Crunching the learning curve with individualized training
As one of the fastest growing companies in direct response lending, Irwin Home Equity needed to find a way to maintain their high standards of customer service while significantly scaling up their volume. Irwin's management team had charged the IT department with finding a way to step up the speed and efficiency of the company's knowledge sharing, to help with internal communications - and to improve their ability to satisfy regulatory agencies.
The installation of a centralized data warehouse was the first step in the process and Business Systems Analyst Pat Calabro was brought in to make it happen. "The company needed a way to connect several stand-alone reporting functions that weren't always balancing properly - a big issue for a publicly-traded financial institution," Calabro recalls. "A cohesive reporting system is essential internally and when you are scrutinized by auditors or outside investors."
Progress and CorVu a natural choice
Irwin was already using Progress for their originations database and their programmers were very comfortable in the environment. Some of the advantages that clinched Irwin's decision to choose CorVu (over Business Objects, the other solution they were considering) was CorVu's ability to run native on the Progress® driver, and, ultimately, the demonstrated experience of Progress' sales and implementation consultants.
"I was impressed with their knowledge of the process," Calabro says. "And I felt comfortable that Progress could really help us in the training and mentoring area. Because our MIS staff is large and distributed throughout the various departments within the company, we wanted a process that would help us bring everybody together and develop a cohesive approach to things."
Individual responsibilities demand individualized attention
Calabro also wanted to offer her programmers throughout the company more than just a big, general, one-time training session. "It was important to us that the CorVu training address people's specific issues. The mentoring workshops really helped because people got real work to do - actual projects - and were able to ask questions that would affect their daily lives, as opposed to just training where they're required to take raw theory and figure out how to apply it to what they're doing on the job," Calabro recounts.
Time for questions to evolve
Irwin Home Equity's ultimate goals were to enable line-of-business managers to easily perform their own ad hoc reporting, and to allow IT staff to build in more complex functionality to the data warehouse. and 'What if we do that?" Calabro explains. "Then we scheduled individual follow-up appointments to deal with shortterm help on particular, department-specific reports."
Fast and focused results
"I don't think we could have done it without the mentoring," Calabro says. "Being able to speed up the learning curve - to see how other companies were implementing CorVu - was critical to the success of our project. As the CorVu consultants were working on the implementation end, we wanted someone to come in and 'rev up the troops,' so to speak, and the people from Progress did just that, helping us to get the most out of the new system.
"It has just been a very enriching experience all around," she concludes. Under normal circumstances, Progress' Mentoring Workshop is usually completed in just a few days, but Irwin asked for a longer - more segmented - rollout in order to accommodate their internal requirements. Implementing the workshop over the span of several weeks, Calabro's staff was able to test their CorVu™ solutions and return to Progress consultants with specific concerns and issues that could be addressed as they evolved.
After the initial workshop, Calabro arranged to have weekly follow-up visits from the Progress team to handle additional challenges as they were emerging.
"When our Progress consultants came by for their weekly visits, we were able to set up question-and-answer sessions where our programmers could sit around and ask, 'What if we do this?'
As one of the fastest growing companies in direct response lending, Irwin Home Equity needed to find a way to maintain their high standards of customer service while significantly scaling up their volume. Irwin's management team had charged the IT department with finding a way to step up the speed and efficiency of the company's knowledge sharing, to help with internal communications - and to improve their ability to satisfy regulatory agencies.
The installation of a centralized data warehouse was the first step in the process and Business Systems Analyst Pat Calabro was brought in to make it happen. "The company needed a way to connect several stand-alone reporting functions that weren't always balancing properly - a big issue for a publicly-traded financial institution," Calabro recalls. "A cohesive reporting system is essential internally and when you are scrutinized by auditors or outside investors."
Progress and CorVu a natural choice
Irwin was already using Progress for their originations database and their programmers were very comfortable in the environment. Some of the advantages that clinched Irwin's decision to choose CorVu (over Business Objects, the other solution they were considering) was CorVu's ability to run native on the Progress® driver, and, ultimately, the demonstrated experience of Progress' sales and implementation consultants.
"I was impressed with their knowledge of the process," Calabro says. "And I felt comfortable that Progress could really help us in the training and mentoring area. Because our MIS staff is large and distributed throughout the various departments within the company, we wanted a process that would help us bring everybody together and develop a cohesive approach to things."
Individual responsibilities demand individualized attention
Calabro also wanted to offer her programmers throughout the company more than just a big, general, one-time training session. "It was important to us that the CorVu training address people's specific issues. The mentoring workshops really helped because people got real work to do - actual projects - and were able to ask questions that would affect their daily lives, as opposed to just training where they're required to take raw theory and figure out how to apply it to what they're doing on the job," Calabro recounts.
Time for questions to evolve
Irwin Home Equity's ultimate goals were to enable line-of-business managers to easily perform their own ad hoc reporting, and to allow IT staff to build in more complex functionality to the data warehouse. and 'What if we do that?" Calabro explains. "Then we scheduled individual follow-up appointments to deal with shortterm help on particular, department-specific reports."
Fast and focused results
"I don't think we could have done it without the mentoring," Calabro says. "Being able to speed up the learning curve - to see how other companies were implementing CorVu - was critical to the success of our project. As the CorVu consultants were working on the implementation end, we wanted someone to come in and 'rev up the troops,' so to speak, and the people from Progress did just that, helping us to get the most out of the new system.
"It has just been a very enriching experience all around," she concludes. Under normal circumstances, Progress' Mentoring Workshop is usually completed in just a few days, but Irwin asked for a longer - more segmented - rollout in order to accommodate their internal requirements. Implementing the workshop over the span of several weeks, Calabro's staff was able to test their CorVu™ solutions and return to Progress consultants with specific concerns and issues that could be addressed as they evolved.
After the initial workshop, Calabro arranged to have weekly follow-up visits from the Progress team to handle additional challenges as they were emerging.
"When our Progress consultants came by for their weekly visits, we were able to set up question-and-answer sessions where our programmers could sit around and ask, 'What if we do this?'
