Communicate
Creating connections that drive success
Leverage our inbuilt communication platform to simplify communicating with end-users, stakeholders, and teams. Build strong, productive relationships within your business that drive action and participation within your audience.
Sending the Right Message
More than just email
Effective communication is the cornerstone of every successful transformation yet many organisations approach this crucial activity using only an email client and a spreadsheet. While this might appear to be a cost-effective in the short term, it introduces several problems that have the potential to negatively impact the project:
- Even for small projects, a manual system would require a small team of dedicated resources to compile, track and respond to emails, preventing staff from being used more strategically
- The system would only run during business hours which slows the responsiveness and efficiency of the team, especially during holiday periods and staff absence
- Information is stored in email, making it difficult to share or create reports that are used to make decisions
Finite resources also limits the project’s ability to scale the communications plan and provide an enhanced experience for end-users.
ManagementStudio enables organisations to plan their communication strategy ahead of time, manage interaction with end-users, and monitor responses.
Build a Community
ManagementStudio’s approach to communication puts email at the centre of every module within the platform, providing a level of user engagement and tracking that’s unparalleled in manual systems. But communication isn’t just about email, ManagementStudio uses surveys and forms to brings new ways of maintaining a dialogue with end-users:
- Focused Email Campaigns: Use ManagementStudio’s automation engine to create email campaigns that will automatically send emails on a predefined schedule, such as t-minus emails
- Invite User Feedback: Ratify project information by inviting users to review and update project information
- Testing Made Easy: Create multiple test sign-offs for scenarios such as UAT, QA, and compatibility that can be linked to multiple items
- Learning From Your Users: Issue multiple satisfaction services to baseline and improve the service that you’re providing
- User Scheduling: Empower users to book their preferred deployment slot, mitigating the need for a large team of dedicated project schedulers
- Build Sheets: Easily generate an itemised itinerary of components prior to working with a user or device.
- Request Forms: Create bespoke forms to enable the team to collect any information that’s relevant to the project
Email Campaigns
One of the best ways for organisations to engage with their users and improve audience participation is with personalised emails that are delivered at key points throughout the project lifecycle. ManagementStudio’s email engine brings the power and flexibility to create a truly engaging experience for your audience:
- Easily create emails that reflect your brand using custom colours, fonts, and images
- Seamlessly inject information from the ManagmentStudio database to create personalised emails
- Automatically follow-up with users that haven’t responded for a set number of days
- Extend the functionality to automatically attach responses to corresponding user records in ManagementStudio
Email in ManagementStudio benefits from our powerful automation engine to create campaigns that puts the user at the centre of your communications:
- Time Based: Issue a series of emails over a defined period of time. For example, a user could be reminded about the time, location and engineer involved in their migration the day before, or provided with useful links to getting started with Windows 11 the day after their migration.
- Event Based: Automatically send an email when a defined action has occurred. For example, email a user inviting them to book their Windows 11 migration slot once all their applications are ready.
Invite User Feedback
Organisations will often see employees move around the business as individuals take on new opportunities or business units are restructured. When personnel changes happen, it’s common that some of the corporate systems that provide data to ManagementStudio, such as Active Directory, are not always updated. To avoid costly deployment delays and disruption to your user estate, users can ratify key information that’s held in ManagementStudio and update it where appropriate.
For example, take the scenario of a user that has changed location and department as part of a new role. If this information hasn’t been updated in Active Directory, your deployment engineer would be building the user’s new device with the wrong departmental applications and travelling to the wrong location to install it.
ManagementStudio makes for it easy for organisations to engage with users early in the process to ensure that you’re making plans based on accurate information.
Testing Made Easy
Testing and quality assurance is a fundamental component of delivering a high-quality service to your organisation. A refined testing process ensures that resources are fit for purpose when released, which ultimately reduces project costs and disruption whilst improving overall user satisfaction.
Test sign-offs are supported in all of ManagementStudio’s primary modules and can collect results for several test types, including user acceptance testing (UAT), quality assurance (QA) and compatibility tests. The testing component also allows an organisation to test a resource against multiple scenarios, for example, a different set of test questions would be required when testing an application that’s locally installed versus accessed over thin client.
Tests are assigned to any individual within the organisation and require only a web browser to access the questions. Email is used to notify testers and contains all the information they need to access the test. Follow-up emails are automatically issued if a test isn’t completed in the time allocated for the work.
ManagementStudio removes the need to manually issue and collate test results, which often delays a resource from moving into production. All test results are sent back to ManagementStudio in real time ensuring that the project team has real-time visibility and can progress resources as soon as testing is complete.
Learning From Your Users
User satisfaction plays a crucial role in every project that your organisation will undertake. Over time, low satisfaction has the potential to jeopardise future projects and foster negativity towards IT, resulting in poor engagement from your users.
Although measuring satisfaction helps businesses to identify areas of improvement, many organisations will only baseline their performance at the end of a project as it’s quite time consuming to request, collate and analyse the feedback.
ManagementStudio makes it easier to ask your users for feedback and learn from their experiences. Surveys provide a way for the project to collect feedback at key points throughout the process. For example, a satisfaction survey can be automatically emailed to a user three days after their Windows 11 migration. The results are stored in real-time which, in conjunction with our powerful reporting engine, simplifies the process of identifying potential areas of improvement that can be fixed before becoming a major problem.
In the long term, a successful, well received project ensures that future innovation or change is embraced.
User Scheduling
Scheduling deployment slots for your users is incredibly time consuming for many organisations. Project schedulers will need to work around different shift patterns, existing commitments, and periods of time when users are out of the office – and in most cases, without access to diaries.
To significantly simplify this, ManagementStudio provides two ways to schedule deployment slots:
- Manual: Project schedulers will allocate users to slots. This works better for departments with staff that have relatively static diaries, such as call centres.
- Self-Scheduled: Users can choose their preferred slot within a given window, e.g. 2 weeks.
Allowing users to choose a slot that’s convenient for them is far more efficient for project schedulers. What’s more, organisations can leverage ManagementStudio’s automation engine to create a workflow that does this work automatically.
For example, once ManagementStudio has detected that all applications for a particular user are in production, the system can move the user to the next step in the process and automatically issue an email with links to the self-scheduling portal.
Not only does this provide a better user experience, users are processed quicker using a smaller project team compared to a manual approach. This saves time and money for organisations and makes the PMO more agile because resources can be assigned to more workstreams.
Request Forms
There are often times in a project where teams require additional information from a user – perhaps application owners are required to complete the discovery or additional details are required about a specific application to support a decision.
End-users can easily contribute to projects using web-based forms that integrate directly with ManagementStudio. Our solution makes it incredibly easy to request information and centrally store responses for all users to review and report on.
Collaborate
Contribute to multiple workstreams with colleagues, partners, and suppliers.