Is it just you? The program has started, everyone knows there is a big change coming (maybe,...
It's a story familiar to Chiefs of Staff the world over. The review is on Tuesday, so you spend the weekend pinging your counterparts in all the different regions for the latest data. You put it together on Sunday night and review it with your exec on Monday so they can discuss it on Tuesday in the executive staff or the board meeting.
You'd think with all these information systems there would be a better way, wouldn't you? Why can't the information just flow into a dashboard in real-time, so it is ready at the click of a button?
Well, it can. Easily. But be careful what you wish for.
What happens when someone changes a record just before the review? Or enters an extra zero? You've got a red-faced exec tap-dancing and the whole process just lost credibility. So back to the weekend PowerPoints then?
No. The organizational agility implied by real-time, data-led decisions is too great a prize to ignore. Plus, it is inefficient to have all that manual curation. Worse, manual compilation can distort the data as it travels upwards due to organizational filtering, a.k.a. The Mum Effect.
There are ways to square this circle. My team and I implemented a real-time Executive Dashboard that was used at board level for a global brand undergoing significant market disruption. Here is the story...
Background
The client was experiencing significant market disruption involving increased competition for their core product and the emergence of new product classes where they did not have an established offering. As such it was critical for the client to enable executive visibility to key customer engagements on new product innovations that were strategic in nature.
The client would have around 50,000 significant customer projects in flight at any one time.
Established Process
As described in the introduction, a manual process of gathering status on strategic engagements was used. This provided a high-quality, curated overview, but the process lagged, was manually intensive and did not provide ongoing visibility between review points.
As such the client experienced a lack of organizational agility in responding to a changing market.
Transformed Process
A real-time dashboard was provided that was driven by current data in the client CRM system. The client's existing analytics investment was leveraged to create this with no additional licensing costs. In this case Salesforce CRM Analytics was used.
Critically, the concept of a strategic engagement was established to separate the engagements of most interest. Designated operations staff members in each sector were made accountable for the quality of the records. Only these staff had the ability to designate an engagement as strategic. This had the effect of identifying a smaller subset of engagements for higher curation, with an understanding of the review cadence, which served to effectively mitigate the risk of data quality excursions affecting the process.
Success here requires establishing a process cadence around the dashboard and an understanding within the people who provide the data as to how and when it is being used.
Technology alone does not make an operating model. The cadence was driven through the same Chiefs-of-Staff and operations leads who operated the manual process. As such, they were very aware of the need for accurate information and so data governance was a natural fit, rather than a tack-on.
Results
The ongoing, global, real-time engagement visibility was used to
- Provide the Board of Directors with real-time status of selected strategic engagements, which allowed the board to understand how new products were faring in the market
- Rearchitect product launch plans based on pre-market experience
- Redirect marketing strategy for key products
- Redirect product feature development for future product variants
- Redirect customer engagement focus to customers for whom the client's existing product portfolio offered more value
- Predict future product revenue which in turn informed corporate restructuring activities
The key here is activating the insights. This client was a large enterprise, but the essential elements of success hold true for businesses of all sizes. Let's connect to talk through how business analytics can help you drive the actions that make your business strategy happen.
Wishing you fewer late nights and better decisions. Looking forward to connecting,
Gareth.
