Case Study: Netlife

The challenge

Netlife’s consultants work on a large selection of projects across a number of different industries, whilst the management team has to oversee putting together a large number of proposals at the same time.

Before the used CV Partner, the management team were using an ad hoc approach with several steps, using multiple tools to combine Word and PDF files with a traditional file server. The processes for storing and retrieving the
files they were using to build proposals were not really connected to the proposal process itself, with CVs managed, edited and imported manually for each new proposal.

What were they looking for in a new system?

As the management wasted a great deal of
time searching for individual CVs and the consultants would lose valuable time trying to update their CVs, any system needed to provide a solid framework for ensuring these processes could be improved.

They needed a system that was both easy to
use, but provided rich data about their teams and the projects they worked on.

Why CV Partner?

As Jørgen explains, “The CV Partner solution had everything we were looking for”. The User Interface (UI) would combine intuitive search functionality (both free text and fixed fields) with an automated index for storing and retrieving CVs. Each search action could process and filter CVs to produce more relevant results when searching for relevant CVs.

This feature would function much like a search engine, helping to refine searches and narrow down results by using either the free text option for unique searches, or using the defined search fields provided in the UI. For Netlife Design, this would allow the management team to focus in on specific skills or qualifications during a search.

With the previous system, Netlife had struggled to get a full overview of the skills in the company. But now they would have a place to search and store all the relevant data to better answer
questions about their internal knowledge. They would no longer have to make rough guesstimates of what project experience existed in the company.  To create new proposals, they could replace the painstaking manual process of searching and collecting the right information from multiple CVs and locations, that may or may not be updated, with an automated process based on customised search queries for a particular proposal.

The Pilot Phase

As CV Partner is a cloud-based solution, there was no need for the Netlife team to prepare any network infrastructure or install new software. Jørgen led the implementation project on his own from Netlife’s end and a trial period was commenced, lasting approximately four weeks. Although the Netlife management team felt sure that CV Partner had the potential to offer them everything they were searching for on paper, the four-week trial helped them see the tool in action, within the context of daily operations. The pilot period helped them to evaluate the true value of the tool in helping to save time and money, alongside seeing how it would improve the data used for creating new proposals.

As the pilot period was drawing to a close, Jørgen, supported by the CV Partner team, presented a business case to Netlife’s executive management. In it, they analysed exactly how much time could potentially be saved by the company, both by introducing an optimised proposal workflow and by individual consultants spending less time on updating CVs. After the business case report was completed, “the decision for giving the go ahead for the full-scale roll out was very easy” explains Jørgen. From the first email in late January, the tool became fully operational across the company by the end of March.

The implementation phase was also a learning curve for the CV Partner team, helping them to understand what steps should be taken in order to deliver the most efficient implementation strategy. As a result, the four-week implementation strategy was developed to better assist clients in migrating to the new system and has become standard procedure for new projects. This included preparing the client for the various actions they should undertake and which decisions or trade-offs they might face.

The Roll-Out Phase

From the first email in late January, the decision for rolling out the tool across the company was taken by the end of March. As Jørgen points out, this led to probably the most challenging aspect of the project - how to migrate the CVs of roughly 70 team members onto the new system in order for each user to complete the set-up of their individual Master CV. Faced with a time consuming process of manually importing the data from old Word files, this was the biggest hurdle to Netlife getting the maximum benefit from the system in a short timeframe.

After working with CV Partner’s consultants to arrive at a solution, it was decided that CV Partner would perform a data scrape from the Netlife website. Each consultant had a profile page on the company website summarising their skills and project experience from which data could be extracted to form the basis for an initial import for each Master CV. The rest of the data was then manually completed by a consultant at Netlife who was about to take paternity leave and so had little ongoing project work and some spare time.

However, after the initial set-up and completion for each CV, Jørgen says that “it was plain sailing from then on”. The time of setting up the Master CV was paid off by the time the company clawed back later on, with consultants able to update their CV in a few short minutes. The Netlife management team were impressed by the fact that their consultants would never have to create another CV at the company, but simply keeping growing their Master CV. The Netlife consultants had no problems adjusting to the system, finding it incredibly intuitive to navigate the UI and execute new functions. To make the transition smoother, Netlife’s management utilised the ‘help-text’ function. This allowed the management to fill in text boxes offering guidelines on how to complete each section of the CV. The help text was displayed to each user as they began completing their Master CV, enabling greater consistency across individual CVs and achieve company objectives more easily. Because the feature was an internal part of the system, there was no need to develop a time consuming routine for sharing the guidelines with all 70+ staff and in both Oslo and Bergen.

In response to the challenges of earlier projects such as this, CV Partner has now developed an automatic parsing solution alongside data scrapes, allowing them to perform large data imports from old Word documents to import the majority of the data required.

The Results

Netlife’s consultants now spend considerably less time keeping their CVs updated - something they’re very happy about. And Jørgen points out that it provides the consultants a chance to build a richer CV, displaying more of their skills and qualifications in a way that is more visible within the search index. This has given Netlife’s consultants the opportunity to get involved with more exiting projects because their CV’s have greater depth and align more closely to project proposals.

For the management it has meant, quite simply, spending less time creating proposals for new tendering processes.