A few years back, the COO of a multimillion-dollar financial services company sat down and identified their ten most critical priorities, things like improving the company’s underwriting automation, consolidating administrative platforms, and managing enterprise risk.

Aging infrastructure and looming regulatory deadlines meant there was nothing optional about these priorities. They were critical.

Next, he pulled together all 1200 people in his division, ran a leadership summit, held lunch briefings, and sat down one-on-one with managers to make sure everyone was clear on what needed to be done. Everyone assured him they were.

For the purpose of this story, we’ll call this COO Alan. That’s not his name, but his position is real, and so is what happened next.

He was crystal clear.

In the meetings with his team, Alan communicated two things. First: Here are our ten priorities for the year, and they’re essential to our success. Second: I want each of you spending 65 percent of your time on these ten things.

A few months later, a report crossed Alan’s desk, and he couldn’t believe his eyes.

According to their timesheets, people were spending less than four hours a week on the priorities he’d asked them to spend 26 hours a week on. He’d mandated 65% of their time, and they were only doing 10%.

What went wrong?

“It’s the tyranny of the urgent,” says Brandon Thornton, the RPM consultant and resource management expert that Alan called in for help.

“Alan was facing the same challenge many companies face. His people were too busy dealing with legacy technology, data quality issues, customer service issues, you name it—they were never able to find the time to get from the urgent to the important.”

Alan was facing a resource alignment problem.

Yes, this massive organization had the standard resource management systems in place—reporting structures, timesheets, the usual apparatus for keeping track of who was doing what.

But what they didn’t have was a system that would keep people aligned with the priority work, even in the face of distractions.

They didn’t have an enterprise-wide worklist that would keep everyone on the same page, day in and day out. And they didn’t have the tools to ensure priority work was actually getting the priority.

RPM was the foundation for change.

When the RPM team from Milestone started working with Alan, one of the first things they addressed was timesheets.

Like most companies, the people on Alan’s team were tracking their time—but it was a dreaded chore, especially because it didn’t seem to have any value.

“We talked with Alan and his leaders about changing this approach,” says Brandon.

“RPM is built to help people plan ahead to what they’re going to work on next week, and align that with the company’s priorities—instead of just reporting what they did last week,” he says. “This shift helps keep people focused, and it gives them a sense of ownership over what they’re working on. It also starts to reveal where any problems might be, like unrealistic expectations, misunderstood priorities, or overloaded team members.”

This is exactly what RPM is designed for.

Not only does the RPM platform keep priority work at the top of each person’s individual project list, it also tracks and retains their weekly time forecasts and timesheets.

And, perhaps most importantly, it facilitates instant, seamless communication and collaboration between leaders, functional managers, project managers, and individual contributors as they negotiate “urgent” requests against the priority initiatives.

Although Alan’s team was using a variety of programs, including Microsoft Project and SAP, the RPM platform is built to pull together all systems. Having one organization-wide place to align and collaborate began to change the game for them.

Starting small

To test this new way of working, Alan’s organization began rolling out RPM with just one team, tied to a single initiative. Here’s how the RPM process looked for them:

• The analysts and others doing the work would use the RPM platform to create a forecast for their coming week, with the focus on doing the priority projects. Then they’d proactively communicate this plan to their leadership for approval.
• At the end of that week, they’d use RPM to confirm where they’d actually spent their time.
• Importantly, there was no shaming involved. If someone ended up getting derailed and working on things of lesser importance, a manager would help problem-solve. Could something be delegated to someone else? Could certain kinds of fire drills be put off? Together, they’d work toward freeing up time for the priority tasks.

The point of RPM is not to eliminate or ignore unexpected emergencies. A major failure in a customer-facing system is more important than the top-ten list, obviously. The point is to make the distractions visible and to provide guidelines for dealing with them.

Folks were skeptical.

At first, Alan’s people were sure this was just another pointless reporting exercise—one more thing they didn’t have time to do.

But when they started to see that their weekly forecasts were being reviewed and supported by their managers, and that they were getting help with overloaded schedules, they were on board.

“Human psychology tells us that if I commit to an idea, I’m going to work harder at it than if somebody just tells me what to do,” Brandon says. “That’s a core premise of RPM. We developed this software to support the way humans really work.”

The test of RPM was so successful that Alan soon rolled it out to his entire organization of 1,200 people.

Focus increased by 5X.

Within seven months of implementing RPM, Alan was seeing major improvements. Instead of his people spending just ten percent of their time on his top 10 priorities, RPM’s reports showed that they were now spending half their time on the work that truly mattered.

“It was a big shift from where they started,” says Brandon.

According to Brandon, the leaders who saw the biggest change in their teams were those who genuinely stopped treating a missed forecast as something to punish, and started treating it as something to understand. Those were the teams that were now spending 20 hours a week on priority work, instead of just four—a whole lot closer to Alan’s goal.

The key to a successful RPM implementation
This kind of shift rarely comes without some effort, which is why coaching is a big part of any RPM implementation. The RPM team from Milestone works closely with leaders to help them understand how to get the best results from their people, and how to help their forecasts match their timesheets.

“These managers and directors are smart, and it usually only takes a little nudge to help them see where they can shift their approach,” says Brandon, about the coaching Milestone provides.

When priorities aren’t being met, RPM can help.

Alan had done everything a good leader is supposed to do to get his team focused on what matters, but it still didn’t work. There was still a gap between what people understood and what they were equipped to do.

The RPM platform and Milestone’s coaches closed that gap, and it’s still paying off for Alan and his team.