Four agencies, three countries, one month

Problem

Four model agencies, independent of one another, each running a booking system that had been overtaken by what the work had become.

The systems still ran. What they no longer did was anything modern — and in an agency that gap shows up in a particular place first, which is images. Imaging and media management sat in its own system, separate from booking, priced by usage: per model, per photo volume, growing with the roster. So the agencies were paying more as they grew, for a library that wasn’t connected to the bookings it existed to serve.

Billing was the other break. Nothing flowed from the booking system to the agency’s accounting. Every invoice, every commission, every usage and every renewal was moved across by hand, by someone, every month — which is both a cost and a category of error that nobody finds until a client or a model finds it for you.

Goal

Booking, imaging and billing in one system at all four agencies, with billing connected through to each agency’s accounting so that the manual step disappeared.

Challenges

The people, more than the software. These were established agencies with established ways of working, and the booking systems they were leaving had been learned by heart. Familiarity is not the same as satisfaction, but it feels like it at the moment someone proposes replacing it. The resistance wasn’t unreasonable — an agent who can work an old system fast is being asked to become slow again, in public, during business hours.

Features that had no equivalent to compare to. Training someone to do an old task in a new place is straightforward. Training them to use a capability they’ve never had is a different exercise, because there is no existing habit to map it onto and no felt need until they’ve used it. Much of what was new fell into that category.

Billing integration was unfamiliar territory. None of the four had run a booking system connected to accounting. For the accounting staff in particular this was not a new screen, it was a new relationship between two departments that had previously exchanged paper and spreadsheets. That is a change to how people work together, and it lands harder than software does.

Four agencies of different shapes, run in parallel. One of them large and operating across several cities including Paris; one small enough to have a single office in Montreal; the others in between. Four data migrations, four configurations, four training schedules, all at once, with no opportunity to learn from the first before committing to the fourth — and no two of them the same size of problem.

And the accounting wasn’t one destination, it was several. Billing integration is a different exercise when one agency’s books have to satisfy French requirements and another’s American ones. A single integration built once wouldn’t have served them; each agency’s billing had to land somewhere that was correct for where it operated.

Solution

Modern booking implemented at all four, with imaging, media and scouting brought into it, and each agency’s billing linked through to its accounting system.

How it was delivered matters more than the component list, and this is the part worth being specific about.

The team was distributed to be physically present. Not a central team supporting four remote projects, but people on site in each location on the dates that mattered — in three American cities and in Paris — coordinated so that four simultaneous go-lives each had someone in the room. For agencies whose objection was that this would disrupt the working day, the answer that actually persuades is a person standing there when it does.

Training was hands-on and went deep. The goal was not competence, it was comfort — which is a higher bar and the only one that matters with users who were skeptical to begin with.

Accounting was walked through it, not handed it. The departments least accustomed to the change got the most direct support, through the launch and past it.

And the support didn’t stop at go-live. A period of hyper-care followed each launch — heavier, closer attention than ongoing support, deliberately, until the transition to ordinary support could be made because the agency was ready for it rather than because the project had ended.

The French side was handled with software built for it. Our own agency accounting has had a sister codebase for French requirements since early in its life, maintained with a specialist collaborator — so the agency operating in Paris was not being asked to accept an American system with allowances made, which is the usual compromise and the usual source of trouble later.

And it wasn’t delivered alone. Our team worked alongside the booking platform’s own people — the developer of that platform is based in Paris, which is part of why a French deployment was workable in the first place. That is the same shape of arrangement Solution Matrix was formed to make ordinary rather than exceptional.

Success

All four agencies went live in March 2018.

The result that counts, though, isn’t the date — it’s that people who had not wanted a new system were using one. Agents working bookings in a system they had resisted a few weeks earlier. Booking, imaging and billing in one place instead of three, with the image library no longer a separate system on a separate bill that grew with the roster. Accounting receiving billing from the booking system rather than rebuilding it by hand every month, with usages and renewals carried through rather than remembered.

That is the whole of it: four agencies, four old systems retired, one month, and the people who were most skeptical using the result.

Solution Matrix had been formed shortly before, and this was the first month of working the way it was formed to work. The company was new; the capability was not. Bringing the agency accounting software together with the consulting and the support — three things that had been operating separately — into one entity was the point of it, and four simultaneous go-lives across three countries is the kind of engagement that only makes sense once they are.