punkto beratung GmbH provides different coaching and consulting services including counselling of individuals/teams, interim HR leadership and organizational development. In all these areas communication is the main method how service gets conveyed. For most of it either Susann Zumstein or the client needs to travel to a meeting point which takes a lot of time and incurrs additional traveling costs. Susann Zumstein already has some experience in holding meetings online and now wants to expand into that direction further.

When moving the counselling business to the digital world, multiple aspects of the classical process need to be redefined. From scheduling appointments, paying invoices to the actual communication channel used need to be considered. Since those processes are unlikely to be covered by one off-the-shelf product we decided to research for individual software packages that target one specific requirement and combine them. We conducted workshops in order to give the client an overview of the products available. The iterative workshop sessions, where Susann Zumstein has actively taken place in, form a substantial part of supporting her informed decision making process.

During the workshops, Susann Zumstein had the opportunity to gain first hand experience with the different tools in question. This helped her to see the functionalities that she can expect from a standard software and also gets a look and feel of how her customers will experience the shift to the digital world. We evaluated different products according to their strengths, weaknesses as well as opportunities and threats. In addition, we researched about the possibilities to integrate different software components and how a seamless user experience can be achieved. In the course of the project, the project team and Susann Zumstein concluded that there are tradeoffs that need to be made. In order to gain more feature richness, one needs to compromise on speed of implementation and initial setup costs. The final deliverable for Susann Zumstein are two completely different implementation scenarios. One of those can even be implemented in different steps that build on top of each other. This allows to go productive faster with lower initial effort and add more features later. The scenarios all describe which software and services to use and how to connect them. The setup effort, maintenance effort as well as the added value are highlighted.