When Steve Soloman, the National IT Manager for Red Bull ANZ, was instructed by his corporate head office to standardise the local offices on the latest versions of Microsoft’s Office Suite (Office 2010) and Client Operating System (Windows 7) he was presented with a significant challenge. With nearly 20 years of experience in IT, he knew the technical component of the upgrade would be easily managed by his team, however, he was concerned with the impact that the change would have on Red Bull’s end-user productivity.
Having tested the latest versions of the software, Steve understood the dramatic differences between the two interfaces and realised that there would be a steep learning curve involved for Red Bull staff members to become proficient with the newer versions. With a large portion of Red Bull’s workforce dedicated to frontline sales roles, the potential impact of lost productivity due to the software upgrade posed a significant risk to the organisation’s top line revenue.
Steve stated “Office 2010 had such a significantly different interface it would have drastically reduced the business’ productivity. Not only would it have increased the amount of time our IT staff dedicated towards support related queries, but more importantly, it could have crippled the business’ ability to function as a well oiled machine.”
In the early stages of engagement, New Horizons worked with Red Bull to conduct a skills analysis of all staff members by assessing their skills within the current version of Microsoft Office installed on PCs and devices at Red Bull. To the surprise of Red Bull, the results from the skills analysis were less than glowing, and demonstrated a deficiency in the organisation’s overall workplace efficiency with Microsoft Office.
With the Windows 7 and Office 2010 upgrade scheduled for mid- 2011, Red Bull was presented an ideal opportunity to not only update staff skills to the latest version of Microsoft Office, but to also improve the overall depth of staff knowledge and expertise within the applications.
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