Ahead of Schedule: Sonny's BBQ on Implementing Thanx

Sonny's BBQ is a 57-year-old southeastern barbecue chain with about 90 restaurants.

Katie Love, Chief Marketing Officer, has run a lot of technology projects there. This one went differently. "I've implemented a lot of technology in my time at Sonny's, and the implementation process was definitely the smoothest that I have experienced." Her point is not that nothing came up. Something always does. What mattered was that the onboarding team saw the problems coming. "The team is very proactive in being able to predict potential roadblocks and help us navigate and go around those."

The result was a launch that beat its own schedule. "We were able to exceed the original timeline that we had planned, which is kind of unheard of, and get our app live." aunching early protected something a project plan does not track. Instead of a team asking when the app would finally go live, an early date carried excitement into launch.