May 6, 2005

Tim Kapp, co-founder of BayHill, a boutique consultancy, explains that his company got nominated by Bass Group, a European conglomerate with holdings in pubs, restaurants, bars, and related properties. Bass Group wanted to get out of the hotel industry.

"The hotel group realized they would be unprofitable, and they had six months to turn the company completely around," he says. "We had six months to cut $100 million to $200 million out of the company."

"The hotel group realized they would be unprofitable, and they had six months to turn the company completely around," he says. "We had six months to cut $100 million to $200 million out of the company."

In doing so, BayHill faced special challenges. The consultancy had 25 consultants divided into eight teams on three continents. As Kapp puts it, "We were all platinum flyers within six weeks." Frequent travel was just one aspect of collaboration. "We knew from past experience that we would generate a lot of documents," Kapp relates.

BayHill decided to manage those documents with a standalone document management system. It didn't last long. Kapp found himself spending a lot of time reissuing passwords and convincing people to update their documents in the application. In the end, the system was doomed because it took the consultants out of their normal workflow.

BayHill next moved to a file server that came with its own particular issues. "It sort of worked," Kapp says. "People posted documents, but then they worked on documents on their own machine and forgot the posted version was there."

Given that 3,000 documents found their way on to the system, version control was a big headache that sucked up the time of two consultants.

The good news is that the engagement went through successfully and that, after being spun out, IHG's stock doubled in price. IHG is happy with BayHill and is inviting the consultancy back for more work in a smaller project in Europe and Asia.

This time, though, BayHill's going in armed with a document management system that has Kapp and his fellow consultants excited. The system, from NextPage, has undergone a lot of testing, and Kapp explains why it will be used in the coming engagement. "It has a clever interface for not making me feel like I'm in a separate application," he says.

That's because NextPage integrates closely with the normal workflow and productivity applications used by consultants. An innocuous icon in the system tray offers notifications -- for example, if you open an old document, a pop-up will tell you that a newer version is available.

NextPage also has a pull-down menu within Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, making it easy to post or retrieve content within the applications themselves. There are also Windows icons that mark a document sitting on the desktop or in a particular folder as being tracked by NextPage, so users instantly know the status of their documents.

That goes to the heart of the document management problem experienced by BayHill in its first engagement with IHG.

But Kapp also points out that, from a project manager's perspective, NextPage provides some handy tools as well. "I can take control of the document when I need to," he says. "You can say to stop working, that this is the final format." That's important in a consulting environment in which people tend to work on documents until the last minutes, creating possible disparities that can surface in a presentation.

Furthermore, NextPage lets Kapp monitor what people are actually doing with documents. "You can see the status history," he says. Thus, if someone claims to be working on a document but has actually done nothing on it, a quick glance at the history reveals it.

All in all, Kapp likes NextPage because it complements rather than interfering with BayHill's working method. "You don't have to change your behavior."

Source: Line 56