The projects are large and complex, the workforce is spread out across departments and physical locations and headquarters often have little relation to what is happening on site. This makes it challenging when managing and coordinating project crew and staff. Implenia solved this with no-code.
Variables such as physical location, work schedules, rotations, and commutes, make it a complex task to coordinate project staff, payroll, and sick leaves. This is a classic challenge for the industry and has been for years.
Implenia had been tracking this on several spreadsheets for each individual project. These were rarely up to date and lacked integration with other systems. They needed to replace their spreadsheets with one tailored system for staff across projects, departments, and locations. That is when they reached out to Appfarm.
While some users are highly motivated to learn new ways of working and embrace change, others feel more in control when working with what they know. That is why Implenia decided to base the first version of the new solution on what people already knew: this was crucial in order for it to be embraced internally. Their strategy was to start off with basic core functionality and expand on this when user adoption was established.
“This is an issue that I’ve seen so many times: projects crashing due to the inability to acknowledge the latter user group. Many are too eager to only consider the data they want to extract from something, rather than how to best insert the needed information. It’s an old-fashioned way of thinking,” says project coordinator at Implenia, Tom Gulliksen.
“We quickly understood that no-code was the best alternative for a soft start, rather than coding a system from the ground up based on requirement specifications defined from a-z, ” he says.
Implenia's management system
The project took less than three months to produce, but before they could get started, Implenia faced the same challenge as most large organizations often run into when creating systems that involve several departments: who should own it, who should run it, and how should it be budgeted.
“It became a lengthy internal process to figure out the politics of it all, but as soon as this was settled, the project took off fast.”
“I believe a key factor to the project efficiency, besides it being created with no-code, was the willingness from Appfarm to gain understanding of our internal lingo and logic on how things were tied together. Our industry has so many regulations that dictate the needed functionality. It was important that the production team grasped these regulations to understand the background of the issues. This made for a far more efficient dialogue and high-quality results,” Gulliksen says.
Implenia’s strategy of starting small with a basic solution and creating a thorough rollout plan for it, definitely paid off.
“The solution was met with immediate appreciation. We had eliminated the time-consuming and costly task of communicating by lengthy and often unanswered email chains and phone calls, just to find simple information about staff. Now everything could be logged in the system and important information could be retrieved in seconds rather than days,” he explains.
As the solution became integrated in their working methodology, they could begin to add functionality and complexity they wanted.
“Today, we are miles away from our old way of thinking and working, and this evolution has barely been noticed by the users, as further development happened very gradually. This approach would have been extremely challenging to achieve without no-code,” he says.
Implenia is continuously building on their solution and have plenty of ideas for new functionality to make it larger and even more integral to their organization. By developing with no-code, they have the option to assess the strategies ahead and continue building based on this.
“It has become a business critical system for our operations, and we’re saving a lot of time and cost on having such a good overview. We are very satisfied with the cooperation with Appfarm,” he finishes.
