joanna.darby@ifsworld.com, Author at Future of Field Service

Reeve Bunn, President, DSL; Mark Rentschler, Director of Customer Support, Makino; and Rudy Goedhart, Sr. Director of Business Intelligence, Spencer Technologies talk with Sarah about how COVID-19 has changed their customers’ needs and expectations and in what ways their businesses have adapted.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I’ve taken note of a recurring theme in many of my conversations with service leaders in recent months: the prioritization of knowledge management within their digital transformation roadmaps. While knowledge management has long been considered “important” to some degree, this increased focused makes sense when you pause to consider a variety of factors at play within service that are shining a light on the need for a strong knowledge management program.

First, you have what is often referred to as the talent gap – experienced workers retiring at a far faster pace than companies can bring newer talent on. When these experienced workers leave the workforce with much of the knowledge they’ve gleaned over a lifetime’s career only in their heads, it presents a real problem. The ability for companies to capture this knowledge in a way that allows them to retain it once these employees have departed and make it consumable for others within the organization is becoming increasingly critical. Furthermore, access to knowledge has been linked with employee satisfaction – technicians are happier doing their jobs when they know they have the information they need to do them well the first time.

Second, there is the trend of the use of third-party field service workers. The need here isn’t all too different from the first – when you’re relying on resources to execute your work that don’t (yet) know your businesses, the need for an effective way to provide them with the knowledge they need to get the job done is very important. With a strong knowledge management system in place, the process of getting third-party resources up to speed, and your comfort level that they will be able to conduct the work with all necessary insights at their fingertips, is vastly improved.

Finally, knowledge management has a significant impact on productivity. In fact, in a recent TSIA report, it was found that knowledge management had a huge impact on performance, with a 50% reduction in mean time to repair. Access to knowledge improves MTTR and first-time fix, which has a positive impact on the customer experience (as well as the employee experience, as stated above).

For these and many other reasons, there has been more buzz this year about knowledge management as a key focus area for digital transformation efforts. I think service leaders have come to recognize the wealth of knowledge their employees hold and the importance of capturing it, as well as the benefits they stand to gain in making knowledge readily and easily available to their workers. As you evaluate your knowledge management initiatives, keep these three focus areas in mind:

Knowledge capture. Companies are usually focused on two areas: the process of digitizing and expanding access to company information (manuals, product information, company history, etc. – any company-held information or resources for technicians to use on the job) as well as the ability to capture the insights of the workforce in a way that makes them accessible to others. I would say that, overall, companies have made more progress in the first category than the latter – despite the latter being arguably more critical. Employee knowledge can be captured through technologies they use – service management solutions, AR, communication platforms, etc. as well as through more hands-on methods. You want to consider what areas of knowledge are most important to the business, examine what you’re most lacking, and look at how you can work to capture that knowledge to incorporate it into a knowledge management platform.
With a knowledge library built, you next need to think about accessibility and consumability. When you set a new employee up with access to the knowledge management system, how easy is it for them to find what they’re looking for? AI has some really great potential here in matching content, and even suggesting content, to different scenarios. The point around consumability is that the act of capturing knowledge doesn’t do you much good if that knowledge is not easily consumed by someone at the point at which it is needed. You want to think about how content will be accessed by mobile devices, how easily searchable it is, how the tool uses AI/ML, and so on.
To get the most out of knowledge management, you need to think about all the ways the information and insights captured will need to be used and ensure the knowledge can be transferred appropriately. For example, besides the consumability of content on the job, can it be used for training new employees? Is the content available in multi-format options, for those that learn differently? Does the system provide analytics on what is being accessed and when that you can use to determine what further training and insights may be beneficial to your employees?

This is an area that is exciting because it provides a wealth of opportunity, particularly as companies evolve their service offerings and expand what the role of the field technician entails. If you’ve made some strides with your knowledge management efforts, I’d love to talk about it!

By Tom Paquin

Manufacturing firms across a variety of disciplines have been looking for ways to implement more service-oriented solutions into traditional manufacturing processes. This true for organizations that work with capital and industrial equipment as much as it is for any other manufacturer, but for industrial manufacturers, there are a variety of unique challenges that must be considered.

Industrial assets—especially those that will become part of a broader manufacturing workflow—exist in a more mature service market than some of their manufacturing peers. As tools that are largely leveraged in business environments, the need to provide thorough service is much more than a courtesy. Broken assets means money out of the pockets of your customers, so offering detailed service plans, especially if you can guarantee outcomes around things like uptime and output, are the path forward. These new outcomes-based business models will ultimately define the future of field service for industrial manufacturers, and many businesses are already embracing outcomes today.

The actual requirements and technical specifications necessary to embrace outcomes-based service will invariably differ from use case to use case, but the bottom line is that to offer contracts around guaranteed performance, manufacturers need to have the internal capabilities to measure and validate performance among often complex systems. Bridging that gap requires some mechanical and operational forethought, as well as a robust and full-featured service management utility that is capable of managing extensive and complex assets, processes, and workflows. Here are some considerations for how to do this correctly:

Consider Your Framework for Connected Assets
Thinking specifically about the assets that you manufacture, what are the current internet-enabled capabilities built into these systems? Saying that you should consider incorporating connected sensors in your products is easy for me to say from behind my computer. It requires a lot of pre-planning and forethought, and requires the synergy between product, planning, procurement, and numerous other fields. There are, however, plenty of sue cases to pull from to better prepare yourself. Making smart moved with respect to IoT, whether it’s before or after you deploy best-in-class service software, will pay dividends in the long run.

Predictive Maintenance is King
An obvious corollary to connected assets is the potential of predictive maintenance in service processes. This requires that your connected assets be compatible with your service software, and that your service software have the implicit power under the hood to deliver predictive insights. How does your asset management system connect to your service management system? Is there a seamless handoff so that appointments can be quickly and easily scheduled? Predictive is a naturally complex process, and getting it right requires the answer to these and many other questions.

Clean up Your Data
We see a surprising number of businesses who discover that they’ve built biases into their data collection. Whether it helps them make it seem like uptime is higher than it is, or that they’ve hit a higher SLA rate than they actually have, sliding scales eventually break. When they do, your customer will wonder why it appears as though you’re hitting their outcomes while their own performance lags behind. Resolving this requires a combination of deep data auditing, from outside practitioners if applicable, and the implementation of smart data inputs to begin with. It could be what keeps customers invested in their outcomes contracts.

Get a Holistic View
I’m quick to point out the importance of tying internal systems together, and we’ve talked a bit already about how service needs to touch asset monitoring for businesses to be able to properly gauge the outcomes that can be offered to customers. For all of this to work properly, your service management software needs to be the grand central station through which everything passes through: You asset information, your parts data, your service-level agreement criteria, and so on. This is the lynchpin to successfully embracing outcomes-based service.

While outcomes-based service is a fantastic benchmark, if you haven’t started on your servitization journey, it will certainly inform it. The good news is that the power that best-in-class service software offers for outcomes-based service is just as applicable to the beginning of your service journey, and if you start out with an outcomes-based mindset, you’ll be ahead of the pack right out of the gate.

Sonya Lacore, Vice President of Inflight Operations at Southwest Airlines, talks with Sarah about the “secret sauce” of Southwest providing the customer experience it is known for as well as the “secret sauce” of her leadership style.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. You might recognize today's guest from the industry or from a recent podcast that we published, that was a replay of a panel discussion I moderated for the Service Council's Virtual Symposium. Our guest today is Sonya Lacore, Vice President of Inflight Operations at Southwest Airlines. Sonya, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast!

Sonya Lacore: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: I loved the panel discussion we did so much, and I am so excited to have you here today and to share some more of your insights with our audience. We are going to talk through a lot of different things today, including how Sonya and others at Southwest have come up with their secret sauce. So we're going to talk a bit about that. But before we do, I want to spend some time, Sonya, talking about you and your journey. Before we dig into the secret sauce part of today's conversation, can you tell our listeners, first, about your role at Southwest?

Sonya Lacore: You bet. I am, as you mentioned, VP of Inflight Operations at Southwest. That really means I have oversight and support, and just there to help, and encourage, and support our 17,000 flight attendants. As you might imagine, that is a busy role but certainly one that I love, because they make it easy.

Sarah Nicastro: That's awesome. That's a lot of folks to be responsible for. No pressure, I'm sure.

Sonya Lacore: No, never.

Sarah Nicastro: So that's the current task. But you've had quite a journey in getting where you are, and even within your journey at Southwest and before that. Whatever you're willing to share, tell our listeners a bit about Sonya's history and the progression through and to where you are with Southwest today.

Sonya Lacore: I love that you asked me that Sarah, because it is an interesting story to me, for sure. I hope others can benefit from it. I started with Southwest almost 19 years ago. I found myself, after being in business with my former husband in the construction industry, of all things... We ended up parting ways, and that business ended. I needed to find something else. And because I had poured everything into that, I honestly didn't know where to turn.

Sonya Lacore: So, I found Southwest. The entry level position for me at the time was a flight attendant position. I was so excited that they were hiring. I loved, loved their values and their core tenants of the company. One of the things that I noticed right away is that their customer is secondary to their employee. The employee is the number one customer. They believe that if the flight attendants or the ground ops or whoever is well taken care of, they'll take care of the customer. I support that 100%, and I loved that.

Sonya Lacore: So I stayed in that role for, gosh, a little over three and a half years. I found myself really craving leadership. I knew I had leadership ability and I wanted to move into a different role. I have served in a variety of six or seven roles along the way to where I am today, and I love that Southwest supports that from the ground up. If you had told me I would be in this role today, I would never have believed it, but I'm certainly thankful for it.

Sarah Nicastro: When you just said, "If you had told me, I would be in this role. That I would be a vice president at Southwest, that I would be leading an operations of 17,000 folks." You had shared with me, that part of the reason you wouldn't believe that is because you were lacking in self-confidence when you started.

Sonya Lacore: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sarah Nicastro: Talk as much as you're willing, as you want, about why was that? And how did some of those early experiences at Southwest, and even before Southwest, start to kind of fuel that fire in you of becoming more confident and growing that desire for leadership?

Sonya Lacore: Sure. I was just a very, very shy child. So start with that. I grew up in a very small town in Louisiana. As much as I love where I came from, college was not really pushed. It was get married, have children, and so that's the path that I took. So, because I didn't have a college degree, I felt like something was lacking in me. I never just got the chance to accomplish that. As a result, I began to look at everybody else like they were more competent, especially if they had a degree. And if they were in other roles, I would think, "Wow." I always wanted more, and I'd look at them and wish that I could be that.

Sonya Lacore: Then one day, I just realized, "Okay. I've got some strengths. I've got strengths as it relates to talking with and encouraging others, and just people strengths." And I thought, "Okay. It's time for me to turn my cup upside down, pour out all of the things that I don't believe about myself. Fill it back up with things that I do believe I can accomplish." And I slowly started on that path.

Sonya Lacore: I think that Southwest does such a great job of developing leaders, and the path is there for any employee, if they want it. I took advantage of those variety of classes and some of them were hard. Some of them are, how do you stand before a big group and speak? And they critique you and tell you things you shouldn't say and do. It's not an enjoyable process. But once I got through it, I think I really learned a lot about myself and leveraging my strengths.

Sarah Nicastro: That's really cool. It's interesting. The title of this podcast is, The Secret Sauce of Southwest. Right? One of the things that I think makes you so passionate about the secret sauce of Southwest is how Southwest helped you find your own secret sauce. Do you know what I mean? I came from a small town and a very humble background. I have struggled with some of the same things, the imposter syndrome. It takes some time, I think, to really find your footing and to start to realize that it's not about being more or less valuable, or talented, or skilled than anyone else. It's just about owning what you bring to the table-

Sonya Lacore: Yes. That is so true. And being okay with that. Recognizing that what you have is a gift and you can use that to help others in some way. That is what I have tried to do.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. We talked a little bit on our panel, with the other women, that everyone doesn't need to be good at the same things. In fact, that would be a big problem. Right? So I think it just takes some time to shift your focus from what your weaknesses are, to what your strengths are, and really embrace that. So that's really cool.

Sarah Nicastro:

I'm curious to ask, Sonya... So in your early days at Southwest as a flight attendant, what were some of the ways you saw this employee focus in practice? How did you recognize firsthand, that at Southwest, the employee is the number one customer?

Sonya Lacore: Well, I think they really demonstrate their investment in you as soon as you walk into the training. The culture there really is real. It's not a word. It is really real. They grieve with you. They rejoice with you. They celebrate with you. They bring the employee along every step of the journey. When they say they care about you, I believed it from the beginning, because they demonstrated that. Then now, as you become a leader, it is up to you, and it's your obligation to show that to others.

Sonya Lacore: And I guess, said differently, they take the approach, and I 100% support this. It is really hard to give of yourself, if someone is not giving to you. So said differently, you got to fill up the employee, so they can fill up the customer. Kind of, as we would say in the flight attendant world, put your oxygen mask on first, so you can help others. It's kind of, we put the oxygen mask on our people, so that they can be healthy, and whole, and well to serve the public. I believed it, and I see it every day today.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. This is a topic that we've discussed a few times. This idea of companies are very rightly, heavily focused on the customer experience, as well they should be. But sometimes that focus is at the detriment of focusing on the employee experience and not really focusing enough on that correlation of how you treat your employees and what that means in terms of their willingness, and ability, and inclination to deliver that customer experience. Right?

Sarah Nicastro: It makes a lot of sense to me, this focus. That the secret sauce is really prioritizing the employees, so that they aren't checking a box of, "Here's the customer experience I'm supposed to deliver." But rather, they're genuinely happy and satisfied, and therefore, naturally provide that. Right? On the Southwest flights that I've been on, and I can't wait to be on another one, you have that feeling that they actually want to be there.

Sarah Nicastro: They're not showing up to get their shift over with, and they're not annoyed with everyone that walks into the airplane. They're personable. They're smiling. They're making jokes, and it is a different experience. I think that that is a really important lesson for folks to think about. Yes. How you treat your customers is critical, but how are you treating the employees that you want to deliver that experience? So tell me a bit about the Southwest culture and some of the things that you think are critical in creating that secret sauce.

Sonya Lacore: First of all, I think it does begin with... We call our employees our number one customer. We have two terms, the internal customer, and the external customer. And so meeting their needs wherever they are. Everybody's so different. I think the other piece of that secret sauce is we let our people be genuinely authentic. When you mentioned being on one of our flights. You may have a flight attendant that is a really good vocalist and they can sing, or you may have someone who, their secret sauce is leaning into the customer and getting with a small child, getting on their knees in the aisle to talk to them, instead of standing above them.

Sonya Lacore: It doesn't matter what your special gift is. We ask our employees to bring that with them, and then we celebrate that with them. Just little things. Like if a customer videotapes something wonderful and they send it in, we broadcast that. And then before you know it, we're on national television with it. And when our employees see that, we celebrate that, then they want to do more of that. It's truly an investment in who they are.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. I want to take a minute here to draw a couple of parallels for our audience. Right? So if you think about the audience of this podcast, there are brands like Southwest. And we recently interviewed Peloton, which is another more consumer-facing brand. Right? Kind of a different world of experience and customer demands, if you will. And actually had a pretty similar conversation with the gentleman from Peloton, talking about they have invested in field operations as a competitive differentiator.

Sarah Nicastro: So they've realized that rather than partnering with a third party to go in and deliver and set up their bikes, they could provide a more unique and white glove experience by having those people be a part of their business, and to do that with internal team members. But as they're hiring these folks, they're prioritizing their ability to be creative and authentic, just like you said. I think that's a really important point.

Sarah Nicastro: It's hard for folks to feel satisfied, if they feel that they are forced to be something they're not or forced to act in a certain way that isn't natural to them. Thinking about the modern field service experience, if you will, there is more of a need to think about how to be creative and how to make room for authenticity and things like that. Just more personality, giving people that opportunity to be themselves.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that a lot of our audience is more mechanical in nature. If you think about HVAC, or you think about a medical device, or you think about construction, or different manufacturing industries. It is a different type of feel. But a lot of the evolution that's happening in those different spaces is around customers wanting more of an experience. Right? And so I think there's a lot for those folks to learn from someone like you, and in a company like Southwest, about how to deliver a more personable, authentic, creative experience to the customer.

Sarah Nicastro: I was hoping you could talk a little bit about, what are some of the ways that you encourage your team members to kind of give that extra, and make it an experience, and what can that look like?

Sonya Lacore: First of all, I think we hire well. I'll just say that. When we onboard them, we have a true onboarding process. When they come onboard, they know, without a doubt, that hospitality is a non-negotiable. We tell them upfront, we deliver a service that customers are expecting. And our service is to get them from point A to B safely, on time, as best we can with on-time performance. But in between that is that little something extra, or we like to call it the essence. You've got the service that you deliver, and then there's the essence in how you deliver it.

Sonya Lacore: So I'll give you an example. I'll use the flight attendants, since I lead that group. You may have a mother that comes to the back of the aircraft and say, "Hey, do you have a microwave onboard? I need to warm up a water bottle for my baby." We don't have a microwave. It would be very easy for the flight attendants to say, "Sorry. We don't have one." But they've been taught to say, yes and/or no, "but here's what we can help you with." And so the, "No. We don't have a microwave, but what we do have is"... "I have hot water. So I can put it in a cup for you, and you can put your baby's bottle in there and warm it up." So they just are encouraged to always look for those extra things that they can do.

Sonya Lacore: Because our motto, too, is we want every customer that steps onboard to feel welcomed, cared for, and appreciated, like they are a guest in our home. So you take that same scenario, and it was a guest in your home, you're not going to say, "Nope, can't do that for you." You're going to try to find a way. That resonates with our employees. They also know at the end of the day, the customer is ultimately the one that signs their paycheck. So all of it comes together.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. I think that's a really good example. I want to talk a little bit about... From a company perspective or a leadership perspective, before we talk about you individually as a leader. If you just look at Southwest as a whole, what are any of the best practices or processes that are in place to kind of facilitate this type of employee focus, and to really stay engaged with employees, and to make sure that they are happy and engaged and therefore delivering that customer experience?

Sonya Lacore: Well, it is taught to us early on, that the voice of the customer is our internal customer, and so their voice matters. You have to be willing to give avenues for that and listen to them, so that you can make improvements along the way. So we found a variety of ways to do that. I'll just use myself as an example. When I was a brand new leader, my leader came to me and said, "Let me be clear. You will never be in trouble for going out and traveling and talking too much to the front line." I took that as a, "Wow, that is a real green light."

Sonya Lacore: What a beautiful way to spend your career, just going out and talking to your people all the time. It energizes you. Just as in any company, there are hard things that you have to get over. I'll use this environment we're in right now. When I can get out and talk to the frontline, that is my most motivated moment. That energizes me unlike anything else. I think we promote that from the very beginning and the feedback that we get.

Sonya Lacore: And we also do an employee survey. So you want to hear what they're having to say through the survey? And if the survey says, "Hey, we haven't seen or heard from our leaders enough," then you can just bet we're going to get out there and do more of it, because that's what the business is about. You know, Colleen Barrett, one of our beloved founders, said, "We're in the customer service industry. We just happen to fly airplanes." Well, we're in the internal customer service industry for our people.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. I know you had said to me, in a previous conversation, that Southwest really fosters this feeling of family. So closer than just coworkers or colleagues, but that it's really a Southwest family. Some of the advice for what that takes can be really hard to articulate, because it is about the culture, and it is about those interactions and it is just about how you treat people and how you listen. I always find it interesting, whether it's when I'm traveling and I meet with different people in my travels, or whether it's having a service experience here at home or something.

Sarah Nicastro: Obviously, with what I do, I'm always interested. But I'll ask like, "So how do you like your job?" And you can always tell by the way someone responds, how they're treated. I have had people that are like, "I love it." You know, "I love it. This company is great." Or, "I love what I do." You also have people that will just rant or... You know? It is so important. I think it's just something that can't be overemphasized.

Sarah Nicastro: So let's talk about you, as a leader, for a few moments. I know that you said you believe strongly in leading from the heart. Tell our listeners what that means, and how it fits in with your career at Southwest.

Sonya Lacore: Every company has... Certainly, you have policies. And in an airline industry, you're highly regulated. So knowing that there's always an opportunity to meet someone where they are in their moment in life. I've often said, if I had one super power, it would be to be able to know the backstory of each individual I talk to and meet with, before I even see them. Because when you know what their path has been, whether it's been wonderful or hurtful. If you know that, then you know what they need in that moment.

Sonya Lacore: And so I really believe leading from the heart means putting yourself in that person's shoes, listening, and really hearing what they're trying to tell you. I think, too, that takes a lot of humility for you to just stop and listen and take other people's thoughts into account. For me, it just means believing in people and helping lift them up. I don't know. I think before they can start their day, if you can do any little thing from the heart and color outside the box a little bit, and extenuate circumstances individually, on an individual basis, and not treat everybody like they're a number, but they really are a person. I think that, that's leading from the heart.

Sonya Lacore: If you can even call their family member by name or, "Hey, how's your dog? The last time I talked to you"... Then people know you care about them. So that when you do really need to have a challenging conversation with them, they know you care and that you're not just following a policy. I just can't say enough about the heart will lead you to do the right thing. The [inaudible 00:25:16] will lead you to the right policy, but the heart will lead you to do the right thing.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And with 17,000 people, that's... It's not like a team of five. Right? I mean, a team of five, it would be really easy to remember everyone's family names and who has what pets. It is a really good point that in some ways, the bigger the team, the more important it is to look for those opportunities to let folks know that you are invested in them personally, and not just as 1 of 17,000. Right?

Sonya Lacore: Yeah. We have a process. With over 60,000 employees, we have something called our Internal Customer Care Team. And when anyone has any life event, they know that they should and could report that to their leader, or they can submit a form themself. But it might be that they had a baby. It might be that they had a wedding. It might be that they graduated with their Master's. Unfortunately, it might be a death. Whatever it may be, our leaders get to see that information about that person. That gives us a chance to celebrate, or grieve with them. I think that [inaudible 00:26:30] important moments that matter. But we can't know about it unless they tell us, and we do have a process that I love.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's really nice because it's hard in a big, big company. You're going to have your certain folks you interact with on a daily basis, that you get really close with. But you don't want to be disconnected from the "bigger" family. Right? I'm curious. If you don't mind me asking, Sonya, what has changed, or how does leading from the heart look different in a year like this year?

Sonya Lacore: Well, that's a great question. I think you really have to have some empathy and understand that everybody responds to this differently. We have people who are not afraid, and then we have people who generally are. We have people who have health conditions. And so just really, really understanding those differences and giving options without punitive action. Because we're an airline and we have to keep going. There are some people who say, "I can't do it." "Well, then let's discuss what that looks like for you, and what your options are." I think that's what we've done and it seems to have worked well for us.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. One of the things you said earlier, too, is the different methods that you have in place. So the customer care, but also as a leadership team, and just as a company to listen. When it comes to employee engagement and employee satisfaction, I think sometimes just listening is overlooked for how really big it is. You know? I think people appreciate the fact to weigh in and to feel heard, even if it doesn't always impact the outcome. Do you know what I mean?

Sarah Nicastro: That's just part of making them feel valued and important, rather than, just like you said, a number, or that their opinions don't matter as much as others. So, I like that. I like that idea of giving folks an opportunity to voice concerns and being empathetic and understanding while you're working through those challenges.

Sarah Nicastro: You had shared with me, Sonya, that one of the things you've loved about leading, and particularly leading other women, is paying it forward, in terms of helping women build some of the confidence that early on in your career, you were lacking in yourself. What has that looked like for you? And tell us about that being a passion of yours.

Sonya Lacore: Oh, my gosh. It's a passion, because I never want anyone to feel some of the way that I felt. I know that it can be avoided with some mentoring, and some coaching, and some encouragement. It really is a passion for me. My assistant, Devin, will tell you often, "You cannot mentor someone else. You don't have time on your calendar." But I want to, because I love it so much. I believe that it's just really important to see the strength in someone and pull that out and give them an opportunity and tell them. I really do believe in positive reinforcement, much more than I do critiquing. Someone did that for me.

Sonya Lacore: But the other thing, Sarah, that I can't emphasize enough is in today's society, there are a few types of approaches that you can take. You can say, "Hey, I'm great at this. Look at me, I'm going to stand up. I'm going to go for that job." I was not that person. I think when you have a low self-esteem, you're not going to be that person. So to have someone else tap you on the shoulder, and say, "Hey, I see something in you. Let's develop that. Let's really fine-tune that." And then, "I think this would be a great position for you."

Sonya Lacore: If someone had not done that for me, I would not be sitting here talking to you today. And so while many subscribe to, and I don't judge that and I don't disagree. Everybody's different, many subscribed to, "I got this, I'm going for it." You know, blows right through it and they get it, and that's great. But everyone doesn't work that way. And I think it’s important to point out that difference.

Sonya Lacore: So, yeah. So that's what I try to do. I almost try to find women that I can see a little bit of my younger self in, and I'm going to focus some energy on that. That's my way of giving back. That's my way of being energized, to be honest. And that keeps you really, really humble because there's so much of that out there.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I love that. And I think the point you made about positive reinforcement kind of ties nicely back to the secret sauce of Southwest. In the sense of it's another really quite simple thing that leaders can do to make people feel so much more appreciated, and seen, and acknowledged. I think that oftentimes in business, with the pace you're moving, or with the challenges you're facing, it's easy to miss those opportunities.

Sarah Nicastro: It's easy to just forget to take two minutes to type a message after you talk with someone, or to not point out something. Unfortunately, especially for folks that maybe lack a little bit of confidence. Like I know for myself, I'm very hard on myself. So I can get paid 20 compliments, but the one critique will outweigh those for me. Do you know what I mean?

Sonya Lacore: Oh, yes.

Sarah Nicastro: So they're important, because if I only get the critique, I start to get really down on myself. You even sent me a note after the panel, and said, "I really enjoyed that. You did a great job." That means a lot to me. Just to have someone take a moment to acknowledge something like that. And so I can see how those types of interactions with your team... That stuff makes a huge difference in making people feel valued and feel important for who they are and what they do. You know?

Sarah Nicastro: That's why I say this topic's hard. You're not going to come in with a blueprint of, "Here's things you've never considered for how to make your employees engaged and happy." But the problem is people don't do the things that are simple, but not simple. Right? And so it's just another thing I think to point out. Of those moments of that positive reinforcement and building people up are so, so important. So.

Sonya Lacore: You hit on the key word. I think is feeling valued. Because it takes someone like myself with low self-esteem. Once I found what my strengths were and I really accepted those, then I began to use them, and then I could see the value. And then if someone does reinforce that for you, it makes you want to do it again, and do it again. Then your self-esteem starts to rebuild and you say, "Wow, I really do kind of have a calling," or whatever it may be. So it's like that hamster wheel. I love it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. And then you can put your energy into full steam ahead on that, instead of energy on all the things you're not good at. Right?

Sonya Lacore: Right. Right.

Sarah Nicastro: It gives you that motivation of, "Oh, my gosh. Someone values this, so I'm going to work harder. I'm going to do more of this. I'm going to be confident in who I am," and all of that. So I love it. Sonya, any, I guess, closing thoughts or final words of wisdom for our listeners?

Sonya Lacore: I think we've covered it really well. I would just say, know what your strengths are, identify those, be really comfortable with them. And then when you continue to use them, you'll be able to say," You know what? That stuff I'm not good at, I'll still work on it. But it doesn't matter so much, because I've got this whole little arsenal of tools over here I'll use, and these are working just fine."

Sonya Lacore: So I don't mean to imply you don't ever need to develop, continue developing. But I would say never beat yourself up over the things you can't do, and focus on the things you can.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. Well, Sonya, thank you so much for being here and for sharing some of your personal journey with us, as well as some of what Southwest is up to. I appreciate it, and it's been a pleasure.

Sonya Lacore: It's been a joy with you, too. So nice. Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you. You can find more content by visiting@futureof fieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn, as well as Twitter at The Future of FS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS Service Management by visiting www.ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

We know that the advancements in capabilities, sophistication, and usability of today’s field service software solutions are impressive. But we also know that, regardless of the strength of software selected, there are many opportunities for projects to go awry during implementation that have little to do with the software itself. Despite the best of intentions, companies can find themselves in a quandary during deployment.

Recently Katie Hunt, Service Operations Leader at APi Group, joined us on the Future of Field Service podcast for a discussion fresh off of the company’s software upgrade. If you’re not familiar, APi Group is a business services provider of safety, specialty, and industrial services in over 200 locations with more than 15,000 employees worldwide. Katie led the team on the software upgrade and, having just wrapped, had some really insightful best practices and lessons learned to share.

Best Practice #1: Know Your Why

Katie’s first piece of advice is to have a clear vision for the project. “Identifying your why is so important because it not only lets stakeholders know why we're doing this project, but then it also serves as a benchmark for project efforts. So, you can avoid that scope creep, and you can make sure you're staying on task,” she says.

APi Group’s most recent software deployment was an upgrade of its Alliance solution for which the company’s initiatives were to standardize processes, move to a hosted environment, and to set the groundwork for scaling the business. “Being clear on your goals allows you to then communicate effectively throughout the organization and really just maintain that focus and discipline and ultimately compare all of those decisions back to that strategic vision and keep the project on track,” says Katie. “It is so important to know that the whys might be different for different cohort groups. We have a very large organization, and when I'm communicating, and my team’s communicating to executives, it's a different message sometimes than the end user or the branch level professionals, which is fine. But ultimately, they all need to tie back to that strategic vision, so that they're all in alignment.”

Best Practice #2: Define Your Project Team

During your project, it’s critical to obtain input and feedback – but it’s also critical to ensure that the responsibility of driving the project forward is clearly defined. “This project was unique, in that we really relied on the operating companies to provide insight and guidance and decision making across the board. We had a unique structure with a service steering committee, where we had one representative from each company,” explains Katie. “They came together, and they really made the agreement upfront that this would be the decision-making body. Even if everybody didn't agree, we would move forward with the decision of that committee, so that we could standardize processes. And, so, although we had great discussions and sometimes people didn't agree, we were able to make those decisions and move forward. It really took the ownership off of APi Group and put that on the companies to drive this change forward, which big success overall.”

On the other hand, APi Group learned it could have benefitted from a dedicated project manager and some additional resources. “We had the core team, which was very lean, including myself and about four other key team members,” says Katie. “We did learn that we could have used a couple more people, not only a dedicated project manager to delineate the project management from business decisions, but also just having an extra set of eyes for different perspective. So that was a lesson learned.”

Best Practice #3: Develop Guiding Principles

As your project hits the inevitable ebbs and flows, and rest assured it will, you need to know exactly what to stay focused on. To this end, Katie suggests developing guiding principles. “We defined four guiding principles. The first one was maintaining focus on end user needs. We didn't want to have a holistic technology solution that didn't meet what the end user needs from the field professionals to those office leaders that are really the ones executing the work,” says Katie. “Our second one was being open to changing processes. Change is hard, but we know that we all agreed, hey, we might have to change our processes. We're doing this for the betterment of the group. And that was just an agreement up front. The third one was leveraging the ideas and suggestions of the service steering committee, which we've already discussed, which worked very well. And then the last one was valuing time over process changes. What we were saying with this is, our go live date needs to be met, despite all the process changes being fully complete.”

Having these guiding principles in place at the start is important to keep clear on what you’ve defined as most important, because competing priorities are sure to arise. Your defining principles don’t negate additional priorities or opportunities from being incorporated but ensure that you stay focused first on achieving the principles you’d set. “As we grew closer to go live, we had a list of items that had not yet been implemented. And we prioritized, made sure we hit those really key items, brought them forward before go live,” explains Katie. “And we're still working in sprints after go live, to continue to refine the system. So, we wanted to view go live not as a stopping point, but really as something we could continue and use as a springboard to keep developing our processes, systems, et cetera.”

Best Practice #4: Testing, Testing, Testing

Katie explains that there’s truly never enough time to test enough and success is a balance of ensuring you’ve done enough, in a variety of manners, to feel confident without holding up forward progress. “Testing: we love it and we hate it because there's never enough time for testing and there's so many different methods of testing. And it's just so crucial,” says Katie. “I would say one thing I learned that I did not know going into this project was how many different methods and different types of testing you could do, from the load testing to the off-road testing, to the scripted testing, to automated, there's just a whole gamut of how you can test the system. It’s important to have a really, really solid plan for testing. Before I came on board, the team already had an excellent script of testing items and what we needed to do. So, we had a really good baseline that we could springboard off of and then we just wanted to make sure that we put the system through the paces and tested as if we were conducting real-world operations.”

Katie notes the importance of not just testing but rehearsing. “Rehearse like you want to actually execute. It's like a military thing. I would say that's one thing that we did well, especially with rehearsing the actual cut-over, but also with testing,” she explains. “One thing that I would suggest that had been used at APi Group before I was on board was the testing matrix and really holding the companies accountable for not only who has tested, but when and what. Because if you have a whole group that focuses just on one end of the testing and you miss the portion where you need to invoice the work order, rather than just create it, you have a gap in the testing. So, by spreading it out and having the end users do the testing and staggering it correctly, I think it's very, very beneficial.”

Best Practice #5: Provide Ample and Effective Training

When Katie and I outlined our podcast discussion, I was quick to group training in with change management – and Katie was sure to point out that it is absolutely important to stand on its own. “I’m very proud of how our team handled training. We created videos within our LMS system with APi Group. We kept them short, no more than five minutes, because the attention span of most people is not more than that when watching the training videos. And then we also made cheat sheets. We made quick reference guides that folks can print off on a one pager for key topics, put it in a little folder, or guys can throw it in their trucks, as they're out on site, and just references as needed. And then lastly, we did make those user manuals that are very in depth. They have screenshots, they answer those tough questions, deep dive, and really, people can search them and use the PDF and that kind of thing if needed,” describes Katie.

So APi ensured there were a variety of formats of tangible resources, but also prioritized live trainings and encouraged interaction. “We had weekly live stream trainings. This was a suggestion by one of our steering committee members, and we essentially dedicated a topic each week, and we opened it up on Teams where people could just ask questions through chat,” explains Katie. “We had really good participation! I think week after week, about 150 people would log in, ask questions, and share ideas. And I think having that service community through our team's page has just been a really good benefit, but we are going to continue to take those trainings and use them for onboarding new users and then refine them, probably quarterly as we move forward, just as a continued resource.”

Best Practice #6: Don’t Skimp on Change Management

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of covering this space, it is that software projects often fail due to the tendency to de-prioritize or under focus on the criticality of change management. “Change is never easy. And I really think, even though this is a very intangible part of the project, it's one of the most important, just because it often gets pushed to the side when the budget gets tight, or you're short on time,” agrees Katie. “This is definitely something we did not want to lose focus on. And we did have times where we slipped; everyone does.”

One critical aspect is ensuring that your stakeholders feel invested and take ownership, and this is accomplished through early and often communication, explaining the “why” and how the change will benefit them, and allowing time and opportunity for feedback. “Our strategy overall was not to push this on the companies, but to have the companies take ownership. We are 100% there to support, assist developing these training tools, develop the testing, outline the plan. But for a three-person, four-person team, it's not feasible to train and really manage that change for 20 companies, 3000 users,” says Katie. “We did everything in our power to explain the why behind these changes. And if they had pushback, if they had feedback, we would listen. And there were times where we didn't make a change, or we've switched the processes, but we did that in a standardized manner to make sure that everyone was in alignment. We constantly tried to solicit feedback, really tried to over-communicate whenever possible, and focus on what I think is the most important resource of the project; the people. No matter the technology, no matter the system, if the people don't support it, and the people don't understand why, and they aren't getting what they need to conduct their work and be successful, the project's ultimately going to fail. We wanted to maintain communication and really just make sure that people understood the why of the changes and how it helped them personally, not just the company overall.”

Best Practice #7: Set KPIs to Measure Progress and Success

You won’t know how far you’ve come if you don’t know where you started. “This is one thing we definitely could have done better, and I think it circles back to our team structure with individuals filling multiple roles. We had one individual that was the project manager, as well as the business process lead. So they're not only managing logistics, resourcing, budget, but they're also doing the process analysis, business decisions, and architecture. And having that, something's going to slip through the cracks,” explains Katie. “The downstream effect of that was that we did not really have project KPIs. Our BI and metrics team has done a phenomenal job of creating operational performance metrics. But in terms of the actual project itself and key milestones, I think we could have done a better job measuring those milestones and KPIs and actually having other KPIs rather than just on-time and o- budget, which is what most people focus on. We could have been more granular and had more holistic KPIs and to do that I think it is important to make sure that you have somebody dedicated to that aspect of the project.”

By Tom Paquin
Manufacturers across the board are waking up to the potential of servitizing previously product-oriented businesses, building out their book of business with service and outcomes-based solutions. For manufacturers who build and sell medical devices, the opportunity is certainly just as apparent. While some customers expect systems and assets to work as expected, medical workers often require uninterrupted utilization in order to keep their patients safe and meet the unique day-to-day challenges that they face. Issues need to be resolved quickly, and service technicians need to work around the diverse, and often inconsistent needs of the business. Getting this right is a daunting task, but one that certainly pays dividends. It starts with a smart approach to technology, and a solution-oriented mindset.

For many medical device companies considering how service technology fits into their business, they naturally assume that custom implementations will ultimately be required in order to meet the demands of a complex and bespoke type of manufacturer. The truth is, though, that smart service management software is designed to be configured to the contours of your business, rather than requiring the time and complexities that come along with customization.

To get this right, it’s important to focus on the right set of capabilities for your business. There are invariably a huge variety that are worth considering, but based on what we’ve seen, there are some common challenges that can be remedied with powerful solutions. I like to pick elements from each stage of the service lifecycle to frame some key capabilities around. To do so, let’s look at these four:

Connected Assets: IoT-enabled capabilities have come a long way from emerging technology, especially in med devices, and the ability to proactively resolve issues before they arise is paramount to the successful operation of many businesses. For example, when it comes to centrifuges for clinical labwork, connectivity to internal systems is the difference between samples aging on a shelf or being actioned effectively. Knowing the status of systems proactively can make sure that organizations are always working at full capacity.

Service-Level Agreement Compliance: Making sure that you’re meeting SLA expectations for medical device manufacturers can be a life-or-death situation in many cases. For that reason, it’s imperative that when service arises, that any SLA requirements are immediately triggered in order to ensure that you’re meeting any contractual outcomes, resolution targets, and privacy requirements through scheduling, delivery, reverse logistics, and invoicing. Getting this right means building your systems around service—not bolting service on to an abstract set of applications. SLA compliance can be tricky when integrating customers into a new service system, but getting it right at the beginning, and building in triggers that inform and enhance all of your service systems, can make a huge difference in the quality of your service interactions.

Optimized Appointments and Planning: In light of the fact that you’ll need to manage and mitigate service issues as quickly and effectively as possible, getting service optimization right is the first and most important step. A good optimization engine combines scheduling capabilities with parts management and technician management to ensure that all elements are working in tandem. Best-in-class optimization goes way beyond one-day scheduling, too, building in the capabilities for simulations, as well as the ability to build multi-time horizon planning to manage demand, headcount, scheduling, and parts allocation by day, week, month, and beyond.

Consumable Management: Medical device manufacturers have a unique relationship with consumable management, and doing it right requires that many of the previously-cited capabilities be in sync with expectations of the business. Especially when dealing with hazardous materials, managing removal and disposal is, for many organizations, a need-to-have. To do this correctly, comprehensive reverse logistics can be the silver bullet. Best-in-class systems help you mange not just routing and depot repairs, but sunsetting of all materials that your service workers come into contact with.

There are obviously a wide arrange of additional considerations for medical device manufacturers to keep in mind when mapping out their service plans, but these are some of the issues that we see come up repeatedly. Getting service right for medical device manufacturers often requires more careful planning, but when it’s in place, it can make a huge difference.

Sarah shares a panel discussion from the Service Council Virtual Symposium with Linda Tucci of Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, Dr. Marlene Kolodziej of RICOH USA, Sophia Williams of NCR, Sonya Lacore of Southwest Airlines, and Cindy Etherington of Dell about how they are leading through this time of immense change.

Sarah Nicastro: Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for this session, Women in Service: Leading the Industry Through Change. My name is Sarah Nicastro. I am field service evangelist and creator of the future of field service. I'm so excited to be here today. I will be moderating the session with this wonderful panel and I'm very excited for our conversation. I am going to ask each of our panelists to introduce themselves, to talk just briefly about the organizations that they're with and what their roles are. Sonya, do you mind starting?

Sonya Lacore: I'm happy to. Hello everybody. It's wonderful to be here today. I'm Sonya Lacore, I work for Southwest Airlines. I'm starting my 19th year there. I started as vice president of our in flight operations which basically means I support and am an advocate for our almost 17,000 flight attendants. Started my career as a flight attendant and served in a variety of roles and now I get to have the privilege of leading them. So happy to be with all of you today and can't wait to hear from the other ladies.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you Sonya. Linda, can you go next?

Linda Tucci: Sure thing. I'm Linda Tucci. I've been at Ortho Clinical Diagnostics as the global director for our technical solutions center for the past five years. Our company manufactures product for blood testing and that includes both diagnostic analysis and also blood transfusion compatibility. My team provides technical remote support for our customers and escalation support to field personnel. Our customers are primarily medial technologists the ones that my team supports. Those working in hospital or reference laboratories and they run the analyzers that produce the results and it's such a critical role in healthcare. I'm really proud that I've served as a medical technologist. For the past 20 years I've held various roles in service management in the medical device sector and I'm really happy to be part of this panel today.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. Thank you Linda. Sophia, can you go next please?

Sophia Williams: Sure. I'm Sophia Williams and I run the telecom and technology division of NCOR and basically that division is support service provider, clients we're the world's largest service provider in tech OEM's and delivering their services solutions on behalf of their enterprise customers. I've been in services for a number of years. I started out in sales and then I managed sales organization and then I had a general manager role and I fell in love with services because I think services is such a key part of our ability to ensure that we keep our customers very happy and we therefore can drive incremental revenue. That's what I do as part of NCOR corporation.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you Sophia and I agree. Service is where it's at. Cindy?

Cindy Etherington: Thanks. Hey everybody, Cindy Etherington. I'm with Dell Technologies. I've been here for about nine years and I lead our education services business. We're a business unit within Dell Technologies Services and we're responsible for three things. We really provide learning solutions to our customers to make sure they get the best return on their Dell Technologies investments. We also support our partners and enable them so that they represent Dell Technologies to the best of their ability in the market and then thirdly we support all of our internal team members, 140,000 or so of them for all of the technical training on our products on our portfolio. We also do some cross company learning platforms for efficiencies and effectiveness. It makes sense for the company to have one of something versus numerous of them so our learning management system and our learning records tour and our learning experience platform we manage that for Dell Technologies. Spent my entire career in the technologies sector, mostly in services and I'm passionate about enabling the next generation of leaders, in particular supporting young professionals and diverse professionals and also women in technology.

Sarah Nicastro: That's awesome. Okay, and Marlene.

Marlene Kolodziej: Hi. Thank you it's a pleasure to be here. I'm the vice president of centralized services for Ricoh USA and my role is providing customer support for all of Ricoh hardware and software services and products as well as providing IT support both white label and external support and certainly having spent more than 30 years now I'm giving my age away but more than 30 years in IT I'm now on the business side but still providing services and support which I find is just so critical especially as in this day and age helping our customers find the most success based on where they're at in their environment today and in their situation especially as the world is changing so rapidly.

Sarah Nicastro: Well thank you all so much for doing the introductions. I like to have panelists introduce themselves because that gets me off the hook and being fearful of mispronouncing everyone's names. Thank you and I at Future of Field Service we've had a Women in Service series for the last couple of years where we've really taken a deep dive in article form and podcast form into women's journeys and I think that when I started covering this space 13, 14 years ago I was oftentimes the only female in a room and sometimes that is still the case although it's certainly improving. I think until that has completely evolved it is important to showcase these types of conversations and I'm very thankful to the service council for having us all here today to do this.

Sarah Nicastro: I have prepared what I think are some good questions for these ladies and we're going to walk through those but certainly feel free to submit your own questions as well. I will be keeping an eye on the Q and A chat and if we have some good questions come in I will incorporate them into our conversation today. Without further ado, let's get started. I'm going to ask each of you to answer this first question. The first question is really talking about if you think of your journey as a female leader, what would you say the biggest challenges and the biggest advantages have been for you? Cindy, can you start?

Cindy Etherington: Yeah, it's actual thought provoking question Sarah and I think there's many challenges and many advantages of being a woman as well as there's advantages and challenges for lots of differentiation whether it be gender or ethnicity, race, background, religion, whatever that might be. The first thing that comes to my mind interestingly enough you just referenced and that is for most of my career and in particular earlier in my career, I was the only woman. One of very few women in the room whether that be within the company that I worked for at the time or I was in sales for a good portion of my career as well or with our customers and partners. Making sure that I found a way to have my voice be heard was a challenge. It was definitely feeling like one of the crowd, one of the group, equal playing field was certainly a challenge but it was also an advantage that I had at the same time. It's almost like your strength is also your weakness in some cases where I could use the fact that I was different and I had a different way of thinking of things to give myself a platform and to be heard.

Cindy Etherington: That's the first thing that comes to mind for me. I've tried to focus in my career on my strengths, many of which I think are strengths because I am a woman. Few that come to mind, empathy and being able to put yourself in the shoes of your customers or your partners or your team members. Being realistically optimistic. I think others follow leaders who are optimistic about what the future holds and then I'd say relationship building which is I think a strength of many women, not that men are not but definitely a woman's strength for fostering teamwork and collaboration. Taking advantage of being a woman is one thing and then figuring out what are the strengths that I bring to the table as a woman and really leveraging them was what I chose and still do choose to focus on.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah thank you Cindy. One of the things I wanted to comment on that you said is oftentimes the strength and the weakness are sort of different sides of the same coin, right? Being the only woman in the room is a challenge but it can also be an opportunity. I think the struggle there is building the confidence or finding the confidence to leverage that platform. That's something I know early in my career I struggled with. I was intimidated to be the only woman in the room so I would stay quiet instead of speaking up and it took me some years to kind of flex those muscles to be able to feel confident in my own voice. I think that that's a struggle that is shared I'm sure.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, so let's keep going with this same question. Challenges, advantages. Sophia, can you go next?

Sophia Williams: Yeah, I will and I'll try to hit something maybe a little different than other folks other than I will say that clearly when I started years ago I was definitely the only female in the room and frankly in some parts the globe, we run a global business, I'm still often the only female in the room. Early on I think there probably were some challenges and I think they quickly were overcome and I had to kind of think back when it was a thought provoking question, I had to think back to those days but I am a female leader that has attributes that at least back when I first started working and had leadership roles were more attributed to male attributes if you will. Very assertive, very action oriented, very if it's good for the business, I'm going to go for it without apology. Forceful, et cetera.

Sophia Williams: I think that was basically... It's kind of like a whirlwind maybe to some folks and was kind of unanticipated. I think some of the challenge I had there was initially not being taken as seriously just because of my gender and the fact that I may have been the only woman in the room. It became an advantage pretty quickly because I was able to be the curve ball. I had a boss once that said, "Damn, you're a curve ball. You're the curve ball," not expecting for someone to be as strong. I think at the end of the day I was able to navigate and execute turbulent waters as a result of that with great success. I would say that very quickly in terms of developing your brand, I think that the brand of an individual is very important regardless of their gender. In this case, the question is about gender.

Sophia Williams: My brand was one that was very focused on getting it done, getting the job done, a say do ratio of 100%. If I say that I'm going to do it we will deliver it 100% of the time. Those kind of brand attributes very quickly overshadowed my gender. It's been really years and years since I've felt disadvantaged in any way by being a woman. I think because in large part the brand that one creates is more valued than necessarily the gender of that person. Overall, I would say there's still far too few women in technology services and in technology overall and I love to mentor women and I love to spend time with young college students in the STEM environment to be able to encourage their activities and so forth. Honestly I would say that it's been a long time since it's been a disadvantage and nor has it been an advantage in a long time. In my mind you bring your brand and what you do to the table and regardless of your gender or anything else about you if that brand is something people can count on consistently whatever it happens to be, then the rest is just about performance.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you Sophia. Love those points. Linda, can you go next?

Linda Tucci: I would say for me the main advantage... I've been really lucky in my career to be surrounded by people that were very supportive of women in leadership roles and also had great mentors that were willing to spend time, generous with their time with me and I would even say more importantly willing to tell me the truth even when I didn't want to hear it in a way that I could hear it. I was really lucky in that regard. Maybe to take a different spin on challenge, I would actually say that my main challenge for me is that I got in my own way especially early on in my career when I first became a manager. You could've written a book about me, The Five Dysfunctions of Linda. Do you know what I mean? I did everything wrong or at least I felt that way trying to adapt other styles rather than stopping and uncovering my own. Maybe taking myself too seriously.

Linda Tucci: It took me a while to realize the importance of being authentic. To uncover my own style, to build on it and to really focus on my strengths as said before and I'm a big advocate to really build on your strengths, leverage and develop those skills that come innate or you can grow into and so I would just add those key points to the conversation.

Sarah Nicastro: Wonderful. Sonya?

Sonya Lacore: I love what some of the other ladies have said. One of the things that I'm a big fan of is establishing your personal plan and what that looks like. For me, especially in the customer service industry that translates into kindness and compassion and empathy and I think sometimes the challenge can be that politeness can be mistaken for weakness. I think for me although it hasn't really been a challenge because I agree with Linda if you leverage your strengths you know that you have them and then you just share those.

Sonya Lacore: I happened to serve in an operational group where I am the only female out of 22 people. I go into that meeting every Monday and I kind of play this little game with myself of okay, take gender out of it. Would I still say or do what I'm about to do and the answer is always yes I am because I'm going to follow my heart and I'm going to back it up with facts, data of course but there's people who know me know that I also am a really big fan of I don't think work works without a little bit of play. I like to be the one to go in and incorporate, "Hey, take the first five minutes. How was your weekend? Tell me a little bit about you on a personal level," and I think when you do that just kind of puts everybody on the same playing field. Everybody's getting a little bit more relaxed. Then I think you can really start debating and be productive.

Sonya Lacore: I just think having a softer approach sometimes is really an advantage and it allows you to lead from the heart and just as Linda said, just be you.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. You know what I think is interesting? I saw Marlene just dropped off and hopefully she'll come right back on but I'm noticing the differences between Sophia's response and Sonya's response and I love it, right? It's a really good illustration of number one there's no right way to lead and number two, there no right way to be a woman or a females or there's no necessarily hard and fast rules of attributes. For me personally I identified Sophia with what you said a lot. Some of those same characteristics you mentioned in terms of your assertiveness and in certain professional situations that where I've been surrounded by a lot of folks that maybe didn't appreciate those as female characteristics or something that would've been delivered in this same way by a male counterpart was just perceived differently because it was coming from me as a female, that's very frustrating.

Sarah Nicastro: Again, it takes time and confidence to, when you're questioned feel comfortable defending yourself and defending your position instead of just shrinking down and saying less as a result of that. I think I used to, Sonya to your point kind of feel like I workshop doing something wrong by not being softer or some of the characteristics that you love about yourself and it took me some time to just feel comfortable in I am who I am, right? Everyone has different strengths and it's up to us to not waste time wanting to be different but to be the best us we can be. Marlene, can you talk a little bit about your own challenges and advantages?

Marlene Kolodziej: Thank you for asking. I think I echo a lot of what all of these strong women were talking about where there's a disconnect between what's on the outside in a sense to perhaps the strength and the persona that's coming through on the inside. We have certain... We're assigned certain behaviors in a sense as a woman there's this empathetic, softer sort of expectation of behavior. For me personally I was raised as a tomboy and I grew up in the technology industry so usually the only female and surrounded by men and sort of in the early '80s and PC's and laptops and desktops and data center and network so you sort of were the one that ran the wire frame and constructed the data centers and it was very masculine environment but when you think about being a female there's a certain expectation of how you're behaving versus how you want to behave or how you show your strength.

Marlene Kolodziej: I think that was the battle is, and even today there's a bit of that disconnect between what's seen on the outside versus truly what's on the inside. Certainly all of us have been very successful in our roles and what we do and there's been a lot of bruises along the way but I think... This is on my LinkedIn if any of read the story I talk about how I had an amazing supportive male boss who at the time when there was a disconnect between what I was projecting versus being female this person had the wherewithal to ask, "Marlene, if you were a man would you have these same issues?" The answer was no. That was an enlightening learning experience for me to realize that I also had to adapt a little bit as well as hoping others grow to understand that sometimes the inside and the outside might be disconnected based on who you are and how you were raised and your perception of traditional male or traditional female roles.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Marlene, I think we need to check your connection. I caught what you said but it is... You are very choppy. I don't know if you want to maybe disconnect and reconnect once more and hopefully that would help. You were good in the beginning and then when you dropped off and joined back in. Sophia coming back to what you had said about your leadership style. You did describe your leadership style already. What I want to ask you instead of describing it is how would you say it has evolved or refined throughout your career?

Sophia Williams: Well, I think the original question was really more about the attributes of myself as a person and particularly in an environment but as I've led teams I guess my leadership style certainly has evolved over time, no question. I would say if I had to describe it in one word and I actually went back because we do a lot of... Especially since COVID we've had some really fun exercises as a team that we've done where we'll have my HR VP and everybody submits something they're very proud about in dealing with everybody on the team, my leadership team and so forth so I've gone back and looked at all those and I would say the one word if I had to describe it in one word would be deeply engaged. I'm talking about me with my team. That was kind of how I'm responding to this question.

Sophia Williams: I guess that's true really within the corporation as well as deeply engaged but when I say that, what does that mean? Certainly it's changed over time. I am so transparent as a leader and again I am just as transparent as the day is long because I find that decisions made by the leadership team are much better decisions than if I make them on my own. I'm sure the earlier in my career I probably didn't feel that way. I probably felt, "I'm the leader, I've got to take control, I've got to make these decisions." Everything I do is very inclusive. Everybody has a vote. We debate important issues. We all align before that we lead as well and I try to listen and I probably wasn't as good of a listener earlier in my career.

Sophia Williams: I try to listen very carefully to the different points of view because you know what? I reserve the right to get smarter and I will tell you that as I tell my team, I've got a leadership team of about 14 people, we are 14 times better than any one of us individually because we all have different experiences, we all have different points of view, et cetera. I set the strategic priorities on our customers. Customers are everything to me because we don't exist if not for our customers. Then I hear from everybody and then we align on that. Then I would say the culture I've got, people... I'm very proud of this culture and it's not the culture that I probably had early on but it's a highly accountable, high performing culture, no question about it. It's also deeply familial. Kind of like steeped in friendship not just accountability but in friendship.

Sophia Williams: We really take care of each other in my organization and on my team. We hold each other accountable so it doesn't mean... you know when you said the difference between myself and Sonya it's... I try to create a leadership style that really has a little bit of both. Deep accountability, high performance culture but my gosh it's very familial. Spending time with people, how are their families, knowing what their kids are doing and really spending time to understand what their needs are. I would say in the midst of COVID you have to have different listening because some people... They have a certain persona, their brand if you will and you start to see challenges. I've had a couple people in my leadership team that I've highly encouraged, "Take a few days off. I don't want to hear from you for a couple of days. Go do something. I know you can't go anywhere necessarily but go do something just whatever you want to do."

Sophia Williams: Really listening, highly engaged and the last thing I would say that's definitely something I have learned over time is a willingness to be vulnerable. I think that vulnerability is such a great leadership trait because that makes you very engaged. I don't have the answers for everything and anyone that thinks they do they're definitely wrong, right? I have a point of view and it's a point of view and my experience oft times makes that point of view have some validity to it, right? Sometimes I just am stumped with a situation and I'll throw it open to the team. "Guys, I'm not sure what to do here. I've got a couple ideas," but that's being vulnerable and that's okay. I would say deeply engaged is my leadership style and definitely it has changed over time.

Sarah Nicastro: I love it. I reserve the right to get smarter. I really really like that. I also think when you were talking about the level of engagement and kind of the familial feel you have with your team, I was kind of thinking about my own team and the folks that I work with day to day and when you have that bond, it's not just accountability. It's way more than that because it's not about being accountable for getting your job done. You genuinely care about the people you're working with and the mission you're working towards and the role that each of you play in that so I really like that.

Cindy Etherington: Sophia, I think that's a great comment about you reserve the right to get smarter. I love that comment. I had a mentor early in my career and he probably gave me the best advice I've ever received and it was really silly at the time and I wasn't sure exactly what he meant. He had to explain it to me a little bit more but it was very simply, "Be a sponge." He said, "Surround yourself with great people and continuously learn from them."

Sophia Williams: Agreed, agreed.

Cindy Etherington: Continuous learning is a journey and it's fun and what keep things fresh and exciting and new so I love your perspective there.

Sophia Williams: I appreciate that and I'll tell you, the interesting thing is if you ask all of my leadership team in unison they will answer this question the same way. What does Sophia says sets you free? The answer is talent. Talent sets you free. Bring in the right people and then take care of them and create that bond but we really do care for each other and be sponge and believe me I do reserve the right to get smarter every single day.

Sarah Nicastro: That's awesome. Okay, I want to shift gears a little bit. COVID has been brought up a couple times in our conversation and it's obviously been a huge part of our lives this year and continues to be. It's not just that situation though. There's a lot of change happening now. There's a lot of different areas of change in our world today and we are all navigating it personally but I'm interested in talking about how you're navigating it with your teams and your leadership. With all of the change that is happening in our world, what is your best thoughts, advice, input on how you lead through change? Marlene, let's try you out and see how this audio's sounding.

Marlene Kolodziej: When you think about navigating through COVID and through a pandemic, I recently had put together a presentation around business continuity and disaster recovery and I tell everyone, you need to write these type of models as if you don't exist. You're dead in a sense and I don't like to quite say that but it really is true that you should be prepared for fire or flood and never, ever imagine that I'd have to prepare for a pandemic. I think for us it's around making sure that the change has been not only shifting from an office to remote work force but really helping many of our peers and our staff adapt to this change. I think as women in particular I think a lot of the caregiving role for children and for school and for the house fall on their shoulders as well. Not to say that there's not many men who are equal contributors or sole contributors in this case but I find for much of my staff the burden of home schooling and trying to do their job and trying to keep the house running does fall on their shoulders.

Marlene Kolodziej: I think for all of us it's been really around being creative in terms of your solutions to help all of your staff and all of your workers be successful in this changing environment, in this unsure state to continue to deliver business and help our customers be successful.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Good points. Anybody want to volunteer to go next?

Linda Tucci: Yeah, actually I would. It's interesting when I hear that question. I put it in the context of my experience and earlier this year my mom passed away at the age of 96. It was right before COVID blew up and so coming back to work... I paused, I went to be with my mom, she passed away, I came back and the world changed. I was in such a fragile state and I felt it really important just to share my experience with my team openly and to tap onto that importance of vulnerability and sharing how I was struggling and how I was responding to that inclusive to taking advantage of our great employee assistance program here at Ortho. Having the conversations that needed to take place, telling my boss, "You know something? I need compassion right now. I really need support right now," and that really made me say am I demonstrating that compassion to others? Everybody has their story. 2020, it isn't for wimps. Everything is being thrown at us and I encouraged my entire team... I did a series of town halls in the July time frame that if they're struggling to find somebody to talk to.

Linda Tucci: It's so often in service organizations no matter gender that we're always focused outwardly and I would say that the topic of self compassion, we talked about it openly and I used my experience so that maybe there could also have a comfort level to start that dialogue. I would also say practically and in my team, my management team historically is on site, right? While we do have remote workers historically the managers are used to being on site seeing their folks and practically we did some modules for our management team around the shift to managing virtually.

Linda Tucci: I would also say with our team we spoke very openly because to a point made earlier there's so much change happening within our own organization. What was happening with the projects? What could we share? We talked openly about the degree of change on top of everything happening in the world with the degree of change at work, to be as transparent as possible and to open up different mechanisms of getting bi-directional dialogue taking place. It's really that dialogue in communication. It's not only key, it's critical, it's crucial. It's more important than ever and I would say for me personally I'm really taking more time for me. More planning and thinking time and really focusing on the present. My personal experience has been it's so easy to get overwhelmed with everything that's happening. Focus on what's most important in the moment, remember that I matter and that in order to do my best that I have to really take care of myself and encourage that within my team as well.

Sarah Nicastro: I think it's such an important example to set for your team. I was thinking particularly if you've transitioned from in person work to remote work this year. It's very easy for people to start feeling isolated and if you're struggling with something work related, perhaps it feels easy to speak up and say, "Hey, I really need help with this but it's so easy for some of those personal struggles to be invisible to the people you work with and I think that your speaking up and sharing that probably made your team feel so empowered to come to you if they needed that type of support from you. I just think that's a really really important point and thank you for sharing that story.

Sonya Lacore: Sarah, I'll go next if you don't mind. I love the ladies talking about vulnerability and transparency. I'm such a fan of transparency and through this I would say that agility has also been my keyword probably for the year because change is coming so fast and we make our decisions based on the information we have right at hand in front of us today and tomorrow that changes. I'll just be transparent and say I was experiencing decision fatigue not because of making too many decisions but because the decisions I was making I second guessed them the next day because new information came.

Sonya Lacore: Even to the point where I was passionate about change that we made, communicated it one day to 17,000 people and then the very next day new information came and I had to go back and say, "I know I said that was really important yesterday and today guess what? We're going to pivot and that taught me to just ask for grace and give myself grace because I think as women we have a tendency to beat ourselves up over the past decisions instead of just saying, "Pivot, move on and let's go from here." I think that's what helped me. I think on a more professional level I'm energized when I think about helping others realize the value of what they bring. I don't want to minimize certainly the pandemic but I'm trying to find ways to look for joy and one of the ways to find that joy, it might be for some people it might be that you find it in your family. It might be that you find it in your job.

Sonya Lacore: I think what's really interesting is some people just need to know that the value they bring, our job is to help them see that value and encourage them because they're panicked enough about job security, having to take care of homeschooling or whatever it may be, women or men I think it's just really key. I do think that sometimes happiness can hide itself in life's smallest details and just looking for those moments of happiness is what I think is helping me get my team through it.

Sarah Nicastro: Very good points. Cindy or Sophia?

Cindy Etherington: Yeah, I think I love the topic of change because I think change is ever present and change 99.9% of the time I like to think leads to opportunity. As a leader, what I do relative to helping my team through changes, I've kind of established a culture of change in the organization and make sure that everybody understands that everything is changing at a faster pace than ever before especially the technology industry as a matter of fact so we're going to make the most of it. We dwell on the opportunities that the change creates. I also think it's important that we as leaders recognize the fact that people go through change at a different pace and that's their prerogative. We can't make them go faster and understand and turn that back on but we can help them with understanding the reason for the change, the outcome of the change and help them balance the time they need to get through the process and acceptance of the change and move forward with the need that we have as leaders to actually get the change done. I think that balance falls on us an awful lot as leaders. I think the one thing that it takes to make that happen is communicate, communicate, communicate.

Cindy Etherington: I think Sonya just mentioned it. Before, during, after. If you have to re-pivot to Sonya's point go re-pivot fast. Be open, be transparent, explain what happened and again get back on that change train and help people along.

Sophia Williams: I think I'm the last one on this question but I think everything everyone said has just been amazing. I'm learning from this and I love the whole conversation about finding your joy and I couldn't agree more Cindy that change is constant and certainly not to minimize COVID but in my business... I have a sales organization, I have a product development organization, a services delivery organization, the whole general management role and so particularly right off the bat from the sales teams, there's a lot of concern certainly about job security overall but also about just the fact are customers going to be buying things right now and all that. To your point, I am one of those folks, I guess the eternal optimist but every time there's a challenge, a really big challenge there's always opportunity. Always opportunity. What is that? Let's figure that out together.

Sophia Williams: I'm in the networking world. Well, networks have become more important. Yes, people are sweating their assets longer but let's come up with new solutions. Let's come up with new things to help our customers weather the storm better and as a result we feel better about ourselves and as a result we're seeing there is opportunity because at some point this will be behind us, hopefully sooner rather than later. I really wanted to reemphasize I thought it was a brilliant point you made. I would say that I'm just in touch with my LT for sure, my leadership team for sure very frequently. We've always had one on one's but I actually reach out to them just for a chat like independent of business 101's. How are you doing? How's the family? It's like those concerns that are invisible I think someone had said earlier about the invisibility.

Sophia Williams: Some things you can see, some things you can't see and having a listening and knowing your team well enough and knowing when you need to encourage them to take a little time off or you need to have a different levels of conversation, et cetera. Yeah, I think that also doing what I've never done before. I've never exercised before in my life, I never have. I should. I'm terrible to admit that but I now get up at... Because we had kind of a challenge on our team. One of the things we did to kind of keep things fun. I get up at 4:30 every morning I do my deep exercise because I have to get back home and do my video because I do think video's important on every call. I really believe that. I get my clothes on, I get my suit on, I put my makeup on, roll my hair which is a difficult thing to do after one has been exercising for an hour, hour and half but I do that and I shared that with the team so that's another vulnerability. This is something I've never done before. I'm doing it and encourage you guys to do it.

Sophia Williams: One of my guys in London, I told him about my morning walks and I was like, "Why don't you do that?" He was like, "Well I can't do it in the morning." I said book on from 11:30 to 1:00 and you just go out and walk. Just go out and walk in the middle of the day, take it off your calendar. You're busy, you're working 9, 10 hours a day but find time for you. I think we're just making sure we're very much with not only ourselves and what we need but also in touch with our teams. That also I think then encourages them to be in touch with their teams and so on and so forth because we truly are all in this together. I know it's an overused phrase but we are.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, I agree. Okay so technically we're done in three minutes. That is clearly not happening. Hopefully you all can hang on with me for just a bit. I do want to try and work through the rest of our questions. We'll do a little bit of rapid fire but I think that they're all fantastic and I want to spend a little bit extra time with you all. Cindy, for you what do you think of first if I ask you what is your superpower?

Cindy Etherington: Yeah, it's empowerment. I think that the most important thing that we do as leaders is empower others and help them get a seat at the table, help them have confidence, sharing their point of view and really helping them perform and contribute. Get much more from a whole bunch of people than I could ever get from myself of any one of us could ever get from ourselves as a leader. So empowerment.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. That seems to be a recurring theme here as well. Sophia you spoke about maybe an early inclination before you mature and just learn to want to be the leader and you learn that actually hey, if we have a strong team we're far stronger as a team than any one of us individually. I like that a lot. Marlene, can you share an example with us of when you feel that you showed some strong courage in your career?

Marlene Kolodziej: Yeah, that's an interesting question and I think that it's sort of along the theme of empowerment where the strong courage would be around helping or trusting other individuals to do what they need to do in terms of putting them in new positions. Hiring them without maybe them having all the experience that they need. Really putting your faith in some of the... Especially the women that you might bring on to help groom them and grow them and help them just be successful in their careers knowing that they don't have everything that you need but you have enough faith to trust that you're going to put your reputation and you're going to invest in those individuals to ensure that they're successful not knowing if they really will be.

Marlene Kolodziej: I think it's a little bit of a leap of faith, it's a little bit of empowerment, it's a little bit of a challenge to really put yourself out there to help other people be successful especially when you don't know how it's going to work out and I think that's... I'm sure many of us have done that over and over and don't realize maybe how much we do it and how much faith it sometimes takes even when you cross all your T's and dot your I's to make sure that you're helping people be successful and to move forward in their own careers and to attain the levels that they want to attain in their work world to help build successful people.

Sarah Nicastro: I like that. I was thinking as you were answering Marlene, the question was phrased in a way of what was a big moment of courage? I would assume we've all experienced moments where we really took a leap. We really put ourselves out there or we really had to be brave to do X but I think it's also important to think about courage doesn't always have to be big. Courage is also the daily, right? I spoke earlier about there were a lot of times very early in my career where it took a lot of courage just for me to speak up in the next meeting after someone was dismissive of me. Instead of shrinking away it took real courage to keep standing up or Linda you spoke about your show of vulnerability and your openness. That is courage. I think it's also just important to reflect on it. It doesn't have to be this big event. It's choices every day to be vulnerable, to continue to learn and all of that stuff.

Marlene Kolodziej: Thank you for that Sarah and I think just to close that conversation a little bit, we all have stories about like you just said where we had this big event but I think we find courage every single day in everything that we do. I don't want to miss that message. I just gave one example and especially when you think about the pandemic just how much we have to find in ourselves every day to be courageous and to be strong and to do the right thing over and over and over again. That to me was about people development but it's the same for any other story that I'm sure all of us can talk about. The courage that it takes every day to just keep doing the right thing.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, for sure. Linda, can you share with us a book or a person or a resource that has had a significant impact on you and your journey?

Linda Tucci: There's two people that I'd like to touch upon that have definitely left their mark on my career and my life I would say. Early in my career as I was starting out I was a medical technologist in a hospital lab in New York City and the head of the department there, an esteemed clinical microbiologist, one day sat me down in her office. She pointed her finger at me and she said, "I am going to mentor you." I didn't even know what that meant nor did I know the impact that that moment would have on my career moving. She I would say opened the door to potential which led to my master's degree and opportunities in my career and such a gift so early on in my career to have someone proactively grab me and mentor me and that's made me see both the value and the importance of mentorship.

Linda Tucci: Then later in my career as I become a director I had the good fortune of working with an executive coach that provides coaching, organizational design and development and for me that work was transformational. Really reached and deep and introspective and helping me see the... Or understand systems thinking and how the organization is interconnected and the value of constructive dialogue and conversation at work. Phyllis opened the door to help me see and believe in my potential while my work with Maria was more of polishing me off into the leader that I would become or hoped to be experienced as and I would say also for me made me want to mentor others and pass that on and I've tried to do that throughout my career. My experiences with them and with others really left an imprint that was really a gift in my life.

Sarah Nicastro: That's amazing and I love that she took that initiative with you. It wasn't something you asked for. Sonya can you share with us what do you do to take time for yourself? To balance, to reenergize so that you can give yourself to your team?

Sonya Lacore: So much of it really does come back to what Linda was talking about. I find great satisfaction in helping others realize the value of who they are and what they bring and I grew up with very low self esteem for a variety of reasons and it took me years to overcome that but one of the things that I have come to know is that I am worthy and if there's a message that I want others to hear is you are worthy and when you give yourself back to helping others whether it's mentoring or just helping people see the good in themselves when they can't even see it themselves then that will fill me up and re-center me and rebalance me and I just... That's how I re-center is giving back. You always feel better when you're not focusing on yourself, right? There's a message I want all the women to hear today. It is you are worthy to do whatever it is that you set out to do. Believe it and you do you.

Sarah Nicastro: I love it. I love that. All right ladies. I know we are already over on time so as much as I would like to keep talking with you all I don't want to go too crazy here but thank you so, so much to each of you for joining in today. I really really appreciate it.

Brad Soper and Dave Clement

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, companies across sectors were moving toward service-based strategies due to a number of challenges such as commoditization, price pressure, technological disruption, stagnant growth, and untapped market potential. Over recent months, and due in large part to the pandemic, priorities have continued to shift, making servitization more relevant than ever.

As a global consultancy focused on topline strategy, we at Simon-Kucher & Partners recently surveyed more than 200 commercial function leaders across multiple countries and B2B industries in June to understand the revenue impact, performance drivers, and key benefits of service-based strategies. Our global survey not only reveals the importance of services as a future source of sustainable growth, but also explores the success factors across the servitization journey, from one-off transactional services to full service solutions.

Impact of service revenues in the near future
A key aim of our survey was to explore the revenue impact when companies move away from the traditional product-centric model and switch some or all of their focus to services. We found that an impressive 95% of firms plan to more than double their service revenue over the next three years, with the greatest absolute potential seen by electronics and machinery companies —the two industries with the largest shares of service revenues today (12% and 19%, respectively).

The survey also revealed that revenue growth potential for companies depends on the type of service offered. Introducing one-off services for transactions such as delivery, customization, and spare parts can increase a company’s revenue by up to 130% (from 7.0% of revenues today to 16.1% three years from now). Contractual and recurrent lifecycle services, such as predictive maintenance, insurance, and repairs have the potential to increase revenues by up to 93% (from 12.9% of revenues today to 24.9% three years from now. Full service solutions, which drive the greatest share of service revenue today (16% of revenues), still have significant potential with an outlook of increasing revenue by up to 102%. Meanwhile, our study also showed that chemicals and building materials companies currently see the lowest shares of revenues coming from services (3% for each), but expect the fastest growth (181% and 211% respectively) in the years to come. So what can companies considering additional servitization learn from the top performers in our study?

Performance drivers and key benefits experienced by service “winners”
Top-performing companies confirm that the greatest benefits come from rolling out full service solutions as opposed to transactional services. These benefits include improved customer retention, financially more attractive offers, and better monetization of performance. However, key to their success is their close relationship with end-users. In particular, companies with the strongest aftersales report the highest service revenues, e.g. machinery (19%) and electronics (12%), providing a benchmark for industries that are looking to grow through servitization. Finding ways to get closer to end customers, e.g. through direct sales, end customer training, data delivery, etc. will be crucial.

Despite the aforementioned benefits, our survey also found that four in five companies struggle to charge for services in general, with the number one driver of ineffective monetization being the fact that companies often think service delivery is a cost of doing business despite its ability to be utilized as a differentiator. It cannot be emphasized enough that what is given away for free has no value. Improving monetization is crucial to unlocking value and achieving revenue growth.

For those attempting to monetize their service offering, customer openness was named as a significant implementation hurdle. As such, improving sales capabilities and defining the best revenue model is critical for adoption. We find that less successful companies underestimate the direct link of offer design and price metric (rather than price level) to drive penetration and user adoption. As customers find it difficult to estimate costs, removing this main purchasing barrier should be a top priority.

Servitization is a journey, but you can start tomorrow: Simon-Kucher’s five-step servitization framework
In response to COVID-19, it is likely your company’s priority is to keep cash on hand and mitigate risk as much as possible. However, growth is still important, and servitization is here to help. Even the smallest changes in basic services can mean quick-wins for cash generation and the beginning of your servitization journey, with the ultimate goal being full service solutions. Companies have switched from selling jet engines to selling flying hours, from selling cranes to selling moves, or from selling tires to kilometers traveled. Our five-step servitization framework is there to support you at every step:

Strategy and segmentation

Definition of customer needs and alignment of needs with market opportunity based on market trends and competitive analysis.

Design and offering

Creation of service portfolio and designing service packages to meet key needs of customer segments.

Monetization model

Aligning on price model, metric, and level based on service value and customer willingness-to-pay. How you charge is as or more important than how much.

Go-to-market and value selling

Defining roles and responsibilities across the organization and empowering sellers via value selling training.

Process and IT systems

Managing the subscription process via ERP/CRM/ CPQ integration.

The majority of surveyed companies agree: especially now, in times of no or slowing volume growth, servitization is key to providing a new, long-term source of profitability. Many sectors have already adopted service-based strategies and revenue models and are now exploring ways to optimize them. What about your company? Are you going to wait until next crisis for the servitization shift?

For more detailed insights from Simon-Kucher’s Servitization Study, reach out to Brad Soper and Dave Clement today.

By Tom Paquin

This is part of an ongoing series on the state and standards of service management software in 2020. Here are the previous articles in the series:

This week, we’re looking at how an organization would implement a new service management platform to replace (mostly) manual processes. While many larger organizations generally have a solution in place today, under many circumstances, even those solutions are more of a hodgepodge of utilities than a unified platform. Moreover, as businesses in traditionally product-oriented fields pursue and expand service functions, as has been an ongoing trend, more businesses will need to unwrap service management software for the very first time. And of course smaller businesses who have relied on pen and paper are understanding and embracing the importance of software for their own growth. Today’s Back to Basics are for those groups (we’ll cover transitional software next time).

There are no shortage of shapes and permutations that businesses can take on their road to success, so mileage will inevitably vary. But, as we always say around here, there are a few key components that will tie organizations together when they’re looking at a solution for the first time.

Map Every Millimeter of your Workflows
Last year, I reiterated an old Harvard Business Review case study that has been jangling around in my head since business school, but it’s so obvious a failure point for businesses implementing new tools that it’s easy to overlook. You need to understand every single element of what your service technicians, backoffice, and depot employees are doing before implementing a new tool. This ensure that the software that you’re employing actually solves the real problems that employees are having, doesn’t overextend into nonexistent issues, and is a tool that will actually be employed on a daily basis.

There are a few key ways that you can make this work. One obvious element is choosing a development framework that involves frontline workers from the get-go. This will ensure not only an understanding of their duties, but also help make them advocates for the new software. Furthermore, as noted in the article referenced above, rollout should be an event, with iteration and feedback loops an element of standard protocol. This makes sure the software if giving employees enough cover, and doing in in a way that organically works alongside their job requirements.

Make a Sunset Plan for Redundancies
So you’re implementing a full-featured service tool, which has all the backoffice capabilities that we discussed last time. However, you had previously been running a customer engagement tool designed for small businesses that indexed all your customers, saved their payment info, their work history, and so on. This is now a redundant tool alongside your broader software investment. What do you do? Do you cut and run, forcing customers to re-enter their data manually? Do you continue to use the old tool, running (and paying for) software that does not integrate? Do you port over the data and sunset the old tool? Do you find a way to integrate the old tool into the new one?

There are options, and I’m not here to recommend one in particular (though I definitely would not recommend cutting your customers off, or running redundant systems). The important thing is to have a plan. Must you manually transition system information into the new platform? That would be an awful nightmare, but there are tools to help support that, and with that information in mind, you can build a realistic sunset plan for your older software. Regardless, your goal, and we’ve discussed ad nauseam, is a completely connected system of tools. No redundancies, no crossed wires, no cut wires. Who can help with that? Well…

Consider Implementation Partnerships
While they’re somewhat invisible to the daily discourse on Future of Field Service, we do talk to partners on here from time to time, and write about them as well. Typically, your software provider is going to recommend an implementation partnership to eliminate some of the development burdens and ensure ease of transition into new software environments. Sometimes, your software vendor themselves will have a consulting wing for that express purpose. While this can help with much of the technical, and some of the organizational strain that goes along with service software development, it can’t erase the last mile, which will inevitably come down to your unique business, and how internal teams are advocating for and engaging with the software to ensure its effective use and position within your organization.

Look Ahead
So you’ve mapped the necessary processes, and implementation is done. That’s it, right? Of course not. Technology, like fashion, is never finished. Today, right now, new advancements in areas of business modeling, device connectivity, and emerging technologies are setting up opportunities for much greater efficiencies for service providers, and far more advanced solutions for customers of service. That’s what we’re here for, of course, at The Future of Field Service! Keeping you plugged in to the latest trends and changes in the service industry. More than anything, it’s important to not be afraid to take additional steps on your technology journey, especially after you’ve just implemented a powerful new system. Know that you’ve just scratched the surface of your ROI potential, and that a solid Service Management platform is the foundation onto which you can build a successful digital-first organization.

Katie Hunt, Service Operations Leader at APi Group, shares with Sarah insights gleaned and lessons learned during the company’s recent field service software upgrade.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we are going to be talking to you about seven keys to software upgrade success. If you have ever been in the midst of a software upgrade project, you know that it is no easy feat, and there are plenty of lessons to be learned along the way.

I'm excited to welcome today Katie Hunt, service operations leader at APi Group. Katie, welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast.

Katie Hunt: Thanks. It's great to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: So before we dig into these seven keys to success, which I'm excited to share, tell us a little bit about APi Group and your role. And I know that this is a topic that is very fresh for you because you had just come off of a major project. So fill us in.

Katie Hunt: Yes. So I'll start with APi Group. APi Group is a family of companies that provides business solutions for safety, specialty, and industrial services. We have over 15,000 employees and are in 200 locations in the US, Canada, the UK. And what's really unique is that our purpose is building great leaders, which for a construction company is sometimes looked on as unique. And so while we focus on that project delivery and great customer service, we also want to grow our individuals, grow our teams ,and make sure we can share knowledge, best practices, and just push each other to the next level.

Katie Hunt: So myself, I joined APi Group after going through the leader development program. I joined after I was in the military, and that was just a very unique opportunity to learn the industry and kind of develop some skills there. And I had the opportunity to join an operating company and then lead this project, which eventually led to leading the full-time service operations team at APi group.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. So you are fresh, very fresh off of a major upgrade of your Alliance service software platform. So, I've talked with you a few times along the way, and I think it's an excellent opportunity to share these seven keys or seven lessons today because it did just happen. So inevitably, you go through a big project like this, and you learn some lessons along the way, but time just kind of washes them away and kind of just makes them not so clear in your mind. So I'm excited to talk about seven aspects that you have uncovered that you feel are particularly critical to having a smooth upgrade and to having a successful project.

Sarah Nicastro: So the first key or the first tip is to be clear on your why. So explain what this means and why it is so important.

Katie Hunt: So ultimately, I would say that the why equates to the vision of a project. Identifying the why is so important because it not only lets stakeholders know why we're doing this project, but then it also serves as a benchmark for project efforts. So you can avoid that scope creep, and you can make sure you're staying on task. So once you create that vision, like we did, of standardizing processes, moving to a hosted environment for those benefits, or just setting the groundwork so that you can truly scale your business, you can then communicate effectively throughout the organization and really just maintain that focus and discipline and ultimately compare all of those decisions back to that strategic vision and keep the project on track.

Katie Hunt: I also wanted to call out, it's so important to know that the whys might be different for different cohort groups. We have a very large organization, and when I'm communicating, and my teams communicating to executives, it's a different message sometimes than the end user or the branch level professionals, which is fine. But ultimately, they all need to tie back to that strategic vision, so that they're all in alignment.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. That makes sense. So, tell us a bit about APi Group's whys with the recent upgrade. So what were the major strategic drivers that kind of led you through this project?

Katie Hunt: Sure. So APi Group was recently acquired and by J2, and we've now become a public company, in that one of the main driving factors for that purchase, and it's been mentioned by their leadership, is just our ability to perform a service and inspection operations because it's that reoccurring revenue, as we all know through hard times lately. And it's just very important. And so they are really pushing us to grow and scale that side of our business. And as such, we have over 20 companies that conduct service work, along with all the subsidiary companies. And a key factor of that is standardizing processes. So getting everyone on the same system, that was one of our key factors.

Katie Hunt: And another one was simply starting this movement to a hosted environment, to have that higher-level support, greater performance and stability, and really just setting the stage to grow the business and move to that next level.

Sarah Nicastro: Perfect. Okay. So you have these pillars that are leading you through the project, and you need to, as you said, have these in place, so that as things ramp up, as things get stressful, as things get hectic, as opportunities arise to kind of go off path, you can stay focused on what it is that you have set out to achieve. So that's the first key.

Sarah Nicastro: The second is defining the team that will be responsible for leading the project. So tell us what you learned here, in terms of this point.

Katie Hunt: Right. So this project was unique, in that we really relied on the operating companies to provide insight and guidance and decision making across the board. We had the core team, which was very lean, including myself and about four other key team members, but we did learn that we could have used a couple more people, not only a dedicated project manager to delineate the project management from business decisions, but also just having an extra set of eyes for different perspective. So that was a lesson learned.

Katie Hunt: But one thing I think we did extremely well was rely on the operating companies to provide feedback. We had a unique structure with a service steering committee, where we had one representative from each company. They came together, and they really made the agreement upfront that this would be the decision making body. Even if everybody didn't agree, we would move forward with the decision of that committee, so that we could standardize processes. And so although we had great discussions and sometimes people didn't agree, we were able to make those decisions, move forward. And it really took the ownership off of APi Group to push this initiative, and it put that on the companies to drive this change forward, which was phenomenal for our team and just a big success overall. So we definitely recommended that for future projects.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think that's a really good point because if you're going to have issues up for discussion or perhaps discrepancies in opinion, all of those things, if you're doing it by committee, it gives the sense of being far more fair. So if you handle those things on a case by case basis, it's easier to have someone be upset about decision that was made. Whereas if it's just an understanding of we're going to discuss, we're going to vote by committee, and whatever the outcome is, the outcome is, that would alleviate a lot of frustration, I would imagine.

Katie Hunt: Right. And I think it gets buy-in, too, from the committee.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, absolutely. All right. So number three, key number three is to develop guiding principles, so that as the inevitable ebbs and flows of the project occur, you know exactly what to stay focused on. So, tell us about what APi's guiding principles were, and if you have any examples of kind of how and when they came into play.

Katie Hunt: Sure. We had four that we outlined. We actually did a full vision with guiding principles, some goals, and that kind of thing, just so everyone was aligned. And the first one that we focused on was maintaining focus on end user needs. We didn't want to have a holistic technology solution that didn't meet what the end user needs from the field professionals to those office leaders that are really the ones executing the work.

Katie Hunt: Our second one was being open to changing processes. Change is hard, but we know that we all agreed, hey, we might have to change our processes. We're doing this for the betterment of the group. And that was just an agreement up front.

Katie Hunt: The third one was leveraging the ideas and suggestions of the service steering committee, which we've already discussed, which worked very well.

Katie Hunt: And then the last one was valuing time over process changes. And this one was a little bit unique that I'll expand on because we really, when we were conducting the project, had a couple constraints, including time, the scope of work, and the budget. And what we were saying with this is, our go live date needs to be met, despite all the process changes being fully complete.

Katie Hunt: And so an example of that was where, as we grew closer to go live, we had a list of items that had not yet been implemented. And we prioritized, made sure we hit those really key items, brought them forward before go live. And we're still working in sprints after go live, to continue to refine the system. So we wanted to view go live not as a stopping point, but really as something we could continue and use as a springboard to keep developing our processes, systems, et cetera.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So these four guiding principles are what really kept you focused on those four aspects that you felt were most important for the success of the project. Do you have any other examples of... Within the project, where one of these came into play and kind of steered you back on track, if you will?

Katie Hunt: Yes. So one good example, I would say, is the focus on the end user need. It's very easy when you see the bright, shiny object, and you want to go make this cool change, but then during the actual testing and training, the end user gives us feedback that, hey, this is really not what we want. And so what we really tried to do is, during our testing and training, we utilized a Microsoft team session and page, and it was open forum session. Anyone can provide feedback. We documented everything, to make sure that they had feedback. They were heard. I think at one point we had 480 responses or something.

Katie Hunt: But you're just going through these and really trying to make sure that the end user knows that, one, they could speak up. There was no ramifications. They were being listened to. And then we understood that their needs were very high priority. So we had to take a step back a couple of times on some enhancements we thought would be beneficial and really look at it from their perspective. And so we did that as much as possible.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. And I think what you said is a really good point of not only for the project team, but for everyone involved, to make sure it's communicated to look at the go live as just the starting point. So that people understand if there's feedback they've given that can't make it for that go live cutoff, it doesn't mean you're not listening, and it doesn't mean that it's not going to get incorporated. That there's going to be opportunities to continue to evolve what you're doing, but being able to use those principles to keep you on track with not just continuing to brainstorm and never actually getting the result out. That makes sense.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So key number four is the importance of testing. So talk to us about all things testing.

Katie Hunt: Oh, goodness. Okay. So testing, we love it and we hate it because there's never enough time for testing, but there's so many different methods of testing. And it's just so crucial. I would say one thing I learned that I did not know going into this project, was how many different methods and different types of testing you could do, from the load testing to the off-road testing, to the scripted testing, to automated, there's just a whole gamut of how you can test the system.

Katie Hunt: And I think going into it, one, just having a really, really solid plan. Before I came on board, the team already had an excellent script of testing items and what we needed to do. So we had a really good baseline that we could springboard off of and really develop and test. And then we just wanted to make sure that we put the system through the paces and tested as if we were conducting real-world operations.

Katie Hunt: And that was the key thing, was rehearse like you want to actually execute. And it's like a military thing, I've learned, you want to rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. So I would say that's one thing that we did well, especially with rehearsing the actual cut-over, but also with testing.

Katie Hunt: One thing that I would suggest that had been used at APi Group before I was on board was the testing matrix and really just holding the companies accountable and checking in and asking the question of not only who has tested, but when and what. Because if you have a whole group that focuses just on one end of the testing and you miss the portion where you need to invoice the work order, rather than just create it, you have a gap in the testing. So by spreading it out and having the end users do the testing and staggering it correctly, I think it's very, very beneficial. And that's one of the most crucial phases that we possibly could have gone through.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So you said at the beginning of this question, there's never enough time for testing. Okay. So that makes me wonder, how do you strike the right balance of testing enough without, again, holding yourself back from ever crossing the finish line?

Katie Hunt: So this goes back to our initial constraint of time, that being just a key factor. We almost had a point where we were testing and continuing some configuration and development at the same time. So this is a lesson learned for us, is making sure that you have the schedule outlined, where you have the users in the system soon enough to catch any bugs or issues or concerns, but having them in late enough so the development is done, so they can have a good testing experience.

Katie Hunt: So really, I think we did a really good job of having a test phase and then almost a recovery phase to address those issues, and then have a second testing cycle. But one thing I would say that we could have probably done a little bit better job on is clearly annotating, during those testing cycles, specific items to test as well as specific items not to test that were still in development. And that way, it's just very clear. But at some point you have to go live, and I think it's one of those things, it's a judgment call of what are priority one items, what are priority two, and what can we live without until after go live. And that depends on the company and system.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. That makes sense. Okay, good. All right. So key number five is providing ample and effective training. So tell us how you tackled training and any advice you have for folks here.

Katie Hunt: Okay. So I will say training is one item, I am extremely proud of our team on this. We receive some very positive feedback, and we're continuing to use some of these items as we move forward. We really tackled it by... We created videos within our LMS system with APi Group. And we kept them short, no more than five minutes, because attention span of most people is not more than that when watching the training videos. And then we also made cheat sheets. We made quick reference guides that folks can print off on a one pager for key topics, put it in a little folder, or guys can throw it in their trucks, as they're out on site, and just references as needed. And then lastly, we did make those user manuals that are very in depth. They have screenshots, they answer those tough questions, deep dive, and really, people can search them and use the PDF and that kind of thing if needed.

Katie Hunt: The other item we did is we had weekly live trainings. This was a suggestion by one of our steering committee members, and we essentially dedicated a topic each week, and we opened it up on teams where people could just ask questions. They chatted questions. We had the live stream. And basically, we had really good participation. I think week after week, about 150 people would log in, ask questions, and share ideas. And I think having that service community through our team's page has just been a really good benefit, but we are going to continue to take those trainings and use them for onboarding new users and then refine them, probably quarterly as we move forward, just as a continued resource. Okay.

Sarah Nicastro: So when you're doing these trainings through the teams page, and you're having these interactions, are you able to capture... Obviously, you had your testing phase, and you captured feedback, and then you incorporated it into the system. As you're training, so obviously this wouldn't be feedback that isn't necessary for go live by any means, but as you are training folks, and there's something that they think of that's just a good idea, so it's something that maybe you didn't think of during the critical phase of the project, but now that it's out, it makes sense to incorporate, are you capturing those insights and able to have access to that information and decide how and what to work on?

Katie Hunt: Yes. So we did push the training ownership on the companies. That's one thing I failed to mention is that, although we're developing all these resources and the weekly trainings, we are asking the companies to do that as well. But in that, if they were to find something that they wanted to add, let's say a change request or something that's a configuration change, we are essentially conducting two weeks sprints, and we're still ongoing in that phase right now, where they can submit that request through our ticketing system or on teams and let us know that they think they want this idea, provide the justification. And then what our team can do is test it out, research it, run it by the steering committee still. And if we think it's something we want to implement, then we will bundle that together in our bulk migration of code every two weeks or three weeks, as those changes become ready.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. That makes sense. Okay. So key number six, one of my favorites, is prioritizing the need to manage change. So I think when you and I initially talked about doing this podcast, I maybe suggested putting training and change management together, and you very rightly said, "No, no, no, those are two totally different things." And you're right. You're right. That's actually a representation of, I think, some of the mistakes that often gets made in the industry, is this tendency to kind of de-prioritize or under focus on the criticality of change management.

Sarah Nicastro: So tell us, from your perspective, why it is so important and what your experience was, what you think you did well, what you would maybe do differently, how you tackled this.

Katie Hunt: Sure. So, the first thing is, change is never easy. And I really think, even though this is a very intangible part of the project, it's one of the most important, just because it often gets pushed to the side when the budget gets tight, or you're short on time, and you don't have time to effectively communicate. So I would just encourage, this is definitely something we did not want to lose focus on. And we did have times where we slipped. Everyone does. But at the same time, I think we did a pretty good job of circling back and making sure that we communicated this effectively.

Katie Hunt: Our strategy overall was not to push this on the companies, but to really have the companies take ownership. We are 100% there to support, assist developing these training tools, develop the testing, outline the plan. But for a three person, four person team, it's not feasible to train and really manage that change for 20 companies, 3000 users. It's just not feasible. I don't have enough hours in the day for that.

Katie Hunt: But so really, we pushed the ownership on the companies, but we did everything in our power to explain the why behind these changes. And if they had pushback, if they had feedback, we would listen. And there were times where we didn't make a change, or we've switched the processes, but we did that in a standardized manner to make sure that everyone was in alignment. And so really, I think we just constantly tried to solicit feedback, really tried to over-communicate whenever possible, and focus on what I think is the most important resource of the project, is the people. No matter the technology, no matter the system, if the people don't support it, and the people don't understand why, and they aren't getting what they need to conduct their work and be successful, the project's ultimately going to fail. So we didn't want to lose focus on the people. We wanted to maintain communication and really just make sure that people understood the why of the changes and how it helped them personally, not just the company overall.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. That makes sense. I'm curious, you said there was a couple of times you slipped, and everyone does. I don't know if it's too much to ask. Is there an example you can share? I just think it would be helpful for someone to hear, in reality, what that looks like and how you circled back to kind of work on something that is an inevitable. No one's perfect. So you're not always going... No matter how critical you know it is, you're not always going to do things perfectly.

Katie Hunt: Sure. I think one of the best examples, especially during testing, when it's very high paced, and especially how we manage the reporting of different questions, issues, process changes, et cetera, it was fast and furious on teams with people reporting, emailing, calling, having so much feedback. And we were trying so hard to document everything and capture it and respond and execute. And I think sometimes, I know me personally, I would get caught up responding to tickets and responding and solutioning the symptoms and making sure we got these tickets closed, rather than looking at the root cause of why someone is asking this question. Is it a lack of understanding of training, or is it maybe the process isn't correct, or the system does have a bug. And so really just taking a step back, kind of soliciting some advice from our core team and then the steering committee and say, "Hey, can you guys test this out? Am I off base here?"

Katie Hunt: And really, it takes time, and it's harder than just responding to tickets or responding to people with the first answer you can come up with. But I think in the long run, knowing that we're taking the time to really deep dive into these issues and find a good solution and good process change helps in the long run, rather than just that quick, "Oh, we got your ticket closed. You're good to go." So, it is hard and it does take time, but I think as long as we circled back to maintaining the focus on the why and the people, it worked out.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, that is a really good example because you're going fast, you're in problem solving mode.

Katie Hunt: Exactly.

Sarah Nicastro: So you get this issue, and it's like, great. I can fix this. Boom. Without thinking, I wonder why they're asking this question. Maybe they don't totally get this part of the objective or what have you. I think that's a really good point.

Sarah Nicastro: And it sounds like... I tend to think one of the most important aspects of change management is making sure people feel heard. And there's a difference between people feeling heard, and you always agreeing or acting on feedback. So they're not the same thing. You can let people know that they're heard and that you value their input, even if you're not using it.

Sarah Nicastro: And so I think that it's important to understand that because I remember one of the companies, I'm not going to remember which company it was, but a number of years ago, we were talking about change management, and they said every single piece of feedback, they made sure it got followed up on. If they had a meeting, they would write it all down. And even if that was saying, thanks for your idea, but we didn't use it. But they still wanted people to know that they were listening, so that they would continue giving that feedback and stay engaged and feel a part of the process. So good stuff.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So our final key, number seven, is to set KPIs from which to measure progress and determine the project success. So talk with us about KPIs.

Katie Hunt: So I would say this is one thing we definitely could have done better. And I think it circles back to our team structure. And that was just an aspect of, we had individuals filling multiple roles. We had one individual that was the project manager, as well as the business process lead. So they're not only managing logistics, resourcing, budget, but they're also doing the process analysis, business decisions, and architecture. And having that, something's going to slip through the cracks. So I think that was a lack that we've identified for future projects.

Katie Hunt: And what the downstream effect of that was, is we did not really have project KPIs. Our BI and metrics team has done a phenomenal job of creating operational performance metrics. But in terms of the actual project itself and key milestones, making sure vendors are on track, making sure our other work streams are on track, that the operating companies... I think we could have done a better job measuring those milestones and KPIs and actually having other KPIs rather than just on time and on budget, which is what most people focus on. We could have been more granular and had more holistic KPIs.

Katie Hunt: But I think it's very important because it really keeps that project on track, in scope, on budget, and on time. And so I don't have much on this topic because it is an area we can improve, but I would say it's important just to make sure that you have somebody dedicated to that aspect of the project.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, Katie, I have two bonus questions for you.

Katie Hunt: Oh, gosh.

Sarah Nicastro: So the first is I know you come from a military background, and I'm curious what military learning you found to be most helpful for you within this process. So what's something from that part of your history that proved to be very useful in this project?

Katie Hunt: So I would say that one of the biggest one is rehearsals. Before any mission, any military exercise, anything, you always rehearse. You run through the motions until you can't forget them. And specifically with this project, the cut-over and that cut-over weekend, we rehearsed, I think it ended up being four times, and the original scope had only one rehearsal. And so we added those on, simply because it wasn't right when we did it the first time, and we kept doing until we got as close to go live as possible.

Katie Hunt: I think also just testing the capabilities and making sure you put both the people and the systems through their paces. Similar to rehearsals, you want to push those things to the limit when you're practicing, so that when you're actually executing and lives are on the line, you can execute how you need to. So I would say those are the big ones. That's a tough question. There's so many things I learned in the military. It's hard to kind of go through them all.

Sarah Nicastro: I bet. Okay. Last question is... I know this was a different experience for you. It was a new challenge for you in your career. What do you feel you, as an individual, what was the biggest lesson you as a person learned throughout this project?

Katie Hunt: I've actually had this conversation with my team a little bit, and really, it goes back to your point of listening to everyone's feedback. But ultimately, it's okay to say no, and it's okay to push back a little bit and make sure that you look at all the perspectives, you hear everyone's input, but ultimately, you can say no, and you can push back a little bit, in terms of what your final decision is. And you're never going to make everyone happy. I think with a project this large, that was a tough lesson because I love for everyone to get along and work well together and collaborate. And there were people upset at different points in the project. And it's not personal. It's really just what's best for the business and what's best for the organization overall. But yeah, just it's been a challenging experience, but at the same time it's been pretty rewarding. And I would just say the people I've gotten to work with and the team has been phenomenal. So I'm just grateful for all their work that they've put in.

Sarah Nicastro: That's really cool. I think it's awesome. I'm sure it's been challenging, but it is always rewarding to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and to really do different things and learn different things. So I'm really excited for you. I really appreciate you joining us today and sharing these seven keys to success, and I look forward to connecting again soon.

Katie Hunt: Well, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate you having me on.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks, Katie. You can check out more of our content by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter at the Future of FS. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS Service Management by visiting www.ifs.com. As always, thanks for listening.

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