Hello Everyone!
First off, I appreciate you taking the time to read this thread. I've recently joined a new company. My background is mostly in enterprise sales and small scale project management (team of 3 on less sophisticated business). I was lucky enough to land a job at rapidly growing small manfacturing company. We work mainly through distributers to deliver custom product development. We have a small team of engineers who focus mainly on product development, a small outside sales force, and an overwhelmed operations team.
We've recently acquired two large products. The problem I've seen from only being there a few days is poor time management, communication, and infrastructure. Virtually no software development tools for planning, aside from a less than detailed smart sheet engineering uses as a basic task manager. There is no centralized point of information and our engineers have no access to our ERP system.
Here is my predictament. I'm young in this company, from an age standpoint (under 30), and a tenure standpoint. This company has resoundingly low turnover, some employees have been there for over 15 years. Some of them are pretty set in their ways. Although, a lot of them are also open to suggestions for productivity changes, there hasn't been any effort put forth other than acquiring me. The two projects in question, I've slowly been getting acclimated to, but there is no way I can restart the process at this juncture without causing a lot of internal pain.
Does anyone have experience in a situation similar to this? Can you offer up some suggestions on instilling process change without coming off as the "new kid, know it all". I want to be very careful here as some of the original creators of these processes are still with the company, and I don't want to offend them.
At the end of the day, this company has been very successful and they're at a pretty critical juncture. They can't handle the capacity of their larger scale projects right now, but they're tentitive to invest in production machinary without purchase agreements from these larger projects.
This is definately a company that needs a PM, but they've never had one and the they aren't familar with our processes. They're paying me good money to be there and I'm passionate about improving the project management of this company. But, I want to do it in a way that causes the least amount of internal pain.
Thanks,
-Newbie