Connections Online Webinars

Cardwell Creates Connections Online Webinars to Enhance User Experience

Nations Heritage FCU used the webinar series and experienced benefits with its management staff – better managing project time lines and communicating priorities and metrics for their departments.

Westlake, OHIO — July 31, 2008 — Cardwell; a strategy implementation consultancy and developer of the award winning web-based strategy execution solution, Connections Online (COL); has created a three-part Connections Online webinar series to help its clients get started with the program and to ensure the execution of the credit union’s strategy (and the employee accountability to get it done). The COL webinar series teaches clients the “soft skills,” of strategy management, project management, and people management – as well as using the actual product with each of these areas.  As a result, the series’ intent is to make it easier for users to get started with COL right away, providing them with a value add-on process.

“Many people have asked us to develop a web-based training series focusing on the skills inherent in the Connections Online solution, and we are excited to now be able to provide it,” says Karla Norwood, President of Cardwell.

This three-part webinar series has been designed to give users a hands-on practice with the COL application as well as the “soft side training” resulting in better strategy implementation for the enterprise and departments – clarity of scorecards, project work, individual goals, performance and accountability – are easy to implement through better communications and feedback loops with employees.  

According to Nations Heritage Federal Credit Union’s Maureen Tebo, who’s been using COL for four years, her credit union participated in the webinar series because her managers needed greater focus on effective project management and reporting, metric/goal setting, and team review/communication tools. 

“Our managers often jump to execution of a project before they have determined its merit,” says Tebo, whose credit union took the series this past spring (three separate days of two-hour sessions). “The webinars helped open our eyes for the need to flesh out a project and determine its value and priority, which has allowed us to be smarter in our project implementation process. Best of all, the webinars provide us with this focus at a more affordable cost given our tight budget.”

At Nations Heritage, the webinars introduced newer managers to the program with formal training rather than the ad hoc direction the credit union had received from peers who had simply been around long enough to have learned more formally with an “in person” training a few years ago.  The webinar series blended the concepts of project management and goal setting with the COL tool so the credit union’s managers not only learned the concepts they created and put them into action, which allowed users to track appropriate projects and metrics in their respective areas.

“As a result of this webinar series, managers are more focused on results,” Tebo explains. “They better manage project time lines, and communicate priorities and metrics for their departments now. This is a small investment for a huge payback in a short period of time.”

“We have never done this before – so obviously it’s new for us and our clients,” says Jim Cardwell, CEO of Cardwell. “But we felt that it was due time to provide our clients with a practical online training session for Connections Online to allow new users to get up to speed quicker and for our established clients to refresh their memories of all the capabilities Connections Online has from which they can benefit. We believe it’s going to be a real hit with them, as it certainly worked out well with Nations Heritage, as well as with our other test webinar sites.”

About Cardwell and Connections Online

Based in Westlake, Ohio, Cardwell is a software development and management-consulting firm that helps clients succeed by improving organization-wide alignment and cross-functional collaboration. Jim Cardwell and Karla Norwood, the firm's current CEO and President, founded Cardwell in 1983 as a leadership development and management process, consulting firm.

In response to strong client demand, Cardwell set out in the mid 1990s to transfer its extensive knowledge in these fields into a stand-alone software product. In 1998, the company launched Connections Online™, one of the first organization-wide software solutions designed to address executives' challenges to leading companies towards their strategic goals.

Currently installed in more than 90 organizations across various industries, Connections Online consistently improves profitability and leadership effectiveness. Connections Online users report projects being completed 30 percent faster with a 31 percent improvement in the quality of project results, according to a recent Cardwell survey.