How Freshworks implemented company-wide ERP and aligned its cross-functional teams across the globe with New-Gen Project Management

Ensured alignment by creating a single source of truth About ERP implementation in Freshworks:

Freshworks has been growing at a breakneck pace, from approximately 2700 employees at the beginning of 2020 to over 4500+ employees in 2021. 

As the company heads towards meeting its aspirational goals, it requires a mid-market enterprise ERP upgrade that can cater to its complex needs.

NetSuite ERP Implementation is deemed as one of the most critical projects in Freshworks history as it enables standard procurement processes, predictable close process and world class revenue recognition process and standard payment cycles. This project was a very big step in laying the foundation to scale Freshworks’ financial processes and in meeting global compliance standards. 
 

The need for efficient project management:

When the Freshworks Finance and IT teams realized they needed to upgrade the existing ERP, they kicked off with the goal of providing clear prioritization, standardization, visibility for all major tasks, and promoting effective communication across different teams.

When Meenakshi (Program Manager) joined the project, her mission was to make sure that multiple teams worked together in complete alignment and that there was a single source of truth.

 

The Challenge:

The team was using Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and Smartsheets for project management, the challenge was that the project details were scattered across multiple tools.

This made it hard to keep all the teams aligned to the business goal. There were accountability issues due to the editing nature of tools and scaling was hard. 

Lack of visibility and transparency into the different teams’ project task statuses and performance made it difficult to achieve business objectives on time.
 

Finding a way to manage complex projects

Meenakshi wanted to find a user-friendly, simple and flexible tool that could manage the complex NetSuite ERP project with ease and would be accepted easily by IT and business teams. But the bigger picture was also crucial. She needed to connect with cross-functional teams across the company, and sometimes outside of Freshworks as well. This would provide organizational transparency and build accountability in an agile manner through clear plans, responsibilities, and deadlines. It brought all tasks, test cases, test results, bugs (and their classifications), associations between tasks (traceability matrix), ownership, risks, and decisions in one place. She was also able to give need-based access to the tool and to various lists and dashboards. 

 

Testing and rolling out New-Gen Project Management

The team started to look for a magic tool that would solve the problems, while the solution was right there in front of our eyes - Freshservice new-gen project management. The team first tested new-gen project management with a small pilot project, to confirm that it was easy to use and scalable at the same time. 
They then migrated the entire project work from Google Sheets/ Excel and Smartsheets to new-gen project management and provided training and documentation to the business teams to use the tool. Because of new-gen project management’s flexibility, different teams could use it in a way that best fits their specific needs and workflows without affecting others. Teams adapted to the tool in a couple of days as it was very user-friendly. 

Solution

Building trust through transparency - In Excel/ Smartsheet, anyone can change any column/ row data and it was very tough to track every detail, given the number of people involved. The activity log in New-Gen Project Management acts as a single source of information.
 

Single source of truth - As work progressed, new-gen project management became a detailed record of action and discussion, which provided a historical artifact for the organization and anyone who needs to understand why a decision was made. 

Accountability in the team - Team members knew who was working on what, what they were responsible for, and what was in their pipeline. It helped people come prepared for sprint/ triage meetings. The IT Team has a special call-out for the Test Case Management feature. It helped them a lot in achieving complete requirement traceability and getting through the critical SIT and UAT phases.  

In other companies, they had used JIRA, Trello, Team Foundation; none of these tools had such a simple Task to Test Case to Bug linking. “Managing the entire life cycle from the project initiation to its implementation, testing (SIT & UAT) to release has never been so smooth,” says Meenakshi.

Breaking silos in the team - Everyone was on the same page, as they started using the @mention and comments features to their strength. 

It also helped put in standard project management practices such as holding triage meetings and status calls. The tool was a ready reckoner for information required for these meetings.  The NetSuite project team was able to save more than an hour every day in discussing issues and tasks, as it was all in the tool. They were able to use the saved time for solving complex problems together.