How Keller unlocked strategic conversations with shorter, sharper board reports

Keller is the world’s largest geotechnical specialist contractor, helping to build everything from schools and hospitals to football stadiums and metro tunnels, and is part of the FTSE 250 index.

What did Keller want to achieve?

Keller has more than doubled in size in the past 10 years, employing 10,000 people across 19 business units and 40 countries.

As the group has grown and become more complex, so too has its board pack — making it increasingly difficult for board and committee members to understand performance drivers and add value.

Our meeting papers weren’t articulating the challenges and opportunities in the best way, or really answering the questions that our directors were asking. We needed help to make things crisper and clearer, so the board could work more effectively.

~ Kerry Porritt, Chief Sustainability Officer and Company Secretary, Keller Group

With the group still growing, this had to change. Board and committee members needed papers that could cut through the complexity, give them a holistic understanding of performance, and stimulate more strategic discussions.

The governance team also recognised that writing board and management papers was consuming far too much management time, and the output was ineffective. This was a significant opportunity to free up valuable time and work more efficiently.

When we worked out how many hours we were spending writing and editing papers every year, it was shocking. It was then a no brainer that we needed to do something radically different.

~ Kerry Porritt, Chief Sustainability Officer and Company Secretary, Keller Group

How did we help them?

Having made several attempts to address the issue internally, the governance team wanted to try a different approach.

Over the years we have tried to improve the quality of our board papers, but there’s only so far you can go with an internal exercise.

~ Kerry Porritt, Chief Sustainability Officer and Company Secretary, Keller Group

Keen to deliver long-lasting change with a growing and geographically dispersed community of report writers, they chose to implement Report Writer, Board Intelligence’s AI-powered board reporting platform.

Report Writer harnesses the power of technology and AI to apply the Question-Driven Insight (QDI) Principle to reporting. It’s a methodology for delivering clear, concise, and compelling papers that are full of insight and focused on what matters.

Report Writer and the QDI Principle have been rolled out to Keller’s senior management team and their direct reports.

Now, when they write a report for the board or executive committee, they can benefit from Report Writer to do so. With its AI-powered nudges and prompts, it helps them to paint a holistic and balanced picture of performance that delivers forward-looking insights, and which answers the questions that matter most to the board and executive committee.

It’s brilliant to have a tool that gives you consistent reminders, that pops out a best practice template and a set of questions based on the kind of paper you want to write.

~ Kerry Porritt, Chief Sustainability Officer and Company Secretary, Keller Group

What impact did we have?

Report Writer has helped Keller's management team produce shorter, more impactful board papers that are helping the board have more focused and strategic conversations.

It’s improving communication throughout the group, helping information to flow more effectively and robust decisions to be made more quickly.

Report Writer has also helped the board to clarify what matters most to them — they have formed a clearer, better articulated view on what information they need, why they need it, and what questions it’s helping them to answer.

When people use Report Writer to write their board papers, it impacts the reports they’re writing elsewhere too — for their boss, team, customer, the regulator. It’s an opportunity for everyone to upskill in how they write and communicate.

~ Kerry Porritt, Chief Sustainability Officer and Company Secretary, Keller Group