The commissioning company is one of Europe's largest purchasing and marketing associations in the production connection trade. In addition to purchasing and marketing services, it also provides more than 1,000 trading partners with financial and logistics services. In order to maintain the connection with medium-sized trading partners in the long term, the company set itself the goal of operating an online marketplace. The affiliated trading companies were to use this platform to sell their products to their end customers. Typically, these trading companies are too small or do not have the necessary expertise to operate successful e-commerce independently.
Project management taken over after failure of an initial concept
The interim manager was commissioned after an initial draft concept for the online marketplace was not approved by the management of the family business. The internal project manager who had been entrusted with the task up to that point was relieved of it. The team was placed under the interim project manager.
Project team for e-commerce quickly increased to 50 employees
At the time of the takeover, the project team consisted of 10 external and 5 internal employees. It was already foreseeable that the project team would be scaled up in the areas of requirements management, IT development and quality assurance. The interim manager planned and coordinated this growth together with the managers. In the meantime, the core project team had more than 50 (mostly external) employees.
Reorganization and task assignment in the project team
Immediately after taking over the management function, the interim manager reorganized the existing team members into a transparent sub-project structure. A project office (PO) was assigned to each sub-project team and a clear task definition was drawn up for each team. The interim manager ensured that resource gaps and missing specific skills were identified in order to recruit suitable internal or external staff with the help of the HR department.
Scrum and Kanban as agile methods accelerate implementation
A significant increase in implementation speed was achieved through the introduction of agile working methods. These primarily included Scrum rituals such as daylies, planning, reviews and retrospectives as well as the transfer of key tasks to a Kanban environment. In addition to faster implementation, this also resulted in greater transparency for all project participants.
Many synergy effects with high cost-saving potential raised
The project was set up like an external start-up at the start. Accordingly, there was always resistance from the parent company when a support service was requested from one of the internal departments. By introducing regular steering committees and a management advisory board, the interim manager was able to bring the start-up closer to the company's core functions. This resulted in many synergy effects with high cost-saving potential.
Customer focus and marketing based on target group needs ensured
The concept initially developed by the interim manager was based exclusively on internally defined needs assessments for the target groups. One of the most important impulses for the restart of the project was to carry out target group needs analyses with end customers and the network partners. The findings generated in this way led to significant concept and positioning changes. They also served as the basis for the branding and marketing strategy of the new marketplace.
Quality Assurance meets compliance requirements for financial transactions
An IT-intensive project such as an online marketplace with connected financial service functions places the highest demands on the functionality of the IT solution. In particular, the BtB factoring service function for the connected trading partners was subject to high risks in the event of faulty processes. The interim manager ensured that all compliance requirements were met through very extensive quality assurance - some of which was fully automated.
On-time and successful launch of the online marketplace
The new online marketplace was launched at the end of the year after 15 months. The management was thus able to keep its promise to the association partners and provide a state-of-the-art digital sales channel.
The almost 50 external employees were gradually replaced by permanent staff at the end of the project. With the timely and successful launch, the business model was taken into operation by a fully functional team.
