As you know, I am very interested in how organizations are using business applications, which problems they do address, and how they review their success. In a next instance of these customer interviews, I had the opportunity to talk with Melissa Gordon, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Solutions at Tidal Basin about their journey with Zoho. You can watch the full interview on YouTube.
Tidal Basin is a government contractor that provides various services throughout the government space, including disaster response, technology and financial services, and contact centers.
Tidal Basin started with Zoho CRM and was searching for a project management tool in 2019. This was prompted by mainly two drivers. First, employees were asking for tools to help them running their projects. Second, with a focus on organizational growth and bigger projects that involved more people, Tidal Basin wanted to reduce its risk exposure and increase the efficiency of project delivery. This way, the company could actually create a triple-win situation, benefitting the employees, customers, and the company. also following the top management’s motto “if you take care of your people, and you take care of your customers, everything else will take care of itself.” The thought behind this is “that providing a mechanism for people to be more efficient, because everybody wants to come to work and do a good job. Nobody wants to do mundane tasks that don’t add value. And so, if you can provide a mechanism to do that, it enables our employees to then take better care of our customers.”
Being tasked with implementing it, Melissa started off with a software selection process. This process included integration into CRM, a feature analysis, and a cost-benefit analysis. At the end of this process, Tidal Basin selected Zoho Projects “because the cost of the system and the value and the tools that we needed really did win out against the alternative options.”
The implementation was fairly small and, most of all, painless, although the company chose to implement its own way of doing project management, based on principles that are applicable across different sizes of projects, allowing their tailoring according to the needs of the project by means of templates. Tidal Basin initially saw a limited adoption, as they did not immediately enforce the use but went for an organic approach. Still, since there is some adoption, the company sees better visibility into and tracking of projects. In Melissa’s word, what Tidal Basin also sees is “that […] our PMs, are spending less time trying to aggregate information when they’re having their meetings; they’re easily able to go in and kind of follow up on the things that, you know, should have been done between the last meeting and this one. And then the people who are doing those tasks can also be a collaborator. And they’re providing those updates. So, you can also eliminate unnecessary meetings, if both parties know that the work has been done; and there’s no need for a follow up. There’s also the mechanism, being able to tag things and tag people, if you have questions. That kind of helps facilitate communication about a specific task within a project that you don’t necessarily have if you, know, you’re managing via email, for lack of a better way of saying it.”
