Cisco on Cisco

Mary Ellen Buchheit had a global training rollout on her hands. As an instructional designer in Cisco Worldwide Salesforce Development, she needed to develop and deploy a training program for a new approach to worldwide sales. “We were asking our account managers and sales engineers to implement a four-step sales framework called architectural selling,” she says. “So we needed to deliver training materials that would put all of our worldwide sales teams on the same page, whether they were in Europe, APAC, or emerging markets.”

The delivery method? Instructor-led sessions delivered to every theater globalwide via Cisco WebEx Training Center. To get such a massive training initiative off the ground within a tight timeframe, Buchheit wanted to find a more efficient, effective way to collaborate with her team members. 

“I knew that email wasn’t the only way of doing things,” she says. “It was just a matter of finding the right solution for sharing documents and developing ideas.”

That’s when she turned to Cisco WebEx Connect.

LiveLink Meets Its Match
Buchheit had previously used Livelink for collaborating with colleagues, but that product didn’t always deliver.

“With Livelink, I’ve encountered a lot of connectivity problems,” she says. “So when I saw that WebEx Connect offered a much faster connection and a more intuitive experience over a far more reliable network, I knew it was the way to go.”

Online Workspace for Smarter Document Management
For Buchheit, WebEx Connect provided the ideal solution for keeping close tabs on a complex document development process.

Cisco WebEx Connect enables users to create collaborative workspaces for sharing files and participating in ongoing discussions. And with its built-in document management features, Connect helped Buchheit juggle multiple document versions with relative ease.

“We needed to develop three training documents for each of our seven global theaters,” she says. “So at one point, we had 21 different documents at different stages of development. It would’ve been a nightmare to keep track of that many versions via email. But with the strict version control in WebEx Connect, we were able to ensure that all of us were always working on the latest document version.”

Streamlining Communications, Minimizing Email
WebEx Connect enables creative, collaborative problem-solving within a centralized workspace, helping Buckheit’s team members respond to the changing needs of her project.

“With this technology, I can streamline the document development process from start to finish,” she says. “The Connect workspace has become my one-stop shop for the key projects I’m managing. That’s huge from a productivity standpoint, because it means that my day is no longer driven by whatever is in my email inbox. With WebEx Connect, my day is driven primarily by the task at hand.”  

Extending the Power of WebEx to Other Remote Teams
Buchheit’s team isn’t alone in discovering WebEx Connect’s potential for enhancing sales training programs. Melony Bravmann, a program manager in Worldwide Salesforce Development at Cisco, found Connect to be just the right tool for collecting crucial feedback from her globally distributed team.

“In mid-2008, we were given three weeks to develop a list of recommendations for providing greener, more cost-effective training materials,” says Bravmann. “My team includes members in the United States, Europe, and APAC, so conference calls were really impractical. I needed to find a way to align our resources for truly global collaboration so that we could provide the best recommendations possible.”

User-Friendly, Eco-Friendly Collaboration
Bravmann decided to create a Materials Think Tank workspace in WebEx Connect so that her team could post ideas on the discussion board, then finalize those ideas during twice-weekly meetings in Cisco WebEx Meeting Center™.

“We held meetings at different times of the day so that we could accommodate as many people as possible, then posted meeting notes for anyone who couldn’t attend,” she says. “The result was that, in a very short period of time, we were able to produce a list of recommendations that included input from every single team member. And we arrived at our eco-friendly recommendations by using an environmentally efficient technology, which I thought was a big bonus.”   

The Payoff: Broader Collaboration Brings Broader Consensus
“When we developed our list of recommendations, we held two online meetings every week, but that’s not where the real work took place,” says Bravmann. “The WebEx Connect workspace is where the ideas took shape, because we were able to harvest as much input as possible, then engage in a dynamic back-and-forth via IM, discussion boards, and desktop sharing to establish and develop the most promising concepts.”  

And the results? When Bravmann’s team submitted its list of recommendations, the leadership approved the list without hesitation.

“They knew that all of us had contributed to the development of these recommendations, so they were confident that everyone was on board,” she says. “Without WebEx Connect, we wouldn’t have been able to include so much of our team’s input in just three weeks. Even if we’d held longer, more frequent meetings, it’s clear that the collaborative workspace was key to developing and refining our best ideas.”   

Looking Toward the Future of Project Management
“Working in an organization that develops a huge amount of training material, I foresee us using WebEx Connect to collaborate on every document that we create for the classroom,” says Bravmann. “This technology really has the potential to change not only how we communicate, but how we manage all projects on a day-to-day basis. It’s going to be a key tool for us moving forward.”