pm.ideas Business Cases

Our reason from connecting with pm.ideas was to both fulfil our stated learning mandate but to also intentionally build internal capability and capacity, in direct support of our strategic trajectory. A big part of BlueSky’s success hinges on the leadership and management ability to lead through accelerated and complex change.

We want to deliver, impact and value. Here’s what powers us.

• Delivery, Delivery, Delivery - We strive to give our clients OTT (Over-The-Top) service. We strive to be better, and do our jobs better, than anyone else.

• Learning and Development – we have actively integrated learning into our “flow of work.” We do this through our Academy, and in our jobs, every day. BlueSkyers mentor, help and learn from others. We share knowledge, build skills, and seek and fuel innovation. We create and embrace opportunities to deliver on our mission, this works best when all our engines are firing strongly.

• Start-up mindset – Everyone brings this to BlueSky. BlueSkyers work hard, chip in everywhere, and helps everyone whilst exposing our clients to new ideas, opportunities and innovation.

The BlueSky formula can be summarised as:

(over) Delivery + Start-Up MINDSET +Learning & Development = BUILDING We build more, and we build better.

Why pm.ideas?

The way that BlueSky uses the pm,ideas management development program and integrates it into the BlueSky business is that the offering integrates immediately into the organisation and the route to impact and value are kept intentionally short.

Learnings from the sessions are applied almost as soon as their learned and the impact is evident immediately. The benefit of this approach is that the program aligns and pivots towards the crucial focus areas, avoiding the usual academic/principle views distance from business reality.

The stated objective was to create an agile but standardised management program that puts managers in a position to lead from the front in a rapidly scaling business that services blue-chip clients with complex requirements and challenges.

Feedback from the people who are lead by graduates of the program has been overwhelmingly positive, with feedback from the Executives that attended the final presentations being that “we absolutely need to do more of this.”

This program is well on its way to become a part of the BlueSky career journey and core of our management success. The real measure here is the impact it has had on the direct reports of the programs graduates. Managers are the biggest reason why people stay or leave organisations, the team feedback has been overwhelmingly positive when we tested management success indicators.

We’re seeing material changes in engagement and satisfaction on the people front, and delivery benefits and gains in the client environment.

For businesses facing similar challenges as BlueSky, you need to find a partner that’s not just open to listening, but is looking to co-create a solution that fits your requirement like a bespoke glove. This partner is pm.ideas. Themba Chakela - Chief People Officer at BlueSky

About BlueSky

BlueSky is an award-winning, fully independent and proudly South African B-BBEE level 1 company with deep cloud-computing experience, we perfectly placed to help businesses jumpstart their journey to the cloud and gain the competitive advantage of digitisation.

Simply put our mission is to BUILD.

• Build the company - To Build Africa’s No. 1 Enterprise Cloud Technology Practice by 2025
• Build our people - Give our people experience and exposure they wouldn’t get anywhere else
• Build our clients’ businesses - Our clients are the why and how we exist. We help our clients to grow their businesses.
• Build the country - We have the desire and the opportunity to bridge historic divides, to help create jobs, and to contribute positively to social and economic inclusion.

“Ambition” is the one word that best characterises BlueSky. We’re extremely driven. As a business we have achieved much in a short time, but we’re still young and it is only a start. We’re not comfortable being “comfortable”. We aim high, and we believe there’s much more that we can do, and will do.