Crunch time at ARN

31 March 2011

There have been two projects that I have been working on at ARN.

First one is the marketing one, that I have talked about earlier, in which I am assisting Jodie Koning (National Marketing Director) but more on that later.

The second one that I have been involved in was with providing a solution to aid Internal Communications, here at ARN.

As part of the communications projects which I christened , 'Project Listen' (as you do) I was asked to move away from the usual suspects when it comes to internal communications; namely the mass email, the newsletter, the webpage or the intranet and asked to come up with something new and with the times.

After speaking to Tracy Martin and doing some research, the only thing that fit the bill was social media. In layman's terms, imagine facebook for work.

Now just to make it clear, this is not THE facebook that we tend to check every day (some more so than others!) so this is not about creating a page on facebook but acquiring a software that helps create a facebook environment at work.

There are quite a few businesses operating in this area but two that fit what we were after were Yammer and Yackstar.

Yammer is the US big brother of all business social networking that is run at many Fortune 500 companies. I investigated this and when i was satisfied that this would be something that ARN would benefit from then I got a web-meet set up with members of the Leadership Team to have a look at the software.

After the meeting the common consensus was that this was a good software but there was a general hesitancy of getting this into the organisation due to various reasons depending on which area you headed.

Overall, most of the comments seem to be coming with people wearing their black hats.

I enquired the cost and it was quite expensive at $50 USD per user per month. So for a workforce of 500, one would be looking at spending $360,000 USD annually. I knew straight away this would not go through based on cost alone.

The second option was Yackstar. This is an australian clone of Yammer and for a fraction of the cost, does virtually the same thing. Yackstar quoted us at at $5 AUD per user per month. So for a workforce of 500, one would be looking at spending $30,000 AUD annually.
Cost would not be a problem.

While we were going through working out the details of Yackstar, the ARN intranet which was hosted on Sharepoint 2003 crashed and virtually all data on it was lost.

Now there was a project to install Sharepoint 2010 before this happened and this event kinda pushed it even further. Add building renovations on top of that and people across the business are already swamped with what things that needed to happen 'yesterday'.

The solution: I wrote down a project scoping plan which highlighted all the research that was done for this project and the steps involved in case this gets picked up by someone else in the future.

Day 1 ... ARN

8 Feb 2011

Yesterday was my first day at the Australian Radio Network (Sydney).

I arrived at ARN on Day 1 and met with Bluebell Rae (Executive Assistant to CEO and CFO) who had very efficiently planned out my day which was spent meeting with the National Leadership Team at ARN and getting an understanding of what their role was in the business.

Recently, ARN has gone through a restructure which has resulted in a national approach for the company as opposed to regionalised decision makers.

As big a step as that was, it was only step 1 of the changes that are about to happen here. Not only in the way business is handled but the physical premises itself is getting a facelift and renovations are happening everywhere in the building. This has resulted in a lot of people/teams having to move desks/offices and finding places to sit to continue work.

I walked into this environment yesterday and can feel the buzz on the floor… Very excited about being part of this change.

Working with NZ Mags was an opportunity to be a part of a different kind of change and this will help me not only learn more about Radio and marketing but also how change is applied to different parts of a business.

I will be involved in a series of mini projects starting with assisting Jodie Koning (National Marketing Director) with the branding application of all of ARN’s stations and the company itself. Geraint Davies (National Operations Director) has got each station on each site around the country to send through in soft and hard copy, anything and everything that has a logo on it.

This has now resulted in a big basket of samples from across the country and an itemised list of the same via soft copy.

My job in week 1 is to make some head and tail of all of this and provide recommendation on how we can be consistent and cost effective with our branding and print runs.

Time to start sorting!

Block 2 completed

28/01/2011



Last day today at GSP and today will be spent putting the finishing touches on everything and saying goodbyes.

I am quite happy with what we have achieved during the three months here but at the same time, I will miss the place and its people. They are a warm bunch of hardworking people who took me in as one of their own and I was made to feel comfortable from day one. Special thanks to Peter Piccione (for all the travel and general advice, a sound sounding board for all my wacky ideas!), Jennifer Jefferys (provider of solutions when i had any problem) and Stephen Rudgley (lunch buddy and going out of his way to drop me home, time and time again!)

Flying home today for a week of rest and then heading back to Sydney to start work with Australian Radio Network (ARN) after that.

I went to meet with Jodie Koning (National Marketing Director, Australian Radio Network) yesterday and she briefed me in on the specifics of my next block.


This has been an amazing learning experience. This block gave me an insight on the outdoor/pos print industry, marketing and organisational behaviour.

I look forward to see what ARN throws at me next!