Following are the initiatives she worked on while at Best Buy: 1. Kiosk Strategy
She was assigned to lead the research and data gathering efforts around Kiosk initiatives for Best Buy, participating in their effort creating personas and journey mapping, rounding up the stakeholders, prioritizing all kiosk-related work and executing their research. The research was conducted using resources from Adaptive Path. Once research was completed, organized the findings for presentation to the Best Buy executive audience. In addition, she also led a supplemental research effort on areas of the Kiosk study not covered by Adaptive Path, generating a report on this additional research. 2. Store Location Information
She was charged with framing this $1Million+ project as a Six Sigma effort, also using this project as a Six Sigma training model for one of the Site Managers who was then obtaining Six Sigma certification. The task included helping define the problem and identify the metrics to track to create a viable business case.
The issue under resolution was the inability of the Store Locator functionality to correctly find a Best Buy store on bestbuy.com and the inaccuracy of store address and hours information served on the site. The project had then been ongoing for over a year, with an implied business case alluding to some $40 Million revenue impact. Several solutions were on the table including one using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.
Maryrose assessed the problem, identified and recruited stakeholders that would gain most from the project, and solicited their sponsorship for the effort. Then, she wrote the business case for the project that spoke best to the program benefits and highlighted the customer value perspective. She also delivered a solutions options list that leveraged tools that were already in the pipeline at bestbuy.com. 3. Change Management
Code promotion for content owned by the .com user group was impacting site stability costing revenue losses in terms of sales and unpredictable bestbuy.com outages (partial or full). This issue was caused by a lack of formal procedure and ownership in the .com area. The problem was highlighted one holiday weekend when an issue was actually escalated up the executive pipeline to then-president Brad Anderson. The stability issue quickly came down through the same path into bestbuy.com GM John Thompson’s attention.
Maryrose performed Six Sigma analysis on this project, identified all the stakeholders, orchestrated them into collaboratively defining the problem, agreeing on a project objective, installing or identifying measures (as appropriate) to be able to gauge project success, and implementing the solution (an effort that included enabling the adoption process of the new procedure). 4. Process Improvement for SEO, Espanol
There were coverage and business continuity issues in the Site Management group during high-volume/high-visibility season due to missing standard operating procedures. There was a very observable reliance on resources instead of a documented process. This was also compromising repeatability of provided solutions.
Maryrose was entasked to identify these processes, work with the Site Management resource to document and improve these processes and create a standard operating procedure to support the stability of bestbuy.com. She created these processes successfully for the SEO group, BBY Espanol, the Change Submission/Prioritization pipeline. 5. BBY Remix
As part of the center of excellence for bestbuy.com, Maryrose was loaned out to do program management for the effort to develop the web service infrastructure. She developed the business case and scoped the effort for the first release of bestbuy.com’s first web services. 6. Holiday Season 2008 Quality Assurance
Bestbuy.com has historically run a special quality assurance/verification process during the high-transaction holiday season to increase site stability. 2008 Holiday season was no different. Maryrose developed a streamlined quality assurance process that exploited an existing QA relationship with their offshore IT partners, creating significant savings on QA resources, a timely problem identification process that gives way to an efficient defect remediation procedure. She undertook defining all the parameters for this test and the escalation process. This change resulted in significant savings for bestbuy.com during 2008 Holiday season, increased stability of the site and ability to operate on the lower resource load dictated by mandated resource cuts.
All rights reserved | 
