Meantime Case Studies

Bespoke software provides £100k return for Dove Nest

Online assessment tools created for an employee coaching company by Meantime IT have provided a return of up to £100,000 each year after an initial outlay of just £10,000.

Dove Nest Group has been operating from its Cumbria base for 28 years, helping clients including John Lewis, BT and Fujitsu to get the best from their staff using a range of business psychology and coaching, team and leadership training and graduate development.

When CEO Dave Moore decided that he needed to streamline his processes and move from a paper-based system to online software, he turned to Meantime IT to provide a bespoke package that would cover everything from client assessments to reporting and invoicing.

“We approached Meantime when we were working on a specific project for an international blue-chip company,” explains Dave. “We asked them to develop a piece of software that would enable us to assess 7500 people using a range of psychometric tools and a number of factors – leadership success, management competency, technical competency and a variety of other skills and abilities.

“Because of the size of the programme and the range of assessment factors involved, we knew we couldn’t operate it using our traditional paper-based assessment and evaluation. We needed a robust, scalable web-based piece of software that would handle everything from the individual assessment to the interviewers adding their comments, and then produce an instantaneous report. So we gave Meantime the brief of helping us build a brain, a scoring brain, that would pull all this together, do all the crunching and build a report that would feedback to each individual involved in the programme and provide reports for the assessors. And we had to ensure that the software had a methodology and functionality that would stand up to scrutiny from a global blue chip company if they decided they wanted to test it.”

So Meantime’s managing director Fenner Pearson and his team developed a piece of software that would enable each individual involved to log in, answer a range of questions and provide an instant report that could be reviewed by assessors and then used to develop the strengths of individual employees and identify areas of weakness.

“Web based software is ideal for this type of solution”, says Fenner. “For a start, respondents can use the application from anywhere they have a web connection and also whenever it suits them, so they can ensure that they are in the right frame of mind. And, of course, we can use secure processing to ensure all responses are confidential. Furthermore, database and scripting tools on the web are so advanced now that handling this volume of users and data just isn't an issue.

“The work we did for Dove Nest is a great example of just why bespoke software can benefit companies, such that it’s not a capital outlay but rather a clear financial benefit to them. For all their cleverness, the applications we built for Dove Nest ultimately replace routine, repetitive, high volume tasks, which are boring and time-consuming for people to carry out. People are an expensive resource and software like this frees them up to do more interesting and productive work”.

Fenner and his team’s approach convinced Dave that Meantime would provide Dove Nest with the software that would set them apart from their competitors. “We’d approached other IT companies but none of them seemed to have the depth or pace that we needed,” he says. “Fenner took the time to go to London to talk to the client to get a real feel of their requirements and because of his background in IT he could talk the language, and he did a lot of translating the language for us. Meantime had the competence to deliver what we wanted at the pace we wanted it.”

As well as being able to cope comfortably with the level of content (with more than 40 competencies being assessed) and number of users required, the design of the software meant that Dove Nest was able to take its basic framework and change the content for different clients.

“In effect, what it did was give us a platform that we could then use with any client – we could change the question sets in accordance with the client’s requirements,” explains Dave. “ Having that blank platform that had the option to easily change the questions and then provide the assessment at the touch of a button meant that we were able to sell it onto third parties who could use it themselves with minimum involvement from Dove Nest, providing us with a further revenue stream.”
And as well as providing that extra revenue, Dove Nest was able to use this innovative use of IT to reclaim a percentage of their tax bill to invest into further research and development, providing a third source of income from the single piece of software.

“Previously, all our assessments had been done on paper and with Excel spreadsheets,” says Dave. “Information would come from two or three online sources, and it was a case of the assessors manually sifting through the data and providing the reports. Obviously, having the ability to do all this online and remotely made a huge difference to the way we work and the service we are able to offer.”

Enthused by the success of the initial application and subsequent additions and enhancements to the software, Dove Nest returned to Meantime to develop Washbox.

“Washbox is a full day’s interactive stimulation tool”, explains Dave. “The idea is if you’re sitting at your desk with your manager, emails will be sent to you with specific requests or tasks, and we can then analyse how you react to and handle that information.

“Historically, we’d have 30 or 40 pages of information, on paper, that we’d give someone a period of time to look at and deal with – what’s commonly known as an in-tray exercise. What Meantime did was take that information and create a fully interactive email version that was online and completely live. So instead of the recipient sitting with a sheaf of paper, he or she would be receiving emails during a timed exercise and being assessed on their responses. So, for example, 30 minutes into the exercise and a catastrophic email arrives, do you drop other work you’re doing and move onto that priority, or ignore and carry on with what you were doing? It’s a much richer tool for assessing people’s judgement and style that can be assessed in real time, with instant reporting at the end of the activity.”

The shift from paper-based assessments to the online systems developed by Meantime has brought about a huge shift in the way that Dove Nest operates and, more importantly, helped the company to grow beyond all expectations.

“If you take the 360 review, for example, we have a series of around 140 questions that are asked to rate someone’s performance that are sent to their boss, their colleagues and their customers. Three years ago that would have all been on paper – we’d have been sending out reams of it to companies and then assessing it all manually.

“Now processing speed is almost instantaneous. It’s much more reliable because there isn’t the risk of error in typing up handwritten sheets and it’s much easier to track thanks to all the business processes that have been written into the software. All our records are archived as they’re entered and can be found again with a simple search tool, as opposed to searching through boxes and boxes of paper.

“So when you consider the huge of time and efficiency savings, it’s not surprising that we’ve seen a return of £90-100,000 each year since Meantime has developed our software, from an initial outlay of £10,000. We’ve recently done a project with 500 managers. If we didn’t have our own software, we’d have had to use proprietary software and pay around £15 per head. We charge £25 per head for our own system, giving us an income of £12,500 as opposed to an overhead of £7,500.”

Making the switch from paper to bespoke software has brought nothing but benefits to Dove Nest, saves Dave Moore. “It’s made us much more efficient as a company, as well as giving us more confidence in our processes because of the accountability processes we now have as a result of the software.

“When we were a paper driven company we didn’t have the profile in the market we have now – developing our own software has made us market leaders.”