It doesn’t matter if your team is remote or in the office; keeping an eye on a technical team’s progress is challenging.
But at Publisher Hachette UK, tracking such progress had long meant accessing project documents fragmented across local folders, receiving critical updates through delayed emails, and keeping track of governance models that varied depending on the team and the size of the initiative.
While work was getting done, per se, it wasn’t always easy for the wider business to see how individual projects were performing or how different workstreams connected to larger strategic goals.
For Peter Quartley, IT director at Hachette UK, the search for a more consistent approach became a priority: “We were looking to standardize our project delivery processes and needed a tool that could house our projects in a single location,” he says. “We wanted something that could bring planning and status tracking into one environment.”
From fragmented reporting to a unified model
After assessing options, in late 2023 Hachette began a small-scale pilot of monday.com, a cloud-based work operating system that allows teams to manage their work in one place.
What began as a contained trial demonstrated value, says Quartley, and over the following year the team rolled out the platform more widely across the department.
Before monday.com, teams handled reporting in different ways, reflecting the varied governance requirements across work packages of different scales.
“Project artifacts were stored locally and communicated by email, so general visibility was limited,” Quartley explains. The challenge wasn’t only operational but cultural: teams needed a tool intuitive enough to be adopted across the department while supporting more robust reporting structures.
With monday.com, Hachette has reorganized its projects into structured portfolios, giving the IT leadership team a clearer line of sight across the entire delivery landscape.
More importantly, responsibility for communicating progress has broadened, says Quartley.
“It has supported a cultural shift within the department regarding ownership of those portfolios,” Quartley says. Sub-department heads now provide weekly updates on their assigned portfolios, highlighting key issues, risks and status changes both at the project level and across the wider portfolio.
The platform has transformed what could have been an opaque, technical initiative into a transparent business transformation that stakeholders can track and understand.
The result is a shared rhythm of communication and vocabulary around delivery. Teams are now working from the same source of truth, reducing ambiguity and eliminating reliance on scattered documentation.
Embedding a project-management platform in large-scale delivery
As an illustration of how deeply the platform is now embedded at Hachette UK, the IT team is currently using monday.com as the central coordination tool for a major ERP transformation program.
The program brings together internal business teams and external system integrators, each with their own complexities, deliverables and reporting structures.
For its part, monday.com provides a unified environment where all parties can share updates, plan upcoming work, manage risks and track progress against key milestones.
“It has allowed us to remove some ambiguity by ensuring key artifacts exist on, or are linked to, a single platform,” Quartley says. For a program that spans multiple teams and third parties, a consistent, real-time view of status is proving essential.
Over the coming year, the IT team plans to expand into capacity planning and resource management — areas that can deliver significant gains when integrated into the same environment as project tracking.
What began as a search for basic project visibility has evolved into something more fundamental: an operating model that positions IT as a transparent, accountable business partner.
In an era where technology underpins every publisher’s competitive advantage, Hachette UK is demonstrating that the real value isn’t just in delivering projects—it’s in making that delivery visible, connected and strategically aligned.
