OVERVIEW
www.seek.com.au is one of the success stories for Australian companies and I am so proud to have played my role here.
I arrived over from London, post Y2K project on a working holiday visa. I moved into St Kilda with friends and noticed the www.seek.com.au billboard at St Kilda junction on my travels.
I joined www.seek.com.au, 18months after it launched and there was only 30 people in total. I joined as a PM, however by the time I left, I was the Project Services Manager which meant I was the team lead for the PM and the BA team as well as 2IC to the CIO. I stayed for 4 years and would have happily stayed for longer, but family reasons took me back to the other side of the world.
I really enjoyed having a role in an organisation with a great culture that was on a fast growth path with the all the challenges associated with budget, scalability and introducing fit for purposes systems and processes that would support scale. It was at SEEK that I learnt it was important to focus on your strengths/core differentiator, i.e. the job board website and outsource non core business, such as finance systems and CRM.
PROJECT LIST
PROJECT
DETAILS
MEASURE OF SUCCESS
Project Name
Building Operational Brilliance(BOB)
Details
Budget - Various - Small/Medium
Method - Agile
Description - To identify inefficient, manual processes with current or future scalability issues and process cheap solutions to resolve issues
Measure of Success
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Reduction process timeframes by 50%
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Ensure processes had the ability to deal with 200% growth with a resource uplift
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Remove in-efficient processes and automate where possible
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Involve the entire organisation and create a strong culture for innovation and change with passion and excitement
Project Name
Website Re-Architecture
Details
Budget - Large
Method - Agile
Description - Allow existing website to deal with a fast growing business. Reduce site outages and reduce IT involvement for content changes
Measure of Success
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Improve searching times by 300%
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Improve website scalability whilst not impacting current business
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Enable business to make content changes without IT involvement
Project Name
CRM
Details
Budget - Small
Method - PMI
Description - Provide a best in class CRM system to manage the sales pipeline and customer contacts across sales, marketing and customer support
Measure of Success
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Visible and transparent sales pipeline and opportunity management
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Automated billing process
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Ability to forecast and predict future revenue
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Improved customer management and support
Project Name
Product Feature Development
Details
Budget - Various - Small to Large
Method - Phased
Description - Enhance website feature set to add value and increase revenue streams
Measure of Success
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To add new features quickly and easily
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To have the ability to track user behaviour and feed back into the product development process
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To enable new featured to be monetised