Customer Story: World-Class Project Management with MeisterTask Business

Large-scale project management is never simple. When managing global projects with a large team, keeping everyone informed can present significant challenges. It requires everyone to have a clear picture of deadlines, responsibilities and project progression, even when working across different locations.

Customer Story: World-Class Project Management with MeisterTask Business

In this customer story, Torsten Schlautmann, Head of HR, Controlling & Administration at OPITZ CONSULTING, shares how their team of 450, based across Central and Eastern Europe, achieve this with the help of MeisterTask Business.

OPITZ CONSULTING: A global team delivering world-class projects

Describing themselves as a classic IT consulting company, OPITZ CONSULTING is a leading European specialist in custom-built digital applications. Consisting of a team of 450 and based across Germany and Poland, OPITZ CONSULTING delivers outstanding digitalization services to clients. 

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Since launching in 1990, the OPITZ CONSULTING team have developed long lasting and successful business relationships with over 600 customers. This success can be largely attributed to the company’s ability to deliver outstanding projects within the deadline and budget.

OPITZ CONSULTING’s customers range from medium-sized companies to multinational enterprises. Impressively, over 2/3rds of the companies within the German stock index (DAX) now rely on services from OPITZ CONSULTING.

The Challenge: Managing Collaborative Projects Globally

With their team of 450 and a large number of concurrent, complex projects, the OPITZ CONSULTING team found they were facing a collaboration problem within their project management.

torsten-schlautmann meistertask business project managementPreviously, many of our team members were using different project and task management tools separately, so nothing was shared and group projects would often have no central place from which to be managed,Torsten Schlautmann, Head of HR, Controlling & Administration from OPITZ CONSULTING shared.

We needed a way to collaborate effectively across all projects and team members. As a result, our management team decided that we’d like to roll out the use of MeisterTask Business company-wide.

The Solution: Utilizing an Agile Tool for Effective Project Management

When working on large-scale projects, it’s important to break down overall aims and goals into actionable tasks and lists.

To achieve this, the OPITZ CONSULTING team use Kanban-style project boards in MeisterTask Business. With the Kanban methodology, a Software Sprint, for example, can be broken down into: ‘To Do‘, ‘In Progress‘ and ‘Done‘.

meistertask business project management

All new ideas can go straight into the ‘To Do’ section. This way, team members can simply go through the board and choose the tasks they’d like to work on.

A project manager can also do the same, assigning outstanding tasks to the most suited team member.

meistertask business project management

Automated integrations

Via product integrations, teams can set up time-saving automations to send data between MeisterTask and their other favorite apps.

For example, want to ensure that all client requests are added as tasks on a project board? MeisterTask offers integrations with Slack, Gmail and Office 365 to make this happen. 

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Transparent Project Management for Large Teams

When it comes to large-scale project management, project data must be shared with relevant team members, while remaining secure. With MeisterTask Business, the OPITZ CONSULTING team achieves this through a combination of transparent project boards and restricted roles and permissions:

We use MeisterTask in many different ways at OPITZ,” Schlautmann shared.However, primarily we use it for managing client projects collaboratively and transparently via the Kanban principle, sharing documents, deadlines, and feedback between all relevant team members.

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With roles and permissions, exclusive to the MeisterTask Business Plan, project progress can be entirely transparent – and secure – for both internal colleagues and external stakeholders.

Project member roles and permissions can be managed via the project settings, as project admins can assign different roles and editing permissions to each team member. With MeisterTask Business, there are four possible project roles:

  • Administrators who have full administrative rights over a project, enabling them to add and exclude team members, as well as manage tasks and project properties 
  • Project Members who are able to manage tasks and add comments but are not able to manage project properties
  • Commenters who are able to leave comments on tasks but are otherwise restricted from managing tasks or the project 
  • Read-only members who are only able to view the project and its tasks.

With limited editing rights, the Commenters and Read-only roles are ideal for less senior members of staff, as well as external clients or stakeholders, who would like an overview of the project, without needing to manage tasks directly.

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Acquiring Clients with an Effective Lead Funnel

With any consultancy business, a sales pitch must be well prepared for and bespoke in order to be effective. To achieve this, the sales team at OPITZ CONSULTING use MeisterTask Business to manage their client acquisition.

We use MeisterTask on the sales teams, particularly where we have bigger sales pitches and leads. Via our sales pitch project board, we can move customers through from potential lead to acquired client,” Schlautmann shared.

For this, we include details of the sales pitches within each customer task. To this end, each task will have all relevant documents, such as supporting materials, attached. We then add the date of the pitch as the task due date. Then we assign all relevant team members as ‘watchers’ within the task, meaning they’re notified of all task updates. We also tag the tasks to specify the type of sale and who’s involved. This way, our management team can have a visual overview of task progress and can filter pitches via relevant tags.

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Onboarding a Team of 450 to a New Project Management Tool

When onboarding large teams to a new product and workflow, it’s not uncommon for team members to have reservations. However, Schlautmann explains that getting the OPITZ CONSULTING team on board with MeisterTask Business was simple as they were able to quickly demonstrate how it would benefit the whole team.

With the ability to import from Trello and Asana, which a few of our consultants were previously using individually, we found it simple to roll out MeisterTask company-wide,” Schlautmann shared. “In order to quickly onboard the new staff members, we uploaded our list of users, including 450 team members, via a CSV file to MeisterTask. This invited each consultant separately and half of them are already using MeisterTask within their projects.

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According to Schlautmann,  team members have onboarded to MeisterTask Business quickly and simply, regardless of former technical abilities:

What we particularly like is the simplicity of use,” Schlautmann shared. “Even our non-technical team members were quick to onboard to MeisterTask. Our HR department, for example, all love MeisterTask, as it’s just so simple to use and quick to benefit from.

TIP: Find a tool with a simple, visual design

Talking in his live workshop with Schlautmann, MeisterLabs’ VP for Sales, Oliver Huebler, described how this usability is central to the design of MeisterTask and continues to be a significant draw for large teams looking to roll out a collaborative tool company-wide:

Our aim at MeisterTask was to create a tool that every single employee can use, no matter the level of tech experience or knowledge. It shouldn’t be daunting on a Monday morning to have a quick review of what the week ahead holds,” Huebler shared. “It’s hard to demonstrate quite how simple it is to manage projects with MeisterTask until users try the tool out for themselves. This is why we provide free pilots, so companies are able to try it themselves – no strings attached.”

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OPITZ’s number one tip for companies looking to manage large projects and teams:

My tip would be to just give MeisterTask a try! Test out the free trial, as it’s so easy to quickly onboard to and receive benefit from. There’s no need to waste time or money on training,Schlautmann shared.Then, if it fits your needs, you can take it forward with the rest of your team.

Want to see how MeisterTask Business could work for your business?

To access a 14-day free trial of MeisterTask Business, including roles and permissions, project groups and 24/7 support, get in touch with our Business team via email.

World-Class Task Management

with MeisterTask

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