  Due to their need for custom development and varying customer needs, our client required a platform that could accommodate ad hoc changes and customizations to their workflows. Asana allowed dev teams to do so, while also providing visibility and communication tracking across their teams, leading to increased motivation and innovation.

  Altudo’s training sessions and proactive customer service, made the transition to Asana easier for the whole organisation. Altudo also helped with integrating client’s existing tools with Asana, allowing them to consolidate their communication and work management tools into one platform.

 

• 80% Reduction in Email Communications

  Asana helped client to significantly reduce their email usage, from around 50 to 100 emails per project to only 10 to 20 per project, resulting in an 80% reduction in email communication. This reduction in emails helped to eliminate redundant manual steps and automate processes, saving time and streamlining workflows. The Asana project had various tasks and sub-tasks, each assigned to different teams and team members, which helped to automate project management tasks and improve communication and collaboration between teams.

 

Key Asana features used by the client: 

• Goals: Set, track, and manage company goals while connecting it to work to achieve it for a single source of truth for team leads, executives, and individuals
• Multihoming: Save time and optimize redundancy by linking the same tasks across multiple projects
• Rules: Add rules to automate manual processes like triaging, assigning tasks, updating Asana fields, and more
• Reporting: Share valuable insights with the management in no time
• Portfolios: Organize strategic initiatives into Portfolios to monitor the status, timelines, and teammate workloads across projects
• Data Control: Control who can edit custom field values across all projects, so you can track all information consistently within your organization

 

"Rules are widely used by the client organization to cater to different departmental styles and working styles. This helped people get more comfortable with the tool and adopt it faster."

Head of Operations - Industrial AI

 

Business outcomes

The partnership with Altudo helped client streamline their internal operations and project management processes with Asana.

• This increased their process efficiency by 80% by automating manual tasks
• Gained client trust and satisfaction by being able to quantify milestones and deliverables, adding 100% project visibility from start to finish
• 50% reduction in delivery and turnaround time through better transparency and timely feedback loops
• Transparency enabled by Asana’s work management platform has helped in improving the quality of deliverables by increasing accountability and ownership.
• Data sharing has become a breeze with Asana providing a robust file sharing platform
• Tasks and subtasks creating higher accountability making individuals take ownership of their tasks more seriously, and this helps in increasing the quality of deliverables. As a result, client was able to prioritise customer experience and deliver high-quality projects promptly
• It helped to improve collaboration between teams and automate project management tasks

 

The product manager at client organisation explains how this transparency affords them the accuracy they need to make helpful, accurate recommendations to customers. By holding themselves and each other accountable, client has done a rare thing: achieved massive growth while still feeling the energy and speed of their early startup days.

To learn more about Asana implementation, contact us , and our team of consultants will get back to you soon.