The Society for Information Management (SIM) is a professional association of nearly 5,000 members, including CIOs, IT directors and IT procurement specialists. Founded in 1968, SIM has a network of active volunteers across more than 30 chapters.
Such a sprawling organization needed a way to streamline its communication. SIM’s management team and volunteer leaders required insight into its numerous interconnected programs.
Choosing Redbooth
While SIM looked at other platforms first, including JIRA and other Atlassian products, those tools proved to be too IT-focused for their needs.
SIM wanted both advanced collaboration features and an intuitive interface, so the organization started using Redbooth.
Steve Hufford, SIM’s CEO, says, “Redbooth is so much easier to use.”
It’s helped the society better organize strategic planning and workflow across its teams that may have different technical and project management skills, he says.
Using Redbooth
SIM uses Redbooth to support and track a number of large initiatives, like the Advanced Practices Council. The council is a group of IT practitioners, researchers and thought leaders who develop intensive industry research on various topics. The council collaborates using Redbooth as a shared workspace.
“The council shares ideas and papers through Redbooth.” says Hufford, “This has been instrumental in the organizing, development and procurement of thoughtful research.”
SIM also created its first centralized document repository making it easier to transfer knowledge when onboarding new employees or volunteers to projects.
Less production time, more productivity
SIM slashed its typical production timeline by 33% since implementing Redbooth by streamlining their content production process.
Staff productivity increased by 25% thanks to email inboxes no longer being required to act as haphazard project management tools.
The Society for Information Management slashed its typical production timeline by 33% after implementing Redbooth and staff productivity increased by 25%.
Before Redbooth, Hufford had to send an email and make a phone call to get the status of a task, which he says he never thought was effective.
“Redbooth gives our organization the ability to see where we stand on specific items and has eliminated the need for long and disorganized email chains.”
SIM’s participants also respond faster since Redbooth entered the organization because of increased transparency and accountability, he says.
“Redbooth enables much better management within our organization,” he says. “If something is overdue, we can jump on it. It’s not good etiquette to hand over a five-days past-due task. Redbooth has helped our organization to pilot our work, assign tasks, complete projects — and get results.
Hufford says it’s also been helpful for proofing and reviewing documents– simplifying the back and forth within the team, and making notes on documents and drafts.
Hufford assigns tasks for documents that need to be written, reviews the drafts and sends them back with notes and additional tasks. This process repeats until there’s a final document and the task is resolved.
“All of this is all done through Redbooth — and it’s a much more elegant and rapid process than using email.”