Winning at Small Ball in Project Services

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, each service line has developed “win plans” that are the cornerstone of our “Small Ball” initiative, whereby we deliberately and methodically grow revenues and profits by aggressively pursuing the right opportunities that allow us to grow the base business. Virtually every service line has added new customers over the last several months while continuing to understand the importance of servicing our existing customer base in a manner that moves us toward our vision of becoming the standard for operational excellence and customer service by which every company in our industry is measured. This success is in part is due to the many small things we are doing every day to improve our service delivery.

Some of the actions we have taken include hosting staff and field leadership forums to ensure engagement and alignment while enabling us to train everyone on what good customer service looks like. We are planning to have additional field leadership sessions as part of our ongoing employee engagement strategy. The same conversations around customer service are happening throughout the organization. For example, our power generation and mechanical call-out technicians gather monthly to discuss how we are servicing our customers and how we can solve additional challenges for our customers. This develops a sense of pride in workmanship that is obvious as we have gone a very long time without any rework.

We have also worked with our suppliers to give us better rates and flexible terms so that we can meet our customers’ needs. Additional improvement efforts include new project management reporting that I&E is using to provide more timely information to our customers regarding their projects. Operations is working with IT to deliver this to the entire project services organization. We are working on some other technology initiatives, but we will discuss those in a future article.

At the end of the day, “you” are our greatest asset as we are in the people business. As part of our win plans, we have many areas where we are looking to add great people to the team. The best way for us to find great employees is to ask our current great employees to recommend their friends and neighbors to join us. I challenge you to assist us by letting recruiting know of any prospective employees you believe could advance us toward achieving our vision. I also believe that as we reach out to the communities where we live that we will be supporting the creation of a more diverse workforce for our industry.

Several service lines have implemented additional workforce evaluation tools to allow us to better meet our customers’ long-term crew planning, which allows us to put our best and brightest in a position to “wow” our customers with their abilities. To this end we are strengthening the Knowledge and Skill assessment used at hiring, and our subject matter experts are performing periodic evaluations.

As you can tell, many of these projects tie into other strategic initiatives such as employee engagement and technology. We work hard to ensure alignment as we work on all of our strategic initiatives, and we truly appreciate all your efforts to support the delivery of of our strategies which bring us closer to achieving our vision.

Thanks for being dedicated to dominating our industry!