Lattice offers client organisations a unique capability to engage with customers in their preferred languages, where the dialogue, required by law or best practice, can be scripted in advance. There is a wide range of situations where this capability can be usefully deployed, from the Police control room to the Hotel front desk, from the Utility engineer in the street to the front office of the Bank. Clearly it offers particular benefits in improving the engagement with customer communities whose first language differs from that prevailing in the client organisation. In addition, the system also helps to ensure that key processes and best practice are successfully propagated throughout the company, and that all the relevant customer data is captured, in a way that is rigorous and easily assimilated.

Key goals – clarity and teamwork

To deploy multilingual capabilities successfully, an approach is required that rigorously and creatively addresses a wide range of issues and technologies. In this context it is important that the following goals are met:

• Operational processes that relate to such multilingual facilities are well defined.
• The relationship of these processes with other relevant processes is well defined.
• These target processes and relationships are well understood and agreed by the key stakeholders in the client organisation and at Lattice.
• The organisational structure and culture of the client is taken into account in the project design and delivery, so that these multilingual capabilities are easily deployed and adopted.
• The nature and volume of the operational requirements are clearly defined, so that the deployed system has the required level of performance, reliability, security, resilience and scalability.
• Training facilities are implemented which are properly tailored to the client’s needs.
• The client organisation and Lattice staff work together as a coherent team.

Clearly, such a project comprises diverse organisational, cultural, process and technical components, and the approach to designing, building and deploying such a system must reflect this multi-disciplinary nature – otherwise there is a danger of presumptions being made which will put one or more of these key goals at risk.

With all of these matters in mind, we have designed an approach that maximises confidence in successfully delivering such a project. We call the approach Lattice Harmonise – a way of working that ensures all these issues are given their proper attention, and that the resulting capability is correctly coordinated with the client’s organisation, culture, process and technical infrastructure. The most common downfall of such projects is to presume that this happens without combining a high level of rigor and creativity. This is necessary to achieve the required level of cross-functional collaboration.

Lattice Harmonise

Our approach to these projects is a synthesis of traditional project management and innovative techniques, to ensure the requisite level of collaborative engagement is maintained amongst the necessarily diverse team of participants. It is led by a project executive who manages the following programme structure for design and delivery:

1	Understand the local organisational structure of the client.
2	Identify key stakeholders.
3	Agree the target for the multilingual facility.
4	Clarify target processes and relationships to adjacent activities.
5	Capture parameters for system sizing.
6	Review processes, relationships and parameters with key stakeholders.
7	Agree project goals and resources with key stakeholders.
8	Design project plan: Overview Size & scope of project Key milestones Team members & responsibilities Resource requirements Costs and contingencies System delivery timetable Design specification Build & Test iterations Final test Training Deployment Schedule of reviews
9	Review and agree project plan with key stakeholders.
10	Agree and institute the relevant regimes for planning, execution and monitoring of key deliverables with project team members, according to their expertise and personalities.
11	Chair daily and weekly project reviews.
12	Report to key stakeholders at scheduled executive reviews.
13	Ensure the project delivers all expectations, on time and within budget.

Although such a rigorous approach to project management is necessary, in practice it is not sufficient if the project is to fully satisfy all expectations. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to maintain a high level of collaboration between the diverse participants of such a project.

This is one of the key aspects of successful programme design and delivery that cannot be taken for granted. In relation to collaboration, people are naturally attracted to some people and situations, and not to others. These personal and team challenges have to be acknowledged and addressed if the project is to achieve all its goals with maximum effect – simultaneously to be both rigorous and innovative. Clearly, the calibre of the project manager is crucial in this regard, and our project managers are chosen for successfully achieving such collaboration.

In addition, we have embedded into this systematic project management approach, where appropriate, a set of activities that help to facilitate a high level of collaboration. These are summarised below:

These activities, used in the appropriate ways, ensure the required level of engagement between team members that encourages everyone to collaborate in the most comprehensive way. For example, when creating the presentation of the application on a computer screen or mobile device, it is useful to use the storyboarding techniques more often found in the creative process of media production. When requiring to extend personal knowledge from one group to another, tutorial techniques can be very enlightening. Similarly, the techniques of expert peer review, used extensively in the scientific community, bring a special rigor and clarity to many challenges in such a project.

These techniques, bringing together best practice from successful business, scientific, technical and creative projects from around the globe, are deployed in a framework for clearly focused action and continuous improvement, which reflects the key aspects of enduring quality management programmes.

This thoughtful combination of systematic project management and innovative team working techniques, enables client and Lattice staff to work together rigorously and imaginatively. In this way we can use the groundbreaking technologies of Lattice, to design, build and deploy creative solutions that will enhance the effectiveness and the efficiency of the client in these strategic multi-cultural initiatives.