Case Study: RBC (Royal Bank of Canada)

Immediate Collaboration

RBC Wealth Management was preparing for a major technology implementation involving multiple key systems and several thousand users. With all the changes involved, Gwen Jorgens, RBCWM's Manager of Learning Systems, knew that support would be a crucial factor in a successful rollout. As a part of the implementation, a special call center was created to provide end users with help desk support for the new systems.

Jorgens describes the situation as follows: "We needed an efficient way for our call center staff--approximately 60 individuals--to search for and share information in the first couple of months following the launch date." Based on this business need, Jorgens selected four criteria for evaluating potential solutions:

1. Easy to update by a number of authors
2. Searchable so call center staff could leverage new knowledge as it became available
3. Presented information in a way that allowed staff to cross-reference related topics and solutions
4. Highly reliable and accessible

OPBworks was the best fit for her team

RBCWM investigated several potential solutions, including Microsoft Share Point, electronic bulletin boards, and a number of startups. After a brief review of the pros and cons of each option Jorgens determined that PBworks was the best fit for the organization's needs.

Of course, selecting a solution was only the first step for Jorgens. Given the time pressures of the rollout, she opted to for a carefully planned rollout:

"Over the course of a week prior to our launch date, we gathered information in a variety of formats (MS Word, printed handbooks, HTML pages, application documentation, training materials, etc.) and created a task force of four individuals to populate our workspace with internal news articles, bulletins, known issues and workarounds, and user handbook instructions. We focused our wiki pages around specific 'help' topics, using tags to group pages by the application(s) they covered and common keywords callers may use in describing a problem. We also made heavy use of links between pages and tagged page lists to keep related pages and solutions at the support staff's fingertips."

Rapid implementation was critial

PBworks' rapid implementation and ease-of-use were critical during this time. As Jorgens noted, with some of the other potential solutions, RBCWM would have required weeks or even months to launch the call center knowledgebase. With PBworks, RBCWM was up and running in less than a week.

Once launched, the collaborative and self-organizing nature of PBworks allowed RBCWM to quickly iterate and refine their knowledgebase:

"After a brief training session with our staff, we established guidelines about creating and modifying content and opened for business. As our workspace evolved, we put a few key individuals in place to 'garden' our workspaces, add tags as needed and reduce duplicate pages.

Spreading throughout RBC

Now nearly a year into their use of PBworks, RBCWM has expanded their implementation several times, and PBworks has also begun to spread throughout the rest of RBC. The key to its success has been its ability to streamline the support and knowledge management processes. This has enabled the Jorgens' team to deliver services more efficiently and effectively, with greater end-user satisfaction. "PBworks proved to be a key resource for our support staff, allowing them to transfer knowledge as new scenarios and solutions arose, and also reduced the time to provide answers as we centralized the vast organizational knowledge around the implementation in a single place."

The Social Collaboration Update has enhanced PBworks' value to RBC by providing even more ways for team members to connect with each other and work within PBworks. "We have over 200 offices, each with people with different expertise and experience. Being able to locate and share that expertise in real-time is critical to providing the best possible client experience," said Jorgens. "PBworks gives us tools for connecting people across the world. The email integration is key for encouraging rapid adoption. It gives people an easy and familiar way to get content into PBworks."