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Innotas Customer Success Stories

 

Hamilton Beach Brands implements Innotas IT Governance Solution to Partner with the Business

Jerry Hodge, Hamilton Beach Brands, Inc."Before we implemented Innotas, we suspected that we had about 20 identified projects. Once we cataloged all of our projects in Innotas, we learned that there were more than 60. Innotas has helped us quantify the business' demand for IS projects, understand the status of the resources we have available, and work with the business to make sure we're focusing on the right projects."Jerry Hodge
Senior Director, Information Services
Hamilton Beach Brands, Inc.

Bottom Line

Supply and demand in IT departments is usually about people and projects, and this holds true for Hamilton Beach. "The demands on our IT department from the business are increasing," said Jerry Hodge, Director of Information Services. The demand for projects was outstripping the available human resources to do the work. Manual systems no longer provided a reliable picture of his team's current commitments and overall capacity. Something had to change.

"We were managing project requests and demands with spreadsheets, and I had to ask project managers about the status of their many projects on a regular basis." Jerry Hodge was looking for ways to meet the growing demand for projects. Bottom line: "Innotas has helped us quantify the business' demand for IT projects, understand the status of the resources we have available, and work with the business to make sure we're focusing on the right projects."

The Situation

The primary drivers for change were around project execution. Projects were coming in late and not meeting the expectations of the management team. The project managers were trained and working hard, but the outcomes were not quite where Hodge wanted to be. Project Management training did not seem to be enough. They decided to take a look at IT Governance as a different approach to projects, and then the pieces started to fall into place.

"Before we implemented Innotas, we assumed we were working on about 20 projects. Once we logged all of our projects in Innotas, we learned that there were more than 60 projects in flight. We were surprised." When the team finally had an accurate picture of what they were actually working on, there was a renewed focus on creating a governance process.

"The large volume of active projects was a driver to help us implement the governance processes. It pushed us to work more closely with business partners in the business units. We wanted to make sure that we were focused and prioritizing the things that we need to work on." Since IS was serving different business units, that put additional accountability pressure on the management team.

Visibility into the facts changed the nature of how decisions were made. "The business' reaction to the visibility that Innotas has given me has been very positive. We can sit down and have positive discussions about where we want to take the business."

Selection and Implementation

Because of the speed of implementation and the incremental cost, "We were attracted to the SaaS model from the start," said Hodge. While Hamilton Beach is relatively new to using SaaS solutions to provide IT services, Hodge sees SaaS as an emerging opportunity. Innotas is one of their first ventures into using SaaS, but it's not likely to be their last. "We can take a look at how well that's worked for us and maybe we can use this as a springboard to other applications."

Results and Relationship

Now management can tune the team by using facts instead of intuition. "One of the things we learned was with our infrastructure team. We thought, 'Well, maybe they're spending a third of their time on projects, a third of their time on incidents, and a third on other work.' What we discovered is that people weren't spending time the way we thought they were, and, in particular, they were spending far too much time fixing things that were broken and not advancing the projects that were most important." As a result, the team has engaged their vendors to take on more break/fix-type work so that they can focus their energies where they would create the most value to the business.

In addition, the relationship between the business and IT has improved. "Now I feel like we are starting to create the partnership." By focusing on priorities and providing visibility, Hodge has been able to close some of the traditional gaps between IT and the business. "We want to make sure we're working on the right things because we have so many demands and limited resources."

Project execution has improved as well. "Now we've got visibility into how projects are progressing, and, if one of the indicators start going into that yellow and red area, I can then intervene or one of my managers can intervene to help get the project back on track." Looking ahead, Hodge is ready for what's coming next. "There's no sign of things slowing down, but I can see that people are getting it. The lights are going on."

Customer Profile

As one of the country's leading distributors of small kitchen appliances, Hamilton Beach Brands, Inc. sells over 35 million appliances every year.

The company's most famous brands — Hamilton Beach, Eclectrics, Proctor Silex and TrueAir — are found in households across America, Canada and Mexico.