Advocating for Productivity
When IT issues mean your team can’t do their jobs effectively or without major pain and suffering, it’s time to get help.
One of our clients, Avient Corporation, had a productivity problem when it came to Mac support. David Honeycutt, senior global director for marketing communications, turned to Cranston IT for help. He began working with our Apple corporate services team. David explained to us the problems Avient faced, and how the solutions provided by Cranston IT were able to solve them.
Marcom Team’s Problem
David: As the marketing communications team, our group’s needs are quite different than the rest of the users in our windows-based company. As one would expect, staffing to support an outlier (the Mac platform) is a difficult proposition for a windows centric IT department.
Our job is to remove obstacles and enable the team to operate efficiently and productively.
– Cranston IT
Fundamentally, our ability to get support was limited to the answers that we could find on our own. In many cases, we were simply unable to solve the problems we encountered. So, we had to live with them or work around them, which impeded productivity.
And because our company wasn’t equipped to support this platform, we had to take time out of our normal workstream to address them. As non-IT marketing professionals, we simply weren’t equipped to solve anything but the most fundamental problems. Often we found ourselves entirely and simply unable to find the fix we needed and were forced to live with the issues.
Enter Cranston IT
David: Now, we send problems to Cranston, and the team can effectively problem solve. They see the whole landscape. They ask the right questions, learn about the environment, and are an advocate for this department. They determine the steps we need to take… and then execute them.
I see this kind of advocacy as a fundamental need. We cannot support ourselves because we do not have the knowledge or time to dig and wade through the issues. It’s not part of our mandate as marketers. We’re now able to focus on marketing excellence rather than IT support.
Cranston IT’s responsiveness is impeccable. They also don’t expect you to be an expert about your Mac. Refreshing.
– Avient Team Member
Cranston IT is also able to demystify our points of tension. They can communicate a technical problem in a simple way, so that the user who’s being affected by the problem understands it. They can then interface with our IT department and create a bridge. The fact that they can define and articulate an issue so that it can be acted upon is very valuable to us.
They’re very responsive and very client-centric. They also go to bat for the user, and we feel they represent us well.
A Solution for Greater Productivity
Cranston IT: Our job at Avient is to ensure the operability of Apple devices within the context of marketing operations. That means we want to represent the marketing users in the best way possible and solve their problems as efficiently and quickly as possible.
We also need to understand what makes the department tick. In this case, Avient’s team consisted of a traditional marketing department with dependencies, multiple vendors, pressing deadlines, and a leadership channel. Further, productivity needs to be the focus, and our job is to ensure that technology does not get in the way. We are there to remove obstacles, not add them.
Working within the given infrastructure, we’re able to find answers that harmonize with core IT concerns without dinging the user. Again, the aim is to keep the IT infrastructure from affecting the users’ individual productivity. So we view our job as project management first and IT solutions second.
David: Cranston has been able to find answers that work with our existing IT infrastructure and don’t jeopardize security, while at the same time meeting the needs of my team. And that’s the piece that we cannot do without. The reason my marketing communications squad uses Apple devices is because they are better suited for the kind of work we do, and Cranston IT is focused on ensuring we reach are able to use our Macs to the fullest extent.
Cranston IT was instrumental in fixing a difficult Outlook issue that our internal IT team was simply not staffed to resolve – they were a lifesaver!
– Avient Team Member
