🏆 Atlas Champion spotlight: Jeremy Edwards, Steel Dynamics

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We're shining a spotlight on our amazing champion, Jeremy Edwards, so you can be inspired by how he uses Atlas. Jeremy is a Leadership Development Coach and IT Consultant for Steel Dynamics, one of North America's largest steel producers. Let's dive into his Atlas story! ⤵️

The challenges of geographically distributed teams

Steel Dynamic’s IT team is geographically spread across the US and internationally. With over 20 IT managers and supervisors, it was extremely challenging for leadership, especially at the CIO level to keep their finger on the pulse of project status and project progress. 

Bringing humanity to the data

When we talk about reporting, we immediately jump straight to graphs, charts, KPIs, and other metrics. In other words, data, data, data. From my experience, data alone doesn't tell the full story.

What's missing is the narrative around what's happening, the human-to-human curated story to supplement the data.

People aren't necessarily built to consume mountains of data points, but rather, they’re wired for the drama. The ups, the downs, the prospect of where we're at, where we're going, and how we're gonna get there.

Without the full story, as leaders, we’re left to infer this from the data. It's just too important to leave the chance. That's what made us seek out and utilize Atlas.

Streamlining reporting and bi-directional engagement

What I love about Atlas is that it addresses our reporting challenges gracefully without being too cumbersome or time-consuming. It fits into the way that each IT team works, and it’s tech-agnostic.

It allows each team to continue to use the project management and execution tools that they're familiar with. In essence, sitting on top of these tools and prompting the manager for the story, and providing guardrails around how to produce effective updates.

Bi-directional engagement is by far the most critical factor to the sustainability of reporting for anyone that's ever submitted a status report. It can definitely feel like sending a message out into the ether.

Leadership, especially the CIO are finding deep value in the information presented by Atlas and they're committed to engaging with IT managers on their status updates.

Leveraging the Loop framework

I really appreciate the Atlas Loop framework, especially belief number three - “curate, don’t automate”. Atlas has standardized the way that the story moves in out and around the organization, whilst still being flexible.

If we as leaders covet this type of communication, then it's a must that we find a way to provide some return on investment to keep the comms flowing. Atlas makes this easy for us to accomplish.

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Thanks, Jeremy!

[Sherif Mansour]

@Jeremy Edwards thank you for sharing your story! 👏🏽