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Best Practices

Calling the Shots

ServiceMaster Co. develops an aggressive approach to partnering with business units

By Richard Gamble | Updated on March 01, 2007

Several years ago, at the ServiceMaster Co., a stressed-out treasury operations staff finally had had enough of putting out fires, running from one ASAP project to the next–only to find at times that what seemed so desperately mission critical to one division might not really have been needed at all. It was time to develop defensible, consistent priorities when it came to projects. Treasury ops was “working a ton of hours trying to complete projects helter-skelter for whichever business unit screamed the loudest,” recalls Brian J. Qualizza Jr., director of treasury operations. “We were reactive. We were frustrated.We decided we had to make a change.”

To Qualizza, the answer was simple to say, hard to accomplish: Develop a more orderly process and maintain control over it. The four-person treasury operations team was undaunted. After fewer than a dozen meetings, it issued an ambitious annual agenda for project selection and prioritization, putting itself at the center as each project’s manager. “We wanted to take the stress off the business units,” Qualizza observes. “And we have a better completion rate when we are in charge.” Another key advantage of having treasury call the shots, Qualizza points out: Treasury can look beyond the needs of one division and select projects that can be replicated across multiple business units.

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