What initiatives do organisations need to take to help their people adapt, rescale and keep up with the pace of change at the moment?
I think one of the big focuses coming down the line is around automation. There’s a huge drive towards AI operations and robotic process automation (RPA). I think that gives companies a timely opportunity to move investment to things that are more valuable, more creative and potentially will create new opportunities.
Alongside that, of course, you need training to cross-skill people and allow them to move on. But I think the reduction in those menial, low-level tasks is something that provides great opportunity.
Businesses need to think about how to maximise the automation opportunity. Is there an option to redeploy their resources, and make use of freed up capacity? Part of that is about investing in people, making sure they’re empowered and feel able to bend and change with the organisation’s growth.
Businesses need to think about how to maximise the automation opportunity.
How should organisations prioritise what to change during transformation?
A lot of what we’ve seen over the past 12 months has been around customer experience and also the employee experience.
People are realising that some of their legacy processes were quite clunky and had huge dependencies on everybody being in the same physical location. So we’re seeing a lot of people putting in place the foundations to support a dispersed workforce – people need to have the right tools in place to be able to work in different places.
At the same time a lot of the traditional drivers are still there, like the need to deliver shareholder value and getting a return on your investment. Those fundamentals still matter. So while some of the ways of working are being reprioritised, there’s a base level of operational need and economics that is driving where companies want to invest and spend their time, effort and money.
We’re seeing a lot of people putting in place the foundations to support a dispersed workforce – people need to have the right tools in place to be able to work in different places.
How has the pandemic influenced the way that your firm delivers your transformation services?
We’ve always done most of our implementation work remotely, so our customers were very comfortable with a remote delivery model. What we’ve noticed, though, is that customers are actively choosing to do things remotely, even if we offer face to face sessions.
This is because their staff base doesn’t look the same as it did 12-18 months ago because recruitment has become more geographically diverse. In days of old, everyone was within 50 miles of the HQ but now they’re scattered all over, perhaps with some people working internationally. Getting the right people together for physical sessions isn’t as easy as it once was because the return to the workplace is only starting to gather momentum.
Virtual meetings need a lot of structure and a strong leader – someone who’s going to make sure that we’re not just hearing from the loudest voice in the room. One of the things we’ve focused on is trying to ensure we don’t have more meetings than necessary, by delivering projects remotely. I think there’s now a culture where if your diary isn’t full, you’re not busy in other people’s eyes which is an unfortunate consequence.
It takes a lot more skilled resource to get maximum value from virtual sessions, and where we might previously have done four workshops, in some circumstances we’re now doing five or six. Face to face is always going to be advantageous but I think we’re going to get people working in small hubs, connecting over a remote meeting. I think remote session facilitation will always be part of our delivery model but we’ll see a return to more face to face sessions in the next 12-18 months.
What we’ve noticed is that customers are actively choosing to do things remotely, even if we offer face to face sessions.
MYLES MOLLOY
Sales and Commercial Director
Unifii
Unifii is an Elite ServiceNow partner founded by a group of former client-side digital transformation professionals. By immersing ourselves in our clients’ business and connecting with their strategy, objectives and goals, we become an extension of their team. Combining our technology and expertise with passion and experience means we deliver exceptional results.