It’s a fail-fast concept. Just imagine a great experience and what it would look like. Forget about technology limitations and use design thinking to start to home in on the shape of things—before you even start to think about the technology build.
What are the most important considerations for organisations planning to accelerate?
I think for folks planning to accelerate, they need to go through a process of how they’re looking at digital and how it’s happening within the business. One of the most important things to understand is if your customer service is meeting their expectations. It’s important to define that journey and understand the velocity of those expectations. There are things we were doing two years ago that would irritate customers today. Today it’s “I want it now”, and “why isn’t it here?”
We look at the concept of total experience and how to deliver that and reach deeper – what are partner experiences, can my partner run as fast as I can? Can they go as far as I want to go? If they’re slow, that’s a kink in the chain.
Alongside that, are we empowering employees for success? It’s not enough to just crack the whip and have them run faster. That’s a recipe for failure, burnout and turnover. And then there’s the stakeholder experience. What are the expectations of the CEO, the budget holder and the shareholder? Gartner refers to this as total experience, but we have been writing it out as a formula for customers for a while. We think about everyone’s engagement and that’s where we find waste, bad processes and things that should not be there.
Finally, stop building megalithic projects that never end, or which have a delivery date so far in the future that you might never get there. You can’t get momentum and you need to build stuff quickly, attack the things you don’t know, and attack your own assumptions. It’s a fail-fast concept. Just imagine a great experience and what it would look like. Forget about technology limitations and use design thinking to start to home in on the shape of things—before you even start to think about the technology build.
How do organisations prioritise what they change in transformation?
There are a lot of methodologies out there. I like to use MoSCoW – which refers to must-have, should-have, could-have and won’t-have. It helps you to prioritise work by laying out specific definitions for each level of priority.
The key aspect is that it’s helpful to identify what is ‘not ever’ versus what is just ‘not now’. What do I need to do that’s new, what do I need to do more or less? This sort of rapid prioritisation exercise works very well, and then you can look at what speed is there to deliver on that capability.
Some of the language we use needs to change to clearly define outcomes and we need to get involved early in that process.
What are the most effective strategies to help clients enhance customer engagement, generate new revenue, and to better serve their customers?
The data says that change management failure rates are 60 to 80%. We’re focusing on the fail side, and we can’t feel good about that.
Some of the language we use needs to change to clearly define outcomes and we need to get involved early in that process. Are there ESG opportunities that we’re missing, that will resonate with the community, buyers, partners and the wider ecosystem? Decision criteria guides can also be useful, even on a local level.
The other thing I’d say is we must build teams that care. I spoke with a CTO who has folks bid on specific projects where they have a direct interest, with no guarantee of promotion. You have to get the interested parties that have a vested interest. It’s almost a case of overfilling your team so you have people who can mentor, and you can invest in people to help them grow by having new experiences within the workplace.
The last step is to communicate and be completely transparent. That means building measurement into the early stages and sharing the results. Establish a culture that promotes sharing and learning as opposed to beating people up.
We’ve got to be smarter, and know what our roadmap looks like, and how it ties into our vision. The roadmap has to be very fluid, and the culture needs to reflect that at every level.
What role does leadership culture and mindset play in becoming more agile and resilient?
We have to look at the way we manage our businesses. When you do strategy, how many folks do you talk to? Before you ask someone to put something on their strategic roadmap for the year, do you know how much they did in the last two years, based on current conditions? If they got 30% done because x, y and z, then what does that mean? Do we shrink things into quarterly increments?
We know from agile or portfolio development that you can’t turn back every time there’s a problem and retool the project to start over again. Rather, we’ve got to be smarter, and know what our roadmap looks like, and how it ties into our vision. The roadmap has to be very fluid, and the culture needs to reflect that at every level. You need to make the best decisions for your stakeholders, employees and customers with a transparent culture that says, here’s why we’re doing it. That gets everyone going. The absence of information creates its own myth and mystery that gets us going in different directions.
We focus on adoption engineering in contrast to the traditional project mindset of ‘I need something done, I get it done, I throw it over the wall, and I’m done!
NICHOLAS BRIGMAN
Vice President, Products
Edge Total Intelligence
What initiatives do organisations need to take to help people adapt, reskill, and keep up with the pace of change?
Adapting and re-skilling are really important, especially with the pace of change. With our company, we focus on adoption engineering in contrast to the traditional project mindset of ‘I need something done, I get it done, I throw it over the wall, and I’m done!’ With adoption engineering, the mindset is that the customer’s experience becomes great when they experience value, not just at the point of sale.
There’s a very cool company called WalkMe that recently went public. They quit building training programmes and actually design the software to help guide users through new processes, or things they haven’t done in six months. It’s similar to when you’re at home and a part on your refrigerator breaks and you watch a YouTube video, and you can fix it yourself. In a business context, you can use the same approach to elevate overall expertise and help people become more adaptive.
Nicholas Brigman joined Edge Total Intelligence (“edgeTI”) in 2020. edgeTI prides itself on helping customers achieve the impossible with its real-time digital operations software, edgeCore™. Through edgeCore, customers are able to, find and create a unified approach to technology and digital transformation that drives innovation.