Using transparency and alignment to deliver strategy
Intro
A $1B Private Equity backed telecommunications provider had made key acquisitions the past 3 years that expanded their business into the media, technology, and payments markets. The acquisitions had cemented their foothold in their industry as they took the lion’s share of the market. Nonetheless, leadership realized that economic fluctuations would be a challenge for long-term growth if they did not find a scalable business model. Consequently, they initiated a multi-year organizational transformation that would unify the brands under a singular strategic mission that generated sustainable revenue while driving innovation and social impact for its customers.
The strategy was to move to a 1:1 leasing model in which money is not made on the technology itself but rather the communications and payment services. Ultimately, the company wanted to shift from the payment services space to being a more media and content focused enterprise. But before any of that could happen, they needed to understand where their investment was right now and what that indicated about where they were headed; after all, today’s projects drive tomorrow’s growth. This would require understanding the business cases, budgets, and finances of each initiative across the entire pipeline of current and incoming projects throughout the organization. The challenge was this had never been done before. That’s where Simpel and Associates came in.
To carry out their transformation, we partnered with the company’s VP of Strategy to re-imagine their strategic planning process. The first order of business was to understand how they did strategic planning in the past. Our Kinetic Transformation Assessment fact-finding tool employs a holistic approach to transformation by comprehensively understanding organizational culture, business value chain, PMO, operating model, and finances. This multi-faceted approach to collecting data allowed us to understand the organization quickly and determine the best way to push the organization’s change forward. It would lay the foundation for the work that the company was trying to do and later serve to be the uniting force that leads them towards their goal.
There were 3 main findings.
First, the current infrastructure was not robust enough to supply the actionable data needed. There was a resource gap to perform the role and the infrastructure supporting the previous EPMO was optimized for business-as-usual (BAU) and operational projects, not strategic. Second, the road would also be fraught with cultural challenges. Because the acquired companies had not been fully integrated, there were functional silos, repeated processes, and lack of knowledge transfer across organizational boundaries. These factors worked to create a deep mistrust that hindered effective teaming from occurring. Lastly, disagreements around how to implement could potentially ground the effort before it ever even took off.
The acquisition and subsequent multi-year transformation had introduced a new level of oversight and requirement of transparency that the company was not used to. To create a scalable strategic planning function, we would have to convince and onboard senior leaders who were entrenched in the current ways of working. Asking these leaders to divulge their budgets would elicit understandable apprehension and this could massively derail the effort. These were people who not only held political power, but also had benefited from the ambiguity that the lax intake process provided. That notwithstanding, we knew we had to roll up our sleeves and jump in the trenches with the team. The work that they were trying to do was a moral cause that would improve the quality of life for millions around the world. Priority number one was to stand up this function as fast as possible.
Solution
At Simpel and Associates, we put one concept before all others: alignment. We strongly believe that people drive change, not processes. We partnered with the newly stood up taskforce to co-create systems and processes that champion alignment and transparency. We challenged senior leaders to shift their thinking towards embracing the clarity the new function would bring to their organizations. Over 9 months, we carried out a multi-phased plan that culminated in the standup of an enterprise-wide strategic planning office.
Reach the change inflection
Although culture was not our remit, we would need to manage it as part of the change effort. The business needed to trust the client team leading the initiative (Operating Committee, OpCo) for us to make progress. We worked with the leadership of each business unit (BU) to define their biggest concerns and identify solutions aligned to the remit of the incoming strategic planning office. By engineering opportunities for goodwill between the team and leadership, we were able to partner with the larger organization to gather robust data on each group's concerns. We supported the effort by turning these into a governance model that defined roles and responsibilities and creating change processes and communications that highlighted the partnership between the OpCo and business.
Embed the new ways of working
The client needed BUs to engage in the work but cooperation is tough to engineer where mistrust abounds. We partnered with the initiative’s Steering committee (SteerCo) to design a collaboratively built central data repository that would be the main alignment mechanism and a corresponding project rating system. To complement this, we created a change plan consisting of a choreographed cadence, frequent communications, and targeted training around how each BU would contribute to the data. During each weekly meeting, the data was reviewed, amended, concerns were raised, and questions answered. It was also an opportunity to reinforce the written communications verbally. These meetings culminated in a pilot of the new Triannual strategic planning cycle where the SteerCo would review and select projects that would receive budget allocation in the next quarter.
Scale the solution with technology
The pilot went very smoothly. The data was precise, the BUs were prepared to champion their best ideas and leadership was for the first time able to understand the current and incoming projects across the enterprise. Now the client needed to take this pilot and scale it into a permanent solution. They decided to upgrade a technology already being used to be capable of managing the entire strategic planning process. We partnered with the vendor and client teams to identify the requirements to industrialize the current solution and create a target operating model optimized for data transfer across the finance, IT, and business systems. Our flexible design allowed our client to start with a non-automated release to get them going so they would reach critical mass and eventually add in automations.
Results
As a result of our work, the company was able to stand up the first ever strategic planning office. By the end of this 10-month journey, they had completed 2 successful pilots and launched a digital solution. The systems we created served as the highway between vision and execution.
36% reduction in IT and Operations active projects backlog by the second month (~ $4MM efficiency opportunity)
$10MM in recurring efficiency savings was identified because of the new data
20%+ increase in focus on strategic projects.
76% innovation bump over baseline across projects throughout the enterprise.
100k annual savings with the non-automated version of the work management technology
510% ROI while still onsite
90% digital transformation adoption in 3-months (vs. 14% over 1+ years by a leading provider)
In the end, centering data as a tool for alignment refocused the energy on innovation and moving to digital ways of working and earned back valuable time for stakeholders across all levels of the organization.
*Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and locales are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, entities, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
