Tag: blog

From Combat Pilot to the Corporate World: How the Military Shaped My Leadership (& Considerations for Recruiting Military Talent)

Mental Health Matters: Resources to Support Wellbeing at Work

Lead Yourself First: Exploring the Link Between Self-Care and Service Excellence

June 14, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Cashing in on The Opportunity of Outcomes

June 14, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Cashing in on The Opportunity of Outcomes

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Sometimes it feels like the majority of content I’m creating is around the move to delivering outcomes. But, guess what? That’s because it is THE single biggest trend – in the form of a truly monumental opportunity – that our audience needs to better grasp, understand, and navigate. In a recent report published by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the firm summarizes the importance of this topic quite nicely by saying, “As the focus of creating and capturing value shifts from one-time sales to long-term partnerships, it is driving higher customer retention as well as rapid account expansion. No wonder many CEOs are convinced that deploying outcome-based business models (OBMs, for short) is the best way to win the future.”

As business leaders take note of outcomes as the way to win the future, there’s a deeper recognition than ever before around the criticality of service – as well as the need for digitalization. In fact, BCG states that “Companies deliver outcomes mainly by combining servitization with digitalization.” I’ve never heard it put this simply, but I love this statement and it illustrates why both of these themes are so inextricably linked. While the statement of outcomes = servitization + digitalization makes it look so darn simple, the reality is that the journey to outcomes proves quite complex for those that seek to cash in on its opportunity.

What It Takes

BCG discusses the evidence of how pervasive the move to delivering outcomes is becoming. The firm also examines the three common characteristics they’ve recognized among adopters of an outcomes-based model. It’s well worth your time to read the report in full, but let me summarize here briefly in my own words:

Customer focused. The first characteristic is that these organizations are customer-driven, which is absolutely necessary to have success in this endeavor. If your focus of delivering outcomes is solely the impact it can have on the business in terms of revenue, without the focus on how you can actually help fulfill a customer need, you will fail. The report quotes a Harvard Business School Professor, Theodore Levitt, as writing: “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” You absolutely have to master the understanding of what it is your customers want and need.
Measurable results. The second characteristic the report discusses is the need to provide measurable, quantifiable results. If you think about the nature of outcomes, this makes sense. Customers will want evidence and tracking of the value they’ve been delivered, so as an organization, you have to think through how you will provide that level of insight.
Enabled by digital. The journey to outcomes isn’t possible without digitalization, and BCG discusses the fact that many recent digital transformation efforts have been put in place specifically to enable this move to outcomes. The availability of asset performance information, the real-time exchange of insights, and the ability to leverage data are all foundational elements of delivering on an outcomes-based model.

What Stands in the Way?

When you begin to really ponder the layers of an evolution from transaction-based business to an outcomes-based model, it becomes easy to uncover where the complexity comes in. While the bumps on this journey vary from industry to industry and company to company, there are a few common challenges we’ve uncovered in our Future of Field Service interviews:

Lack of alignment. For an outcomes-based model to be fully embraced and adopted, there must be agreement on the value of moving to outcomes and this agreement has to be shared by the top leadership of the company. Often, we speak with service leaders who are bullish about the opportunity outcomes presents their company but are working with top leadership who is very traditional and doesn’t share that perspective. Because the delivery of outcomes relies on an elimination of siloes and a cohesive, collaborative approach, alignment among leadership is imperative.
Layered legacy and change management. For most organizations, the move to outcomes represents a massive change and legacy mindset, culture, and practices often get in the way. From sales and marketing to operations and service, from R&D and production to IT and financials, everyone has to be on board with this change for it be successful and there are a lot of historical beliefs and processes that have to evolve. Overcoming resistance to change and creating buy-in on the value of migrating away from the company’s legacy is often the hardest challenge companies face on this journey.
Digital lag. As we discussed earlier, digitalization is essential in delivering outcomes. Companies that are laggards in their digital transformation efforts must first contend with modernizing their systems and creating foundational functionality before they can really dig into the introduction of an outcomes-based model. Whether the challenge is outdated, legacy technology, disparate and disjointed systems, or functionality gaps, a certain degree of digital competency must be achieved to fulfill the outcomes-based value proposition.

Will It be Worth It?

Absolutely, undoubtedly, 100-percent yes. The reality is, in fact, there’s no choice. Outcomes is the future, for service and for business overall. I couldn’t say it better than BCG does in the summary of their report: “A word of caution. As more customers start demanding outcomes, challenging suppliers and software vendors to deploy outcomes-based models, it may be dangerous to ignore them. Companies that can’t deliver outcomes and don’t have a role to play in their customers’ ecosystems may find they are expendable. They will give up market share, miss growth opportunities, and lose long-term buyers.”

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June 11, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

What Will Become of the Pure Service Provider?

June 11, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

What Will Become of the Pure Service Provider?

By Tom Paquin

We spend a lot of our time here discussing servitizaiton: The act of repositioning traditionally product-oriented businesses with a more service-oriented mindset. It’s obvious why we do this: Servitization is a compelling trends, especially in manufacturing, but also in the ways in which industries like utilities, telecommunications, and others are embracing service.

We’ve centralized this conversation so much on the move towards product diversification that it’s easy to overlook the companies that have been there all along. Is there and equal, but opposite move in those organizations to “de-servitize”, thus creating internal product categories with which to service? From my experience, the answer is generally no—there’s a lot more of an incentive to become a service than to become a product provider.

But the move towards servitization does have an impact on pure service providers, of course. Suddenly, relationships with product categories, vendors, are fraught, as once allies in the battle for business could potentially become competitors.

These changes mean that pure service businesses need to make sure that their core offering—service—is of the highest possible quality. So from order scheduling, to routing, to parts, to follow-up, to customer retention, and everything in between, service companies need to go beyond optimization to make exceptional service a true value-add for their customers.

We’ve certainly been able to feature a lot of stories for how companies have done this well, but there are a few constants. Chief among them is making sure that their technical infrastructure is catered to the contours of their business specifically. This means choosing software that’s built with a service-first mindset, understands, broadly, your industry, and has tools that don’t just work for you in the abstract.

Below are links to some of my favorite pure service stories. While these three all service products in specific industries they each provide exceptional templates for making sure that the core of a service business is offered at a world-class level.

Smart Care

“We needed technology that would help us build a better customer experience. From an end user perspective, I call it the Amazon mentality or consumerization that’s happened so this whole expectation of service delivery and timing a service delivery and great communication and constant communication flow, but also things like information on the equipment you’re working on and work order management systems. Impacting the customer experience was first and foremost for us.”

Spencer Technologies

“In today’s always-on world, customers demand insight. We realized about 18 months ago that we weren’t giving them enough information – they wanted more from us, and we needed to better use our technology to deliver. Customers want to know, at a glance, how we’re performing against our SLA, how long the technicians have been on-site, the reason for any delays or re-visits. They want to check in continuously to get that status update and know everything is happening as planned.”

Park Place Technologies

“In light of this pandemic, digital capability is more important now than ever. It’s been instrumental in our ability to make sure that our customers can safely work remotely, but at the same time know that their data centers, for example, are running healthy and they can support their end users, and their customers, and their essential services.”

Brady Services

“Sometimes when you’ve been successful in doing things a certain way for a long time, it’s hard to understand why you’d need to do something a different way. We’ve really focused in the last several years on our culture and have been very intentional about how we wanted to preserve the good and evolve as we’ve needed to. It’s really come down to getting good leaders in place and having a culture that is very performance-based, very data-driven and very process-focused, and helping everybody understand that that’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing and it’s going to help us continue to grow and continue to distinguish ourselves from our competitors in the marketplace. Sounds easy, but it’s a lot of work to take an organization in that direction.”

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June 7, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

The Value of Fresh Perspective in Field Service: 4 Real-World Examples of Impact

June 7, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

The Value of Fresh Perspective in Field Service: 4 Real-World Examples of Impact

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

True innovation rarely happens in a bubble. The best ideas are born of creative freedom, collaboration, a fail-forward environment, and by seeking the perspective of others to fuel your inspiration, ideas, and plans. This resource, Future of Field Service, and the community group I run exist largely to serve the purpose of having a place to find peer insights and to glean lightbulb moments from tales of success, failure, and lessons learned.

But perhaps your company’s struggles to transform and innovate service demand more than what you can gain from listening to a podcast or even having a one-on-one chat with a peer. If this is the case, you might want to consider the value of bringing in some fresh perspective. I’ve noticed over the last couple of months more and more examples of how companies looking to advance service offerings are recognizing the need to embrace and leverage outside expertise.

This fresh perspective can take many different forms. In fact, we’ve seen several examples within some of our recent content – partnership with very hands-on consultants, bringing expertise in from another industry, and hiring proven transformative leadership to replicate past successes. Culturally, of course, there can be a tendency to want to own the path or claim the success of transformation. However, the amount of change happening in field service today is immense and letting go of ego to recognize the significant impact some outside expertise or fresh eyes could bring may be the key to your success.

Let’s examine what this can look like in practice based on some examples I’ve taken from recent Future of Field Service interviews:

Value Proposition & Selling. Last week we published the first half of a two-part podcast with Howard Bowland, VP Field Services Australia at Schneider Electric and Scott Weller, Partner at Mossrake. The two previously worked together at Hewlett-Packard and have teamed up to introduce the as-a-Service model into Schneider Electric. Howard is leading this initiative inside the company, and Mossrake is assisting as a consultant partner. In the podcast, Howard speaks at length about not only seeing the potential for as-a-Service within Schneider and advocating to bring that potential to life, but in the benefit of working alongside a partner who has real-world success in such a transformation. This benefit has been particularly true in the value Mossrake has added in helping to develop the go-to-market with Schneider Electric as well as taking a SWAT-team approach to introducing the value proposition to customers and helping to upskill and train the Schneider sales talent who is accustomed to selling in a completely different manner to often a totally different audience. When you think about how big of a shift advanced and outcomes-based service offerings are when it comes to creating, articulating, and influencing on the value proposition, you can see how leveraging new talent and/or an experienced partner to bring the value proposition to life and bring the teams up to speed could be immensely beneficial.
So, selling the new value proposition is one thing, but how do you grow awareness of the modern incarnation of your company and feed your funnel? Marketing. We recently had on the podcast Jennifer Deutsch, CMO of Park Place Technologies, who joined the company four years ago from outside the industry. Jennifer has 38 years of marketing experience and has worked for brands such as Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, and Nestle. The fresh perspective she’s brought into PPT has added a layer of punchiness, simplicity, and draw to the company’s marketing that, in my opinion, is very impactful. For example, the company’s tagline “Uptime All the Time” speaks to what matters most to customers in an attention-grabbing way. As the value of service evolves and expands, marketing is another area that perhaps could benefit from the innovative look of someone with experience outside the organization or even industry.
Operational Transformation. A little over a year ago, Karl Lowe joined Panasonic Heating and Cooling Solutions Europe as the Head of Panasonic European Service. On the podcast, Karl speaks of his experience over the last 10 years developing service organizations for OEMs. At Panasonic, he’s been tasked with determining how best the company can leverage service as a strategic differentiator. As a historically very product-centric business, the idea of brining in talent that has experience leading service in more service-centric organizations, or better yet, has a track record of helping organizations grow into more service centric businesses, can be a very smart move. The operational change needed in order to transform to advanced or outcomes-based service is no small feat, and someone who has learned some of the hard lessons of the journey firsthand can help navigate the choppy waters in a smoother way. Karl came into Panasonic with a clear mind and quickly got to work on assessing the current state of the operations, defining desired outcomes, and determining the path to success. This sort of objectivity can be hard to attain from those closest to present-day operations, so augmenting your current leadership who are masters of where you’ve been with someone who has experience from where you’d like to be is a good way to strike balance.
Modernization of IT. Pekka Nurmi, Director of Corporate IT at Cimcorp, was a management consultant before joining Cimcorp around five years ago. Now, he is taking a fresh approach to the company’s IT strategy that focuses more on leading and less on doing. In his podcast interview, Pekka discusses how he feels his consulting background gives him a good appreciation for the business side of things which helps him be a stronger IT leader. He is making some major changes at Cimcorp, focusing on how technology has and continues to rapidly evolve, to help the company keep pace with change and stay ahead of demand. I was struck by Pekka’s fresh take, objective observances, and clear goals and I think IT is another area of immense opportunity for brining in a new perspective.

These are just a couple of recent examples – when you think about how the necessary skillsets are expanding and evolving with the introduction of more advanced services, you can think of many other areas where outside viewpoints, skills, and help could be beneficial. For example, data is another major area of growth and opportunity. Another approach we’ve seen is the introduction of a centralized, functional role to drive the fresh perspective and innovation so that the leadership in place can continue to focus on current business and operations while the functional team works to leverage those leaders as subject matter experts to chart the path and drive the success for the future of the business.

However you look at it, or however you incorporate it, there’s always value in a more diverse set of opinions, in better vetting new ideas, and in incorporating various sets of expertise.

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June 4, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

Cybersecurity can’t be an Afterthought in Service

June 4, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

Cybersecurity can’t be an Afterthought in Service

By Tom Paquin

Why is it that people never want to take preventative measures? I’m reminded of Y2K, when we were told that a catastrophic glitch in computer systems would lead to widespread outages, unexpected nuclear missile launches, and all other manner of nightmare. This prompted years of thoughtful preventative action from programmers, who meticulously re-coded systems and prepared our digital infrastructure. On January 1, 2000, when we woke up to an undisturbed world, the simple minded people of the world wondered why we took it all so seriously. “Nothing even happened,” they would say. Perhaps nothing happened because responsible people acknowledged and addressed the issue before it became a catastrophe.

This simpleminded philosophy of only having the mental capacity to address things as they’re happening is why people put off physician visits, why people don’t invest in health insurance, and why cybersecurity and continuity planning are so often shuffled to the side of the public discourse.

A recent series of high-profile cybersecurity incidents have, it would seem, opened the eyes of some of those simple-minded people, causing them to conclude that yes, this could even happen to them. Our lives are a lot more than simply enhanced by technology in 2021—for many of us, our ability to function is contingent upon technology.

In service, this is overwhelmingly the case. Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and lost access to schedules, customer lists, payroll, scheduling tools, your bank, or your vehicle.

Catastrophic, right? And the reality is that these threats come from different sources. Hopefully none of this is news to you, but let’s talk about some of these sources in plain terms.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

For quite a while when a business was “hacked”, they were often actually the victim of a DDoS attack. These things still happen all the time. A distributed denial of service attack essentially weaponizes web traffic in order to cripple a site. A website is like a road, and the more cars you put on the road, the slower it’s going to go. If enough cars all converge on a single road, from different directions, then nobody can go anywhere. And this is what a DDoS attack does—sending web queries from thousands of IP addresses simultaneously until a service crashes, this “denying service”.

Imagine that your service firm has online scheduling, and that you’re the target of a DDoS attack. Hackers will initiate thousands of scheduling requests, thus crippling the queue and crashing the site. How are you prepared for this? Are you able to pull requests from the queue? Do you have a CAPTCHA set up to ensure that traffic is actually human? What is your continuity plan for when a webpage goes down? Each businesses understands implicitly its own service needs and urgency, here, and each will establish its own criteria, but this is yet another reminder of the importance of planning ahead.

Phishing

Phishing would be the other end of the “I was hacked” coin alongside DDoS, and I’m extremely hopeful that I’m not breaking new ground for anyone that’s reading this. We should all know what phishing is, and we should all be cognizant and suspicious of it in our day to day lives.

Phishing is when hackers attempt to capture credentialed information by sending out official-seeming emails and creating webpages that look like legitimate email or bank websites, in the hopes that you’ll put in your email address and password before you realize that you’ve made a mistake.

So yes, we should all be on the lookout for phishing in our day-to-day lives, but phishing is also the means by which many businesses install tracking software on computers. More maliciously, if a high-level service professional is the victim of phishing, then suddenly external forces may have access to sensitive information like location, total number of assets, asset performance, or even more maliciously, the ability to remotely interact with assets. We don’t want disconnected HVAC systems or unrestrained capital equipment.

Preventing phishing tends to be, primarily, an awareness campaign for businesses, and while it’s useful to have a training when an employee joins the organization, it’s arguably more important to create mandatory re-training benchmarks for employees. Look—we all have been guilty of skimming an official looking email and clicking on a link when we’re in the middle of three different things. We just need to be mindful of what we’re doing, and that is where smart training is key.

Ransomware

Ransomware, like the others, is nothing new. Often, it’s initiated by a phishing attempt, or alternatively by remotely accessing someone’s computer (often through a bogus tech support phone call), visiting a malicious website that downloads the software in the background, or via physical media like a USB stick.

What ransomware does is it encrypts everything on a user’s computer (or ideally their network), and holds your machine for ransom. Typically, the only message on the screen will be directions, or a bitcoin account, and a threat to release public information, or to continue to restrict access to computers. Obviously, even minutes without access to integral systems could spell doom for a digital organization. For that reason, the ransoms are often paid, and the perpetrators, perhaps surprisingly true to their word, typically restore access to the website.

Because it can originate from many places, ransomware is hard to prevent, but in service, it’s doubly important to protect field equipment from meddling. Technicians should have equipment best practices with respect to mobile and rugged devices, ensuring that they’re in their possession at all times, or locked in a vehicle.

Unfortunately, like anything, there’s no 100% safe way to tackle all of this, and one could look at this article and question our digital transformation strategy as moving too fast, or relying too much on automation, but the fact of the matter is that the digital good outweighs the digital bad. Companies looking to succeed in business, therefore, owe it to themselves to have a solid contingency plan in place for cybersecurity. Planning ahead now will position you to avoid catastrophe down the road.

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What You Can Learn from Schneider Electric’s Unique Approach to Delivering Outcomes-Based Service

May 31, 2021 | 9 Mins Read

What You Can Learn from Schneider Electric’s Unique Approach to Delivering Outcomes-Based Service

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I absolutely love sitting down to talk with different service leaders about how they are spearheading innovation and transformation within their companies. Across industries and regions, the evolution from break-fix service to delivering experiences and outcomes holds so much potential and excitement. There’s so much to learn from listening to how various organizations are tackling the complexity that comes with this migration.

I recently had the chance to sit down with Howard Bowland, VP Field Services Australia at Schneider Electric to talk about how he’s led the region on a journey to delivering power-as-a-service. He’s enlisted the help of former Hewlett-Packard Enterprise colleague Scott Weller, who is a partner at Mossrake, to use his region of Schneider Electric as a blueprint for success for the global organization.

Both Howard and Scott have experience at HPE and realize that the IT industry’s progress in outcomes-based service is just as possible in a wide variety of other industries. “Any time you have a long-lived asset that may require specialty skills to maintain, it's a perfect setup for pay-as-you-go pricing,” says Scott. “Then, if you think about a business that thinks of these assets as critical but not core, it's not the business they're in. It's not a core competency. It's very clear that this is a perfect setup for as-a-service models and really a shift to a focus to outcomes.”

When Howard joined Schneider Electric, he recognized the opportunity to introduce his learnings into the organization and transform service. “Coming into this company, a slightly different segment from the IT industry, I was coming from having worked with the IT industry in developing that cloud economics for IT assets and for really operationalizing that in the Asian Pacific theater,” he describes. “As I came into Schneider Electric, there really wasn't anything in place around providing customer greater value over and above the traditional asset-ownership model. It first started with the thought of, "Could we do this? Why couldn't we do this with the kind of assets that the customers are acquiring from Schneider Electric?"

From that initial thought has grown a project under Howard’s leadership, with Scott and Mossrake’s help, that has brought Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure outcomes-based service model to fruition. Coming up this week and next on the Future of Field Service podcast, I do a deep dive with Howard and Scott into the project – from vision to future plans. Be sure to stay tuned for the two-part discussion, but in the meantime, here are five worthwhile aspects of their approach you may be able to learn from.

#1 – Enlist Help

Howard, having worked with Scott at HPE, knew firsthand his expertise in building an outcomes-based model. He decided that if he were to introduce this evolution into Schneider Electric, he would need to enlist help to juggle both the day-to-day work and a major transformation. “Some people might think of consultants as advisors that can write a report, for example, but, really, the Mossrake team and Scott were in the trenches actually developing the offer,” he explains. “What it gave me the opportunity to do was to have confidence that we had done it, that we had people that knew how we could navigate it in a new location, and then to bring my own people on that journey and see and learn from being part of that. What I found was that people wanted to join the team and wanted to be part of it because they saw the excitement through in the innovation, the learning opportunity to do something really quite new. And introducing a new business model into a company of any kind is even more challenging than you think even if you've done it before.”

One of the most common challenges I hear from service leaders working to progress on the outcomes-based service journey is the constraint that comes from essentially working two full-time jobs; one leading the current business, and one building the future business. Brining in outside help may be a great option to temporarily augment your team with folks that have fresh perspective and vetted skillsets. “We came into this opportunity with Howard having all that experience back at HPE, so we knew, certainly lived through, the trenches of trying to introduce a new business model like this into a large, multinational company,” says Scott. “Of course, we started with a look at the market but then quickly turned to an internal view: the culture, the appetite for innovation, the process for innovation, looking at the full value chain from sales channel, delivery operations. We came to the conclusion, that there was a huge opportunity for Schneider Electric. We built a plan, and the plan was really based on the premise of agile development.”

#2 – Take a Pilot Approach

To introduce this type of change at a macro scale in a multi-national corporation seems a bit daunting, right? It certainly would be. Therefore, what Schneider Electric did, was allow Howard, his team, and Mossrake to essentially pilot the transformation within his region with the intent of documenting the journey in detail to serve as a blueprint for expansion to other regions. “This is also the approach we took at HP. We've done it with Howard and Schneider Electric, and we're working on a couple of other clients as well,” says Scott. “I would say the beauty of this is being able to do this in a microcosm, where if it were to fail for some reason, the risk to the company is small. The reputational risk, primarily, but even operationally, even financially, the risk is very small. It lets you learn, because inevitably you're going to learn. No two companies are the same. No two as-a-service offers are going to be the same, so you have to allow for that.”

Using the pilot approach allows you to contain those learnings to a region, so that you can adjust and improve and determine exactly what works before you take the transformation to scale. “Being able to de-risk the journey helps for a lot of companies who first consider stakeholder perception,” explains Scott. “If you think about yourself as a dividends-value company, moving to a model like this may really upset stakeholder perception, so it gives you time to succeed, learn, and really be planful about how you want to pivot the company around something like this in a way that you can talk to your stakeholders about, you can talk to your employees about. It's really, we think, the right approach.”

#3 – Leverage a SWAT Team to Build Acceptance, Foster Skill Building and Minimize Risk

Howard, Scott, and I discuss in detail within the podcast that far and away the most challenging aspect of this journey is around the go-to-market. Because the value proposition of an outcomes-based or as-a-Service model is so fundamentally different, getting this part right is absolutely critical to success. What Schneider Electric did is use a SWAT team approach to protect its customer experience and ensure buy-in was built among internal and external stakeholders.

“There's definitely complexity in migrating the go-to-market model and the sales approach is vastly different,” says Howard. “In the early stages, in fact, you want to keep the uneducated or uninitiated salespeople away from the customer conversation. The SWAT team can come and start profiling the customers before you go meet them with the salespeople, and then act as specialized resources who introduce the conversation,” explains Howard. “From there you can offer sales tools and some training to help the general sales force understand the concept better, helps us profile the customer better, and build the skill to have those conversations. But to work customers through the pipeline, we need to still have a pretty high degree of specialization.”

If you can leverage skilled resources to lead those initial conversations in this SWAT approach, you can more adeptly familiarize your talent with exactly how different of a story the outcomes-based service value proposition is. “The sale cycle is completely different, much longer, typically. They have to be accustomed to doing that. If they're more transactional, it's very difficult for those individuals to transition, and so there's just a lot of work involved in bringing the go to market around,” says Scott. “What I had to do is build a SWAT force, because you couldn't rely on bringing people along fast enough. You had to show and do and bring people along that way, figure out who could come along on the journey to this new kind of go to market. In a way, with Howard, we've done a little bit of that, injecting people who, both from our firm and other folks within the organization, to be that SWAT deployment to go after the early deals and bring the rest of the organization along.”

#4 – Adopt Agile Methodology & Strong Documentation to Refine and Expand

Howard and Scott agreed from the beginning in an agile approach. “The agile method is key. We're making this thing work. The customer sees a good outcome. Inside, we've got people running around on treadmills, but we'll replace that with systems and automation and so on at the right times,” says Howard. “It's just keeping ahead of that curve. That makes it an affordable way to develop it. If we tried to develop all the capability and have it readied and put in place so that we could cut the ribbon it, it would be a much more challenging assignment to get the investment for it.”

As with any transformation, starting with small successes and then building is a consumable, practical approach. The journey to outcomes can be similar. “Agile doesn't mean just winging it. You have to have a sense of where you're trying to get to. You have to have a fundamental vision and a belief, as Howard mentioned, and then that guides you,” says Scott. “Even though, on any given day, you might be working on pricing, or you might be working on a revised channel program, which itself takes several steps to mature through, but you know where you're going. It's just a matter of accepting that you won't have a completely finished product on day one. You've already stated that. You've got a minimum product. That's going to be good enough to have a conversation with the customer about, and even sell to them, in a pilot sense.”

Also key to Schneider Electric’s initiative was impeccable documentation so that this pilot-approach transformation could be followed by any region to come. “I felt that it was important that this be repeatable and we document our journey,” says Howard. “As we went on this journey as well, we, strengthened our existing process documentation for just our regular bricks of service capability. There was a systematic approach to building out the blueprint for how to do this and document that, and that was a key part of what Mossrake brought to us, what our team worked on, and we've created that repository of documentation and learnings and insights, which has been really useful to keep us on track and will be useful as other regions of Schneider replicate what we're doing here.”

The deliverable of this documentation and blueprint was another area of value from brining in expert help. “One of the key deliverables from our work together is this operational blueprint, which covers every aspect of the value chain, and then, on top of that, the operational description for actually how the run what's effectively an engagement with the customer,” explains Scott. “As-a-service ends up looking like a consulting engagement that just doesn't necessarily have an endpoint. All of that is what, in our conversations with other countries and regions within Schneider, that's the foundational element is that operational blueprint.”

#5 – Be Tenacious in Your Pursuit of Potential

Finally, know that the journey will not be smooth sailing. “I have to give a lot of credit to Howard,” says Scott. “It takes a lot of stamina and tenacity to really navigate this into a big company, especially if you're sitting in a region. You're not at worldwide, where a lot of the innovation is expected to come from.”

Howard reflects on his experiences at HPE as motivation for seeing this potential come to life at Schneider Electric. “We’d had this success at HPE, and so I knew it was challenging but I also understood it could be done,” he explains. “I had the advantage of my upstream management being open to discussions and then ultimately finding a global leader that was really passionate about it as well to help the funding. But there's a lot of people between that person and getting it done, and that's where it takes a lot of energy. You have to understand the importance of not taking no as the answer. You've got to find the person that can say yes and get support. We could easily have stopped at various points because it looked like it wasn't going to be possible to do what we wanted to do. That tenacity comes in in making sure you continue to look for the way.”

Click on the link for more information on Schneider Electric’s innovative aaS offer EcoStruxure Outcomes: Secure Power as a Service - www.se.com/au/outcomes

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Living with COVID: Decentralizing Dispatch

May 28, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Living with COVID: Decentralizing Dispatch

By Tom Paquin

Office work sure ain’t what it used to be (eighteen months ago). Businesses are hybrid-izing work expectations and streamlining office space for a more streamlined in-office staff, ISPs are being pushed to the brink to support home office videoconferencing on a whole new level, and many people are discovering what some of us have known for a while: Working from home can be really, truly, what you need to (literally) get the job done.

I’ve written about the service ramifications of this from ITSM, wherein businesses now need to think very carefully about supply chain, device management, and triage in order to manage how, where, and why service vehicles are deployed at all. But this new paradigm has internal and external ramifications across a wide array of different axes. Let’s explore one of them.

The truth of the matter is that service businesses may be just as likely as any other busines to want to limit the amount of physical footprint that they have, chiefly within the context of the backoffice. Obviously this is less of a possibility for manufacturers, telco providers, or utilities, where there’s more of a need of physical infrastructure. For straight service providers, though, there are certainly some possibilities.

Is the prospect of shuttering a great deal of physical real estate a unique challenge? Obviously, yes, but with a set plan of how you’re going to proceed, and what you need to do to make these moves equitable to your staff, there are a lot of tools that can support. As we always say here, your business’ unique needs will shift marginally from certain elements of what we outline here. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering. Let’s break down some elements:

Getting a holistic view

Service businesses can’t build a coherent strategy if dispatch centers are siloed islands of data and operational utilities. If, for instance, you have a telco that has commercial tower services disconnected from consumer services, you’re doing it wrong. Systems feed off of a shared resource base, even if the technicians or parts will never cross over between two groups. Businesses looking to decentralize their understanding of their business need to start by centralizing the insights of service, parts, and asset management.

Increasing the ratio of technicians to dispatchers

Thinking about reducing the size of internal offices means naturally thinking about how resource allocation meets the dispatch. We of course already know how businesses succeed at doing this: They employ true scheduling optimization. Not drag-and-drop schedules and pretty colors, like what some companies call “optimization”, but AI-powered utilities that offer a single view of asset performance, available resources, and SLA-powered job expectations, all synthesized in a system that can update in real-time across the whole of your company, not just a single location.

Getting in all on mobile

Yeah, I know that I’m a broken record on mobile supremacy, but whether or not your technicians have office time, they need 100% of their desktop resources on their mobile devices, no exceptions. Mobile field service is so mature that treating it like some sort of ornamental dongle is just plain reckless. What it will take to make this work for your business will depend a lot on what you do, obviously, but at the very least, systems need to be unified across all platforms. No redundancies, no forgotten work order submissions or part requests.

Rethinking parts and logistics

I love a good depot, don’t get me wrong. Be it a train depot, where I spent a lot of my young commuter life, or a Home Depot, where I dump thousands of dollars a year into landscape fabric and screwdrivers, there’s something very nice about a place that has a confluence of all the things. Whether that depot needs to be within spitting distance of a technician’s truck or not is another question. If you’re disseminating service and limiting office space, you have an opportunity to expand service territories out much farther. You just have to think about how you get parts to technicians, or, conversely, how you get materials from technicians available for repair and remanufacturing. You’ll find the mix that works best for you, but with a holistic view, you shouldn’t have a problem employing parts and reverse logistics systems to meet employees wherever you find them, including their homes, or the homes of your customers. The right tools are right in front of you, waiting for you to set the criterial for what they do.

These are but a few small considerations for what the future of work might look like for service, and there are a lot of others worth evaluating as we continue on our post-pandemic journey. While the last year and change has not been particularly fun, the ripples of change offer us all an opportunity to reflect, and reposition ourselves to make the future a lot brighter than it was before.

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The Shared Responsibility of Destigmatizing and Prioritizing Mental Health at Work

May 24, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

The Shared Responsibility of Destigmatizing and Prioritizing Mental Health at Work

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

In the last 14 months, as the lines have blurred between our personal and professional lives more than ever before, workplace discussions and action around mental health have never been more critical. Burnout is real and even employees who didn’t content with mental health struggles pre-COVID are experiencing the impact of the chronic stress the pandemic has introduced. Those, like myself, who already had a mental health issue to keep in check alongside their work, family, and home duties are in varying stages of struggle.

So, what do we do? Well, first, we need to acknowledge the criticality of destigmatizing, normalizing, and prioritizing mental health at work and we need to understand that doing so is a collective responsibility of us all. Yes, it is May and this is Mental Health Awareness month, but posting a few links to articles on this topic or checking the box on a ‘mental health meeting’ for your team does not a movement make. At Future of Field Service, we’ve been working to incorporate mental health into our content and dialogue because we realize how imperative it is to have this be a topic of discussion and an area of action as a regular course of business – not one month a year.

I recently sat down with Johnny Crowder, who I noticed from his active presence on LinkedIn surrounding mental health, to ask for some input on how businesses can improve and make progress in caring for their employees’ mental health. Johnny is a suicide and abuse survivor, TEDx speaker, touring musician, mental health and sobriety advocate, and the Founder & CEO of Cope Notes, which is a text-based mental health platform that provides daily support to users in nearly 100 countries across the globe. We started by discussing the fact that, in today’s world, personal lives and professional lives are simply lives – innately interconnected. “A lot of people who are in a corporate environment, they'll start experiencing a mental health issue where it's interfering with not only their work, but also with their work-life balance,” explains Johnny. “And then that's affecting their sleep and it's affecting their eating, and then that's affecting their performance. And we have leaders who are saying that's personal stuff. No, it's not. No, it's not. Mental health is not a purely personal matter.”

Small Steps, Repeatedly and Continuously

Johnny urges you to look at mental health as an area of responsibility and key focus, not as a buzzed-about topic that requires you to check items off a list. "Oh, it's mental health awareness month. And for mental health awareness month, we're going to send an e-blast out to everybody. And then maybe if you reply to a poll, you can get entered for a chance to win a water bottle. We could even donate $500 to a local mental health charity and then do a press release about that,” says Johnny. “Some companies do this and then at the end of May, all the executives are patting themselves on the back. I see a lot of that. And I don't even have to explain why that's not enough.”

But while it is important to take a genuine approach to incorporating mental health care into your workplace, it is also important to keep it natural and practical. “I will say that what I do see commonly is kind of too much, too soon. ‘Let’s have yoga every morning!’ I think this stems from a focus on policy rather than culture. And the best policy in the world won't save you from a bad culture,” says Johnny. “When you look at really incorporating mental health into your culture, I think small incremental steps and including it in existing policy rather than drafting a whole new policy work best.”

Think about where, within your existing processes, you can incorporate mental health discussions and actions that are non-intrusive, natural, and repeatable. “My sister in law was trying to introduce spinach to her kids that don’t like vegetables. She put it into their grilled cheese sandwiches! I was like, this is such an innovative approach to getting these kids eat spinach. And she's like, ‘Well, yeah, if I just pour out a big bowl of spinach no one's going to eat any. You have to work it into things that they're familiar with that they like.’ And I think the same is true for mental health,” explains Johnny.

What this looks like in practice often seems small or non-descript, but Johnny is confident that’s what works best. This can look like simply working to ask your employees more personal questions, about their hobbies or what they enjoy or their families or what they did last weekend, to simply get to know them better and to open a non-role related dialogue. “Focus on casual mentions. So using a term like anxious or anxiety or depressed or depression, even just those two very basic things or asking people like how they are feeling, or literally just start with asking people at the top of a meeting what they did over the weekend,” say Johnny. “It’s about fostering interpersonal conversations and connections. Because if all your work conversations are about work, I can guarantee that people will never be fully honest in the workplace.”

Embrace Vulnerability & Lead by Example

It’s important for leaders who are in any way uncomfortable with the idea of mental health as a focus to realize that vulnerability is the new superpower. “The strong, fearless leader with a stiff upper lip worked for a long time, but it is entirely outdated,” cautions Johnny. “A few decades ago, what people feared most in a work setting was a spineless leader or a leader that couldn't take action or command authority. Now people's fear is a careless, cold, callous leader. They don't want to follow a robot. Why do you think there are authenticity and vulnerability trainings everywhere for leaders? It's because people want to work for somebody who they know is a real person.”

Accomplishments and authority as a leader are still important, but today those things need to be balanced with relatability, authenticity, and humanization to be effective. The most impactful leaders realize how much power there is in building influence through connection rather than coercion and how critical personal relationships and openness are in attaining this. How you speak as a leader, your willingness to open up and share some of your own personal moments and even struggles, can go further in normalizing mental health in the workplace than countless dollars spent on formal programs.

Don’t Be caught Unprepared When it Matters Most

Finally, Johnny points out that as you start to normalize mental health discussions in the workplace, you need to be prepared with action when someone opens up about an issue they need support on. “Don't be empty handed. Have a few go-to resources. And I would say, make sure those resources are tiered for the level of seriousness of the issue. Be sure you’re ready to cover different bases,” he advises. “And never minimize the impact of just being present and listening. If you're identifying someone who might be struggling, the best thing you can do is take them out to lunch. Best thing you can do. No pretense, just like spend time with them.”

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Living with COVID: Planning for Perpetual PPE

May 21, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Living with COVID: Planning for Perpetual PPE

By Tom Paquin

Out in the wilds of the world (of the suburbs north of Boston) I’ve seen every manner of barrier, mask, visor, partition, dome, and so on—all with the purpose of quartering off those pesky microbes to keep one another safe. At one place, the partitions will be made of flimsy plastic, while another has installed glass barriers that permanently separate their staff, which is to say that the scope of personal protective equipment (PPE) ranges from things that can come down with the help of a light breeze to things that are now permanent fixtures of our lives. So, too, will it be for things like masks, visors, and so on.

Perpetual PPE, as it were, has a variety of connotations and considerations for service, certainly, and it’ll be necessary to start thinking now about how some of this stuff will function beyond the quick stopgaps that we’ve built over the last year. Here are some considerations for what the next step of COVID preparedness might involve:

Developing a Coherent Strategy for PPE

We touched on this last week when we were considering how to meet people where they are, but service businesses interact with the world in different ways, and building a policy of consent is, first and foremost, integral to meeting that customer’s expectations.

As we emerge from our caves, and allow people to enter them to conduct service, it’ll be important to establish boundaries to maintain the new expectations of a weary world. Cynical people might call this “kid gloves”, but a year’s worth of trauma and anxiety doesn’t wash off, and if you want to be a business that is taken seriously, you’ll take people’s expectations about personal protective equipment seriously as well.

This will start with evaluating employee expectations, but it’s also about enabling employees, ensuring that the right materials are available in vehicles and at job sites to maintain cleanlieness and expectations, and that that training is disseminated, understood, and agreed upon. It’s a simple thing that can go a long way for the customers. Some will certainly brush it off. For others, it’ll prove that you actually care about them.

Rethinking Resources

Perhaps, you have, like me, concluded that mask dispensers will now be ubiquitous in public spaces in much the same way as hand sanitizer and tissues. There’s a rolling spectrum of where, why, and how these sorts of one-off materials will be disseminated to staff and customers in any given space, but as people stop carrying masks in their cars all the time, because they don’t need to, perhaps they’d like one while they stroll through a department store.

This is another one that is simple, but courteous—get in front of customer expectations, and start planning for this future today. Many businesses have made slap-dash changes to their floorplans to combat COVID. Maybe now we can take a step back, look at what we have, and make clear plans for what comes next.

What do we do with Waste?

This is a lot more complicated. I’m not unearthing some vast conspiracy when I said that PPE waste will continue to be a problem—It will. What we do in the short-term is important, but if PPE will be a continued fixture of how you conduct field service, it’s important to at least consider what the environmental impact of those actions will be. Perhaps it’ll overlap with the way that you manage your investment in the circular economy, or it’ll simply be disposal guidelines, but there’s no doubt the opportunity for disruption at some level, here.

None of us expected that we’d be wearing masks and taking precautions for this long, and without a doubt, there’s a contingency of people who will wear masks forever, for various reasons. Building plans for how we navigate these new dynamics will be necessary, and may even end up giving your business a leg-up.

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Foxtel’s Lessons Learned in Engaging & Empowering its Contract Workforce

May 17, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

Foxtel’s Lessons Learned in Engaging & Empowering its Contract Workforce

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

With the labor shortage proving one of the industry’s biggest challenges, there’s much discussion around the extent to which contract workers are a viable option to help organizations address the problem. There are some major differences of opinion on this topic among service leaders – those who are for the contract worker model are emphatically so, and those who don’t see it as a fit for their operations are firm in their stance.

In my opinion, any reasonable solution to a real challenge is worth evaluating. I also think that some of the greatest concerns around the contract model – namely a lack of control and the potential for negative impact on the customer experience – can be alleviated with a combination of strategy and effort. Australian media company Foxtel is a really good example of an organization that is successfully leveraging a contract workforce for field operations and has mastered the art of engaging and empowering those workers in a way that allows the organization to benefit from the flexibility and savings of the model without sacrificing its service or brand experience.

I recently talked with Nunzio Bagnato, Director of Home Service and Advanced Servicing at Foxtel, to understand what he’s learned in 23 years of overseeing Foxtel service and managing the company’s contract workforce. He shared some valuable lessons learned which you can catch on this week’s episode of the Future of Field Service podcast, but let’s summarize here some of the key points.

Lesson #1: Focus on Collaboration, Not Control

The concern companies have over not being able to control contract workers is reasonable in some ways, but to achieve success with the model Nunzio explains that you have to shift the thinking from control to collaboration. “If you treat your workers like a contractor, you're going to get contractor results. It's about building a partnership and working side-by-side,” he says. “Traditionally, a contractor model is transactional, it's a master/servant sort of arrangement, and that drives a certain behavior and culture. We’ve changed that culture.”

In evolving the way Foxtel views its contract workforce and focusing more on collaboration than control, the company has been able to improve those working relationships and create a contract workforce that is highly engaged and empowered to deliver the level of service Foxtel wants its customers to experience. “We have two-way communication and collaboration with our contractor workforce,” explains Nunzio. “We pressure test ideas with our field leaders and then with a focus group of technicians to get their feedback. We don't just make decisions and expect them to fall in line. They're the ones that are actually going to be delivering our service, so we need to consider their viewpoints and hear their voice.”

Lesson #2: A Positive Approach Will Yield Better Results than a Punitive One

About five years ago, Foxtel realized the need to provide a more sophisticated customer experience and shift away from transactional service. The company knew that to achieve this goal, the contract worker relationship needed to evolve away from a transactional relationship as well. “Previously, our technicians focused on the traditional metrics like the completion rates and we drove a volume-based behavior,” says Nunzio. “In the past technicians were penalized for not hitting those KPIs or milestones. We did away with that. Our view was that we're dealing with adults.”

Foxtel introduced a scorecard model focused on driving behaviors if felt mattered most in improving the customer experience and service delivery. It did away with the idea of punitive action for subpar performance and instead shifted toward positive reinforcement of desired behaviors and outcomes. “We wanted to focus on the positives. We wanted to look at what the technicians were doing really well, how they achieved that result, and promote more of those behaviors,” says Nunzio.

The scorecard was centered around incentivizing those behaviors by rewarding the contract workers who achieve the greatest results. Their performance on the scorecard determines a rank between platinum, gold, silver and bronze technician and platinum workers are rewarded by getting the highest volume and best schedule of work from Foxtel. Focusing on positive reinforcement for good work versus punishment for poor work has proven effective. “When we first started this journey and launched the score card model, 70 odd percent of our field workforce were bronze technicians,” Nunzio explains. “We're really proud that right now, 70 odd percent of our field workforce is predominantly platinum and a little bit of gold.”

Lesson #3: Clear and Simple Expectations Are Critical

So, with a collaborative mindset and positive approach, the third area that is key to success is to keep expectations around performance clear and simple. The Foxtel field technician scorecard has four quadrants: customer, cycle, finance, and quality. “We introduced the scorecard that focused on four quadrants,” explains Nunzio. “The first quadrant is all about the customer - customer surveys and arrival on time. The cycle quadrant is your traditional metrics, like completion rates. The third quadrant is finance, which looks at free issues and inventory. And then the last quadrant is quality, where we look at revisits.”

Four quadrants and only two metrics each at any given time; that’s it. “There isn't a lot of KPIs and that is by design,” says Nunzio. “We don't want to have too many, and we've identified the key areas of our business that we want the technician to focus on. You can have a laundry list of KPIs, you can really get carried away, but we chose the eight to keep it simple. We chose the eight because we wanted to shift the way we operated, shift the way we serviced our customers, and we felt these KPIs did that.”

The quadrants and KPIs in each which dictate the technician’s score and therefore tier make what’s expected of them clear and easy to understand. The quadrants never change, but Foxtel does update the two KPIs per quadrant as needed when focus on a certain area becomes important. Note they swap them out, though, versus add a metric in because it is important to keep the measurement targeted and simple.

If you use a contract workforce and are looking for some tips to drive performance or if you’ve considered a contract model but have some concerns, be sure to listen to Nunzio’s podcast for more detail on how Foxtel has mastered this model using its scorecard system.

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