Breakthrough Metrics for Solutioning a Customer Transformation Journey
There’s no silver bullet for driving change; it’s a challenge in any organization and services providers and their clients struggle with this. In working with providers and buyers on transformation deals over the years, I observed the need for breakthrough metrics to drive the change through the buyer’s organization.
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, transformation needs to start with defining the business outcome goal from the customer perspective and then translating it into issues and organizational implications that the delivery organization can align against. Those issues include metrics that you must clearly articulate at three levels in the buyer’s organization:
- C-level vision – Here the highest level of metrics calibrate the benefits and what needs to change in the status quo to accommodate the benefits. In the event you find you can’t get to the goal with what you conceive for the journey, you need to start again and conceive the journey differently.
- Direct reports responsible for executing on the vision – These metrics focus on the implications for the delivery organization.
- Technical talent – Metrics at this level focus on the tools, talent, and process changes that the goal affects. What are the details that the architects need to understand as they solution the goal?
Having metrics at each level puts business transformation not in light of those who are doing it but, rather, those who are experiencing it.
Service providers need to keep in mind that this shouldn’t be a roadmap with a detailed plan. But people at each level in the client enterprise need assistance in understanding what they are trying to do, how they have to measure themselves against that goal, and what the implications are to technology, talent, policy, process, and sourcing. The metrics can’t be prescriptive.
If you’re an executive, you can break through your organization’s obstacles to change by driving change through the benefit goal and the metrics that allow the organization to understand and configure against the goal. First define the experience you’re looking for. Then ask how to accomplish that. You’ll end up with a set of metrics that defines what you have to do to get to that experience.
As an example, let’s say you want to improve the speed of the employee onboarding process. What are the technologies you have to put in place? What talent issues do you have to think through? What policies and processes do you need to think through? What are the consequences of changes to those technologies, talent, policies, and processes? Now you have the metric and sub-metrics that help guide those implications.
Once the client organization is committed to the transformation journey at each level, the service provider can then engage with them around how that should be done.
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