Business Situation
Mitsubishi Estate Co., Ltd. is a comprehensive real estate developer in Japan operating a spectrum of businesses in diverse fields. Due to COVID-19, the way employees work has changed dramatically with a mix of remote and in office work environments that presented communication and meeting challenges. While they moved from face-to-face communications using digital tools such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft SharePoint which was also being used to disseminate important internal company information required employees to proactively visit that portal on their own.
To make it easier for employees to collaborate, management decided to consolidate information across the two tools in Teams and chose Avanade help, particularly due to our strong track record as a Microsoft solutions provider.
We realized that our team having the ‘courage’ and driving towards resolution without giving up to improve employee workstyle innovation were achieved due to the excellent teamwork with Avanade and the accumulation of Scrum development to date.
Solution
A proof of concept was completed in five months, focussing on how to deliver important information in a timely and easy-to-understand manner. We proposed creating an application based on a Scrum development method that provides for incremental releases of the solution in an agile and timely manner. While the team at Mitsubishi Estate was a bit apprehensive at first about trying an agile approach, they decided to adopt it, realising the value of our full support and guidance, plus acquiring this type of development experience would be advantageous to them.
The Scrum development was largely conducted remotely, with an in-person general review of key milestones. Improvements were made along the day using PDCA (plan, do, check, act). Together, we created a prototype application, reviewed it in Scrum and repeated the improvement cycle. Released two months later was “miTene”, a portal that plugs into Teams and provides employees with the information they need.
Results
Using “miTene”, employees can anticipate saving five minutes per day in their productivity and they can also now:
- Receive notifications twice daily
- Easily check the latest information from their smartphones or computers such as company announcements
- Access a collection of frequently used business links
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