Grass Roots - Project Management

Established in 1980, Grass Roots is a performance improvement company with a turnover of £284 million that serves over 1000 organisations in the UK.  It also provides international solutions to an expanding list of companies.  Grass Roots delivers a full service approach based on communication, education, measurement and reward that will stimulate outcomes and results from employees, channel partners and customers.

The Accord Partnership was asked to help Grass Roots migrate an existing Microsoft Access-based system that supported its mystery shopping services to a new web-based application. The new platform, Mysticweb, stores and uses information on clients and their premises, along with a panel of more than 60,000 registered people. The deployment has achieved new levels of automation in the management of over 10,000 mystery shopping assignments each month. 

Formal project management processes were implemented by the Accord Partnership to manage this complex project.  This involved conducting a series of scoping meetings to attain a realistic assessment of development schedules and how they aligned to the short, medium and long term requirements of the business.  These meetings also helped to align user expectations of what the project could achieve against the required business objectives within given time frames.

The Accord Partnership provided an expert resource to improve decision-making throughout the development process which helped keep the project accurately defined and progressing within known timescales.  Accord also project managed the implementation which was successfully completed within well-defined timescales and budget.   

The updated MysticsWeb has enabled Grass Roots to achieve immediate business improvements including significant service efficiencies and a twofold increase in the  capacity to execute mystery shopping assignments with a streamlined operational team. 

As well as enabling the delivery of high levels of customer service, the new web-based solution makes it quick and easy to deploy new services and will play an important role in enabling Grass Roots to expand its services to international markets^.