INSERT Centre Ville presentation

Insert is the French leader for inner-city indoor advertising. With a workforce of 600 employees, located in 15 cities, Insert manages 150 000 billboards and 30 000 hosting sites.

Insert was founded by a LBO- financed merger between the two leaders of the industry. The merger has revealed the obsolescence of the old information system, while new services required by the advertisers led Insert to a massive adoption of mobile technology.

To achieve this goal, the information system had to be reconstructed from scratch in a new program encompassing four major projects.

Specific stakes

Under high shareholders’ pressure, management started the project without CIO and technical staff. Moreover, new mobility applications had to be supported by special, untested, hand-held terminals. Some specific features had to be completed in a tight time frame or the company would have to incur high extra operating costs.

Our mission

1. We built the IT department, recruited and coached the new CIO.
2. We organized the four project s as program, managed the program, and managed directly one of the mission-critical underlying projects

The first part consisted in:

• Structuring the IT department in identified ad hoc functions
• Writing the related job descriptions and assigning tasks
• Mapping the main processes, ITIL-like
• Defining the IT policy and budget

The second part consisted in classical program / project management, with a special emphasis on the following high-stake and difficult items:

• Maintain a constant and very explicit alignment between the company strategy, the tactical objectives of the system and its technical features, hunting down relentlessly any sign of over-engineering
• Organize and motivate the end-users’ base so that they play an active and visible role in the software specification
• Assure stakeholders management and manage the decision making process
• Detect and correct numerous requirements mistakes and misunderstanding
• Direct and control external providers accordingly

Results and achievements:

At the end of the program, way before other outdoors advertisers, Insert gained a significant competitive edge and benefited from:

• Real-time operational coordination of nationwide advertising campaign
• Real time street workforce assignment management, with geographic optimization
• Sales force real-time view of unsold advertising space, with yield management capabilities
• Automation of hosting site billing and payment

Eric Eido | CEO Insert Centre Ville – Testimonial

Transition management appeared to be a valid solution to structure our IT department and its projects. InSYNC’s intervention brought concrete and measurable results:

• The projects moved on, the agenda became clear and was followed through
• The project reporting was made using plain non-technical language. It was linked to the company strategic goals and tactical options. At the same time, technical issues were under control. All of this made the project much clearer to stakeholders.
• The project setting and organization was also clarified, so that it became easy to take it over at the end of InSYNC’s mission.
• The CIO was efficiently coached. Freed-up from program management tasks, he could concentrate on other urgent core duties.

As an external project manager, Eric Fanton presented several decisive qualities for the job:

• He blends IT knowledge and business acumen with sufficient depth to effectively bring together between technology and company strategy and produce a consistent result.
• He built up quality relationships with most key players of the project, while maintaining a high level of authority
• His contractual flexibility allowed us to minimize the cost of his intervention