With Google Workspace, MMP improved how its large, growing workforce can collaborate and use data and information in new ways to deliver some of Pakistan’s most transformative public projects.
MMP is an independent, privately-owned engineering, management and development services company, operating in all the major sectors of the Pakistani economy. It has overseen the completion of hundreds of projects and managed multi-disciplinary assignments both as the lead firm in consortiums and as a partner with international companies. It has 1,200 staff in 8 offices across Pakistan.
-
Pakistan
With Google Workspace, MMP improved how its large, growing workforce can collaborate and use data and information in new ways to deliver some of Pakistan’s most transformative public projects.
Google Workspace Results
Develop project management systems for demanding projects
• Automates processes and workflows to increase compliance and standardize ways of working
• Easily handles multi-year project files that can range into the terabytes
• Improve analysis of performance due to better data insights and workflows
• Freedom to design and develop new systems that help every project member better leverage information
• Breaks down communication and collaboration barriers due to the large geographical spread of the company operations
With a history lasting 35+ years in Pakistan, has established itself as one of the country’s top project management and engineering consultancies. The company plays a leading role in national development and is uniquely qualified to serve many sectors, including energy, water resources, transportation, urban planning & infrastructure, and social development. Most of its clients are departments of the Government of Pakistan.
However, working at the top tiers of national development comes with country-sized challenges. MMP is implementing more than 50 projects, spanning from the southern Balochistan to the northern Gilgit-Baltistan provinces, involving eight regional offices. With 1,200 employees needing to collaborate, communicate, and comply with its Quality Management requirements, the organization needed a powerful suite of work collaboration tools to help MMP transform the company’s "Way of Work."
Creating a new culture with Google Workspace
“In 2021, we embarked on a business process improvement program and chose Google Workspace to create a unified culture and work environment in the company. Given our plans to venture out of Pakistan and become an international company, we needed a new, more sustainable work culture at MMP.” - Kamran Rafique, Technical Account Leader, MMP
Before using , MMP used to collaborate across different platforms and channels. Teams across the organization would rely on emails, WhatsApp groups, phone calls, even traveling to in-person meetings, which greatly impacted the company’s productivity and costs. Mailing or hand-delivering USB sticks and hard drives filled with large, sensitive files was also common practice, but became increasingly risky for the company as they continued to grow.
"We never set up Exchange servers because we are geographically so spread that hardware maintenance costs in different regions, and the infrastructure that goes along with it, would have been impossible to manage," says Kamran Rafique, Technical Account Leader at MMP.
Collaboration challenges and issues continued to mount, and came to a tipping point as the company doubled in size from 2017 to 2021, meaning that traditional ways of working and its old culture would be unsustainable.
Rafique explains, "In 2021, we embarked on a business process improvement program and chose Google Workspace to create a unified culture and work environment in the company. Given our plans to venture out of Pakistan and become an international company, we needed a new, more sustainable work culture at MMP."
Changing the MMP work culture in steps
“Drive serves as a reference point for solutions from all our past projects so that our teams won’t feel like they need to reinvent the wheel when they start a new project, says Rafique.” - Kamran Rafique, Technical Account Leader, MMP
After deciding to integrate with Google Workspace in October 2021, MMP began integration by first migrating all their emails from a different provider to .
With that first step, MMP’s teams realized that their jobs were becoming easier because Gmail simplified how project teams could set up and manage any number of email addresses to coordinate with clients in all its projects.
The next step was to build a data repository to speed up learning via easy access to past project deliverables.
" serves as a reference point for solutions from all our past projects so that our teams won’t feel like they need to reinvent the wheel when they start a new project," says Rafique.
MMP’s teams can now collaborate on the same documents in Drive using structured portfolios for different projects with standardized folders, simplifying how information can be located and acted upon.
Drive also ensures that every MMP team member is working on the latest version of the document, relieving another challenge for MMP. According to Rafique, document version control was a huge factor for consideration when deciding on a cloud platform, given a large number of documents and data that goes into each development megaproject.
"We’ve also encouraged our staff to streamline communication through Google Workspace using the Spaces function in to share files, assign tasks and stay connected, and use for team calls and general communication. We also heavily use Google Groups to create what we call ’Communities of Practice.’ These bring together those with similar expertise, like all our structural engineers, to exchange ideas about particular aspects of their discipline," Rafique elaborates.
MMP aims to improve performance management by automating internal reporting workflows from an annual to monthly cadence. Rafique explains that MMP is in the process of setting up standard templates using and to help staff deliver standard deliverables, making it easier to automate internal quality assurance so that management can quickly nip any quality issues in the bud before their annual audit.
Create new systems to turn information into profit
MMP discovered that the technology enablers on Google Workspace have created new avenues for it to design and patent new project management systems for use in technically demanding projects.
The first is BD Workspace, which has a workflow based engine to drive proposals process, and dashboards active bids and their status, including the decisions under evaluation. The second, projAware, covers project functions like planning cost management, staff deployment, progress reporting, invoice management, and document management. It was given the tagline "projects with no surprises" because, as Rafique puts it, "nothing is worse to a project than a surprise." Both systems unite data streams from different tools into a front end on to ease analysis and monitoring. Another system, called Hawk-i, makes monitoring and evaluation of information possible in real time.
The BD Workspace provides an end-to-end workflow and datastream from a prospect to a project. It helps the company’s proposal teams to use workflows from the time a new project advertisement appears and stays active until it wins or loses a bid. Automated notifications cue team members with different expertise to provide input throughout the process, unifying the contributions of different specialists in creating a winning proposal.
"This is important because information is the currency of projects. It impacts your project margins. Information availability at the right time, in almost real time, is fundamental, and that’s where projAware comes in," Rafique explains.
In one real-world example, Rafique describes how information made available at the right time saved a project’s profitability. It involved a project with a lump-sum price, but the customer made many alterations and grew the list of deliverables.
"In my position, drilling down to the minutiae of every project development is impossible. But, with projAware, I can switch on activity monitoring in Drive in the correspondence folder of a project to be alerted about new customer correspondences. Picking up on these alterations, I quickly arranged a meeting with the teams in Karachi to understand what was happening and revealed that the changes could have affected our margins significantly. We worked to amend the variation order to the client’s satisfaction while keeping our margins intact," Rafique says.
MMP plans to connect projAware and BD Workspace in the near future to unite the bid and project execution phases and create a common data thread throughout the entire project lifecycle. Rafique sees this as a planning accelerator to pre-populate execution plans using the right information from the proposals as soon as the client greenlights the project.
Transitioning from a consultancy to a technology provider
“The true potential of Google solutions is not just what we’re trying to do for ourselves in our company, but as a provider of project management SaaS to our customers to independently monitor and evaluate projects in real time.” - Kamran Rafique, Technical Account Leader, MMP
According to Rafique, Google Workspace has opened MMP’s view to leverage its engineering and project management expertise to provide software-as-a-service (SaaS) with the new technology enablers it discovered on .
It aims to build on its position as a key management support consultant, particularly in the water resource management, renewable energy and social development sectors.
"The true potential of Google solutions is not just what we’re trying to do for ourselves in our company, but as a provider of project management SaaS to our customers to independently monitor and evaluate projects in real time," Rafique explains.
Rafique says this is a perfect example of how a technology enabler can help experts in the field and innovate the business side of things with minimal effort, and MMP is looking forward to exploring more solutions on Google Workspace and Google Cloud.