DC Thomson Media

DC Thomson Media is one of the leading content creators in the UK, publishing newspapers, magazines, and comics.

Importance of Strategy Management

As DC Thomson Media's business continuously evolves and expands into new areas, it became clear that strategy management was going to be a key part to their overall success. DC Thomson Media soon realized that a strategy management system would help pull everything into one place, giving the senior leadership team high-level visibility and accountability of key activity across the media business, in a single location.

Integrating ClearPoint

DC Thomson Media introduced ClearPoint in March of 2017 and since then, it has become an integral part of their business. In the beginning, DC Thomson Media was mainly using ClearPoint for project management, through project and milestone tracking. After attending the ClearPoint Summit in Fort Lauderdale, Amanda Sangster, Head of Strategy at DC Thomson Media, realized the potential of ClearPoint in other areas, specifically around KPI tracking. Now, ClearPoint is used to track objectives, projects, KPIs, milestones and action reports, which are reported on during weekly and monthly meetings for different businesses across their portfolio.

Running Meetings from ClearPoint

DC Thomson Media runs both departmental meetings and Senior Operating Board meetings directly from ClearPoint. They use an agenda with links to view uploaded documents, as well as activity and project updates. The KPI dashboards have been particularly powerful, as they provide valuable insights to members of the Operational Board prior to their monthly meetings. Supplemental presentations and documents are generally uploaded as well to provide some additional context to attendees. Additionally, the custom action reports ensure meetings can be run directly from ClearPoint, without the need to jump from one application to another.

Saving Time with ClearPoint

With the introduction of KPIs over the last year, it became evident that there was a plethora of data that needed to be transferred from Excel to ClearPoint. At this time, the ClearPoint Team worked with DC Thomson Media to implement the Data Loader. Now, the Data Loader runs on a schedule to keep ClearPoint up-to-date. Along with the Data Loader, DC Thomson has taken advantage of some advanced calculations. So, with each automated Data Loader run, all the data and calculations run within ClearPoint, and all the KPIs viewed during their monthly Operational Board meeting are ready to go.

Still Learning and Growing

As DC Thomson Media continues to grow and acquire businesses, they are going to rely heavily on ClearPoint. With each new business will come a new scorecard in ClearPoint. Each scorecard will have a KPI dashboard and project being tracked.DC Thomson Media's experience with ClearPoint has been a remarkable one as the software has become such an essential part of their day-to-day strategy.