Co-managing strategy and operations with AirSaaS + Asana - Intuis Group

Before/After AirSaaS

The context: key figures, company

Intuis France is a company with more than 70 years' experience in the thermal comfort industry, with a strong presence in the French industrial fabric and even “Guaranteed Origin France” certification!  Here are some key figures: €200 million revenue - over 1,000 employees - 120 engineers and researchers - 6 factories in the Hauts-de-France, Grand Est and Pays de Loire regions - 5 R&D centers - 3 training centers.

After joining the Intuis Group after a one-year assignment as an interim manager, Aurore Butrot is now CIO and a member of the Executive Committee. As an AirSaas user, she's not afraid to talk frankly about the challenges she's faced as CIO, so that the lessons she's learned from her experiences can be passed on to her peers.

The Challenge: simplifying and sharing IT processes to engage teams

Transformation program, reporting, cross-functional project management, team acculturation... Among all the challenges, the common thread has been the simplification of IT activities, to tackle three issues: re-establish trust between IT and business teams. Developing a consistent project culture, and bringing coherence to the governance of project roadmaps to get teams on board and involved.

Mistrust, heterogeneous project culture and low process adoption

Like many organizations, Intuis' project management was lacking in methodology and maturity. To varying degrees, the following symptoms were present:

• Mistrust of the relationship between business units and IT
• Lists of ideas and requirements that were often passed on as they arose
• A general lack of framework
• Lack of a common frame of reference
• Lack of regularity in rituals: “When I have time, I fill in the Excel file a bit”
• A relative lack of education from the organization towards end-users on change processes
• Low adoption of processes: “only those who were in the loop updated the tool”

Submerged governance not shared with COMEX

The challenge was to provide COMEX members and the General Manager with a clearer understanding of the company's strategic organization, so as to facilitate their governance and prioritization.

Indeed, before AirSaas was set up, the governance process was in part drowned in the various informal exchanges carried out via e-mails, Teams and meeting minutes. This scattering was also found at a more global level, in the organization of the group, which was relatively siloed and not very agile.

Aurore points out that “projects lacked the decision-making required to move forward”.  The key idea was to simplify processes by offering a synthetic view of the activity.

The solution: AirSaaS + Asana, to co-pilot governance and project management, by aligning IT, management and business units!

Creating a common frame of reference

Prior to the implementation of this approach, the prevailing feeling among business teams was: “If I ask for information, it's not going to move forward, I won't get it on time, and it won't be what I wanted”.

In the case of IT teams, the impression they got was that the business units didn't  properly frame the projects, and that these projects were constantly subject to variable goals.

With AirSaas, it was quite easy to show that if projects were not kept on time and on budget, it was for several reasons: lack of methodology, poor framing, waiting for validations...

“When you come to the end of a project, if you don't know how to trace this history and give these explanations, the result is a loss of credibility: people say it's normal, they're late”.

Aurore was soon able to involve the business units in a “give and take” relationship based on greater objectivity. “In exchange for transparency, projects had to be framed, without constantly changing goals,” explains Aurore.

“AirSaas made it possible to list everything, and the tool remains factual, keeping track of what we're doing. I can only improve what I can measure!"

After a month, the company decided to use AirSaas to provide a centralized, orderly, planned and shared framework for managing needs/requests and projects.

What's more, “It also helped to strengthen the cross-functionality between marketing and technical projects, and build a bridge between these two worlds. The aim was to get non-technical people on board, and to get straight to the point."

Synchronize the shared governance tool with a complementary project management solution like Asana

Once the project governance solution was in place, Aurore was soon looking for a tool to help business teams get to grips with project and task management. “Once you break down these silos, there's an organization that has to adapt around them, and more appropriate tools to be put in place and adopted.” For her, the important thing is: “to give priority to tools that end-users want to use, and to do so without copying information”.

The first team with whom this organization was set up was the marketing team, with whom a Product Information Management (PIM) project was to be carried out. Over time, after the marketing teams, Aurore was able to bring on board other business referents for one-off projects, using this architecture of governance monitoring with AirSaas + execution monitoring with Asana.

When asked why she chose a best-of-breed Asana+AirSaas integration versus an “all in one” tool, Aurore points out that she hasn't found an all-in-one tool that combines operational and strategic visions in a way that's easy to understand for different audiences

“When you're in execution, you need to go into detail, list all the tasks, make your critical path, plan in the short term. Asana is adapted to these needs. When you're involved in management and governance, you need abstraction, to know the progress of projects and decisions, without having to go into the details of each task. AirSaas is the solution we have chosen for these other uses”.

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This “best-of-breed” versus “all-in-1” solution has been the key lever for getting business unit users on board.

Involving COMEX members in the “top-down” transformation of the portfolio

“General and financial management expect use cases and return on investment. They need to understand the purpose of a project, without being drowned in technical details,” stresses Aurore. But Excel is not the best format for alerting or getting the attention of the management committee.

For our IT Department, rather than an Excel file, showing the portfolio in a synthetic, ergonomic tool was a key to simplification.  “We succeeded in showing the value and scope of the team's tasks.”

After the creation of this common transformation framework shared between IT and business units, and faced with more financial, less technical interlocutors, like those of a board of directors, Aurore simplified the task of steering and governance.  By coming in, not through overly detailed project and task management, but “from the top”, through the value created.  It has succeeded in showing the essentials and the purpose of the portfolio!  This made it possible, for example, to show which projects were “buffering” and which were relevant to reschedule, to keep the organization's focus on priorities. “The more regularly we monitor things, the quicker we can get them back on track” reminds the CIO.

She confides that she is fortunate to belong to a steering committee at the heart of the transformation. “Our tools are nothing without the proposed approach. That's where AirSaas has made a real contribution. It enabled us to show the governance / IT relations / part of the process, which was sometimes buried in emails and teams. The tool made it possible to show reality and speed up decision-making.”

Bonus section

What sets AirSaaS apart from the other tools considered?

For Aurore Butrot and her team, AirSaas is a synthetic, ergonomic solution for structuring the governance of all projects, in a simple, collaborative platform, and she recommends its use, combined with a “supercharged” project management tool like Asana.

What's your favorite feature?

The flash report in PowerPoint format.  Aurore tells us: “We're very good technicians, but not good PowerPoint makers!  What works is the CEO's PowerPoint! AirSaas enables this file to be exported in a single click, so that it can be sent to him the day before, giving him the information he needs to get to the meeting without being drowned! This contributes to the marketing of the IT department”.

Express Bio - Aurore Butrot

Aurore started coding at the age of 8! She began her professional career with development, then project management and finally team management. What motivates her today is to participate in the transformation of companies. Organizations that all too often see IT as a thorn in their side!  For Aurore, on the contrary, the IT team is at the crossroads of all projects and can contribute to great successes.

Thanks to her for her testimonial, which may help other executives and managers in their quest for greater efficiency and fun!

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