Digital's blowing up Operations!

​Welcome back to our 5 Top Challenges for Digital Leaders series. This week we’re moving on from Agile Angst (catch-up ​here for last week’s post), to start talking about a perennial issue for transformation leaders – how to limit the impact of transformation change on the areas of your organisation that support your customers.

How do you stop Digital from blowing up Operations?

​Some of the common issues I’ve heard from transformation leaders (and from operations leaders too):

1. “It’s just the front-end of the process that has been digitised and now we’re being swamped by requests that have to be manually fulfilled”.
2. “We never get sufficient warning about the impact of a change” (from ops people) and “Ops wasn’t prepared when the release went live, even though we’ve kept them informed” (from transformation folks)
3. “We’re not allowed to release our change yet because Ops isn’t ready to support us”

And you could, by the way, substitute Ops for Call Centre or Customer Support, and have exactly the same feedback.

So, what's going on and why is it important?

Firstly, friction is inevitable when transitioning complex processes from the old world to the new world. Your agile project will start with a minimum viable product and will deliver small iterations regularly and this means some parts of your process are new shiny digital and some are not. New and old world don’t always gel well together.
 
There’s also a multiplier effect with digital change, given the large number of users you can impact in one go. Even a small process breakdown is going to have a big effect when multiplied by a large number of users. In many cases there may also be latent user demand that’s unexpected and hasn’t been allowed for.
 
Finally, there needs to be deep understanding and collaboration between the transformation project and the support areas to really manage complex change well. But often there’s confusion around roles and lack of clarity of accountability.
  
It’s a big topic – so to begin this week we’ll be looking at some things to consider before you even start.

One: Are you selling CDs online or streaming music?

​Before you spend a cent on your project you need to start with a big picture strategy question. Are you looking for incremental improvements to your product/service/process or are you hoping to reinvent your whole market?

The answer to that question is going to determine not just what you do but how you do it and who you do it with.

Steve Jobs famously said “Some people say give the customers what they want, but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do”.

There’s a different skill-set needed if you’re planning to disrupt your whole world versus tweaking a process to make it better. Start with a clear view (and the necessary approvals) for where you’ll be on the scale of evolution to revolution.
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Two: Customer journey mapping?

​Full disclosure, I’m not a huge fan of customer journey mapping because it’s very easy for the output to become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.

If you journey map all your customer processes there is a very high chance that you’ll be able to admire your enormous problem (look how many super-complex processes we have, depicted beautifully over reams of A1 sheets posted on walls in a special war room), but the output will be so overwhelming that no one knows where to start and so nothing changes as a result.

I would rather that you start with your biggest profit pools, your highest value customer interactions or your worst problems and then concentrate on fixing those processes first. Journey-mapping those priority processes will be useful then (but only to ensure you have understood the critical steps).
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Three: The Three Ps

​This is another “don’t spend a cent until…” - you have reviewed and revised your products, policies and processes. This is especially important if any of those 3Ps require costly customisation, manual work or workarounds. Often transformation projects inherit 3Ps invented in the bricks and mortar age, and they’re simply not relevant or practical for a digital solution.

It’s the manual work and workarounds that usually cause the largest impact on your customer support and operations teams so it is vital to address the 3Ps upfront.

Talk to your internal stakeholders about what is essential versus what is just “the way we’ve always done things here”.
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You will undoubtedly ruffle a few feathers – understanding and patience is key, but so is persistence!

Good luck!
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Next time we’ll get into some more detail about how to work with your operations and customer support areas.

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