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May 14, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Living with COVID: Meeting People Where They Are

May 14, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Living with COVID: Meeting People Where They Are

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By Tom Paquin

In this week’s look at what our COVID-19 co-habitation looks like, we’re going to consider how service leaders can work with customers, given their new geography, new expectations for social interactions, and new predilections for working with technology. Fortunately, we’ve seen, over the last year, the various ways that businesses have begun to internalize these truth into a broader strategy. So let’s take those different areas that I mentioned before and break down some hypotheticals.

Tackling our New Geography
I’ve tackled this previously on here, as businesses have had to realign their strategies to work with a decentralized workforce. I’ve mostly considered this through its relationship to the home office, but I think it’s important to consider more broadly across service as well.

How will, for instance, our increased lean on home workers impact the telecommunications infrastructure? While the path of least resistance for most businesses is to cut costs, eliminate office space and the business internet plans that come along with them, and offer the savings to home workers in the form of a stipend. That might work for the businesses, but teclo companies might not be thrilled about the shift, certainly in terms of long-term estimates of the amount of their networks that are being used for commercial purposes.

It might, then, make sense to create “home worker” internet plans, perhaps sold directly to consumers, or to the companies for which they work, to offer preferred speeds and specialized service for business users. The increasing prevalence of 5G might prove to be a boon for such a program, as 5G hotspots could function as the conduit by which businesses manage their remote workers’ internet. For the many workers currently battling with their kids’ Xboxes for bandwidth, this would likely be a welcome addition.

Of course, decentralizing business operations means decentralizing business service for telcos—suddenly, business priority appointments extend outside of a major metro, into the suburbs. That means infrastructure needs to be top-notch, even in rural areas, and that scheduling and routing optimization needs to be the bare minimum. This is a single example, but it belies the broader challenges that many businesses will face as the dust settles and the nature of what work means for people changes indefinitely.

Making People Comfortable

I’m vaccinated, and pleased a proud to be, as are my wife, parents, and in-laws. It feels nice to know that, per guidance from the Center of Disease Control, that we can be inside together without masks. Some folks, even vaccinated folks, do not feel comfortable with that. That is fine, and for customer service to be managed, maintained, and exemplified, we need to meet the level of respect that people feel.

Over the summer, for instance, we had an issue with our septic system. It was necessary for the router person to enter our basement in order to access our cleanout. He chose not to wear a mask, never asked if we were comfortable with that fact, completed the job, was paid, and left. Yes, sure, I never asked him to put on a mask, because remedying the issue took major precedent, but that assumption is very troubling. So…I’m not calling that router guy again (I’ll note that I’m also not tripping over myself to be in a position where I need to call any router guy, but that’s that’s enough about that).

I’m reminded of Peloton’s service questions for customers. In a pre-COVID world, this was simple asks like, “Can I take off my shoes?” but as time goes on, and expectations change, asking people about their comfort level before barging into their house seems like a bare minimum. We all now have a very strange relationship with our personal space. Service needs to recognize that, and champion communicative consent over making assumptions about people’s comfort levels.

New Technology Frontiers

About a year ago, I wrote about a postulation that, within eighteen months, manufacturing would see a technology evolution equal to about five years. So—twelve months in, is that true? I haven’t studied enough of how COVID has impacted manufacturing yet to say for sure, but let’s assume that most businesses have adapted to survive. So businesses are moving along, what about customers? Well, I also wrote about that about a year ago.

So—there are these two forces—personal and professional—both advancing their technological capacity. Customers are more amenable to digital service offerings like self-service and remote assistance, and businesses are accelerating on their digital transformation journey as well. This is a little bit of a tease, but in the second half of the year, we’re going to look at how those two areas have converged in holistic detail, and furthermore, where we go from here. We’ve certainly developed blind spots in our meteoric launch forward, and I can’t wait for the dust to settle so we can look at service and chart a plan for what comes next.

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May 10, 2021 | 6 Mins Read

The 5 Tenets of Cimcorp’s Modern IT Approach

May 10, 2021 | 6 Mins Read

The 5 Tenets of Cimcorp’s Modern IT Approach

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

As digitalization permeates every area of the business, we’ve seen IT become far less siloed in its strategy, processes, and execution. The lines between the business and IT blur as technology becomes increasingly critical not only in how a company operates optimally, but in its value proposition for its customer base. With digitalization playing an ever-increasing role for businesses in every industry and geography, what needs to change as it relates to the IT approach to keep pace with innovation and remain competitive?

According to Pekka Nurmi, Director of Corporate IT at Cimcorp, it is critical to modernize your approach and focus on working smarter rather than harder. Cimcorp is a global supplier of intralogistics automation with systems used within manufacturing and distribution centers in over 40 countries across six continents. I recently sat down with Pekka to record a podcast that you should stay tuned for, but am sharing here the five major point of how he describes the company is working smarter versus harder to modernize its approach.

Tenet #1: Evolve Your Perception of IT’s Role in the Business

As I said, it’s imperative for the business and IT to be working alongside one another to accomplish today’s objectives. Many organizations have made strides in eliminating a siloed structure, but others have work to do in improving collaboration. “The business is much more involved and should be much more involved than it was a few years ago,” he says. “It's not like the IT side has become any less important, but in order to get things done and the complete ideas, it's like the scope of things has increased. Today, you have to solve the IT and business side at the same time.”

Particularly in service-oriented businesses, IT capabilities are crucial in delivering on the expectations of customers. Cimcorp is a user of IFS Cloud and, as Pekka mentions, believes strongly in the IFS mission to help companies master their moment of service. “We are using IFS Cloud, and they are talking about the moment of service and I fell in love with that slogan, ‘moment of service,’” explains Pekka. “Because that describes quite accurately what we need and what the customers need. The IT systems really have to be there, present, and have real-time information to provide in the moment of service. There's no other way. When the customer contacts you, what the customer wants to hear is that okay, can-do answer. So, the moment of service is actually really fantastic way to describe the need of what IT has to delivery for the business.”

Tenet #2: Relinquish Control and Leverage External Expertise

A key mindset in Cimcorp’s mission to modernize IT and reduce complexity is to understand that the idea of doing, owning, and controlling everything is outdated. A modern IT approach acknowledges the expertise that lies outside of the organization and finds power in utilizing that expertise in order to reserve more skill for strategy than execution. “We're trying always to find things to outsource, and there is so much new stuff IT has to take care of, like a compliance, information security, and embedding IT and IT processes,” says Pekka, “And that seems to be the core, so we really always are trying to find less critical tasks that we can outsource.”

For many organizations, Cimcorp included, this is a major shift and can take time to embrace – but in Pekka’s opinion, being a master of all is no longer a realistic goal. “Cimcorp has historically done everything in-house, but through a lot of discussion and opening the idea of how management sees IT department, we helped the company embrace this change,” Pekka explains. “It was based on an understanding that if we're trying always to do everything, we will be so slow that with all there is to do, it just isn’t reasonable. Being able to prove that we're on the right path by being able to do something in two weeks with a partner that would have taken six months internally helps foster acceptance. People are happy about it, and we get compliments from the management, ‘How did you guys do that in such a short timeline?’ and the cost wasn't bad.”

Tenet #3: Embrace a Platform Approach

To simplify and master the complexity that is inevitable in today’s digital landscape, Cimcorp has fully embraced a platform approach with IFS Cloud. “We are always reducing the number of the systems in house, because we started from a situation where the number of different systems was just immense. And we were in the continuous loop of update, upgrade, and then you would begin to lag so much behind. We knew we needed to cut down the number of disparate systems and concentrate on the core systems in general,” explains Pekka.

When you look to consolidate into a platform, it is important to choose a partner that you feel is aligned with your short, mid, and long-term business objectives. “We’ve focused on finding suppliers and partners who share our vision of the future, because we cannot be inventing everything in-house. IT, for us, has become less about building and more about managing a network of partners who are on the same page with you,” Pekka says.

In evaluating options, the value of a platform approach was clear. “Of course, we do alternative scenarios. And when we discovered that we would have to build 19 interfaces between two systems, and most of them two-way interfaces, that was immediately the point that we knew we don't want to do that. We don't want to be spending the time working the interfaces, all the changes in the system that will affect the interfaces. So, once again, we found a position where we would be digging a hole underneath us with those interfaces,” explains Pekka. “There’s innovation in accepting IFS as a platform and limiting the number of systems. We did our homework, and we decided that IFS is a good platform for us.”

Tenet #4: Think Out of the Box

Perhaps one of the most impactful points of my discussion with Pekka is his description of the outdated view many have of software systems in the sense of overlooking the idea that a solution might work quite well for the business, right out of the box. We talked about the fact that this may stem from a historical viewpoint of far less sophisticated solutions, but that with what today’s technology providers offer, insisting you require customizations is – in many cases – an issue of pride versus reality. “ERP systems or software in general, they already have built-in processes, and tried out ways to work. And all the jobs I've had and all the customers I've had, I always saw that idea that everybody was trying to over-complicate that. ‘My process is so special. Our business is so special,’” says Pekka. “And as an outsider, you could say that I've seen this a thousand times. It's the exact same process repeating itself time and time and time and again.”

What Pekka urges you to consider is to evaluate the out-of-the-box functionality before pressing for what you feel may be necessary customizations. “Have an open mind that maybe somebody has found the golden nugget of approaches that's already built into the system,” he says. “They have tens of thousands of clients, and that have been running for decades actually. So, the process, it might have been already evolved. And in many cases, I've found that accepting the ERP system might actually be really smart. At least try it out, and if it's not, then look to do something.”

Tenet #5: Focus on Continual Improvement

IT today is incredibly fast paced, and Pekka and I discussed that the primary role of the function has shifted from doer of all things to strategist and manager of all things. This means an increased focus on education, innovation, collaboration, and partnership. It also requires a constant state of movement. “I've been discussing with many of my colleagues in similar positions at similar companies, and we seem to agree that unless you're a little bit proactive in replacing and updating and upgrading, you always are playing catch. And that's not a good place to be,” Pekka says.

Pekka encourages his team to look externally for information and inspiration. “I continuously encourage my staff to find benchmarking companies and to be active in end user groups. We don't want to be stuck inside the walls of our department, and it’s encouraged to discuss with the outside all the time, more and more, because we can only win in gaining that insight,” he says.

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May 7, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

What Criteria Do You Use to Power Planning and Scheduling Optimization?

May 7, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

What Criteria Do You Use to Power Planning and Scheduling Optimization?

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By Tom Paquin

We talk quite a bit about the importance of planning and scheduling optimization. We know the business value, we know what constitutes best-in-class optimization, and we know that optimization is a lot more that auto-scheduling and recommending a couple parts.

True best-in-class optimization automates repeatable tasks, provide real-time resource adjustments that are scalable to meet the number of technicians in a firm (whatever that number might be), and can provide planning insights for a day, a season, a year, or whatever unit of measurement that your business is in need of.

An automation system, at its best, actually automates activities. And like any AI-powered system, you can’t just provide inputs without matching criteria for how to catalog, rank, and execute those inputs into practical outputs.

So it’s necessary, then, to build a set of criteria that moderates your service system to prioritize outcomes, which will ultimately be passed on to your customers. I’ve written about this previously as a function of AI-based learning. Let’s outline some criteria areas that best-in-class systems can employ in this capacity:

Customer-Oriented Criteria

As we frequently discuss, building outcomes-based service scenarios has become an imperative for many service providers. Planning and Scheduling systems are an important (and often overlooked) piece of the outcomes-based service mix. So for that reason, you can build outcomes into the systems to help prioritize jobs to meet SLA expectations. Here are a few examples of criteria:

  • Time from ticket-to-invoice
  • Downtime expectations
  • Dispatch expectations
  • Asset value expectations

The list goes on and on, but, as an example, if you promise 2-hour resolution time for a specific asset for a customer (like our friends at Scientific Games), when a ticket is raised, it needs to be appropriately scheduled and prioritized to meet those SLA expectations.

Operationally-Oriented Criteria

These tend to be what people think about when considering planning and scheduling tools, but as you can see, they’re only one piece of the puzzle. Here are some considerations:

  • Cost per truck roll
  • Location
  • Technician schedules
  • Time per job based on criteria

And so on. The name of the game here is to build a list that offers businesses the ability to derive the most value out of a day’s worth of technicians. And something to note is that might not be the highest quantity of completed jobs in a day, and, when the criteria is established, you might end up being surprised by what the optimization tells you is the right thing to do.

Sustainability-Oriented Criteria

Finally, and most compellingly, is the ides of using optimization as a launchpad for sustainability. Yes, I wrote about this not long ago, but let’s outline some of the criteria that best-in-class optimization systems can work off of when building and stress-testing schedules:

  • Drive time
  • Fuel consumption
  • Trucks on the road

And so on. And yes, these naturally overlap with what’s going on in the world of operational criteria, but as I said in the article I linked to above, there’s an added value, and added imperative for businesses to focus on it. It might just be what drives a customer to choose you over the competition.

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May 3, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Are Contingent Workers the Missing Piece in Your Advanced Services Puzzle?

May 3, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Are Contingent Workers the Missing Piece in Your Advanced Services Puzzle?

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Companies leading the charge in capitalizing on the strategic potential of service are all looking for ways to break away from break/fix and advance their service offerings, customer experiences, and revenue streams. Innovation abounds from industry to industry, with a common focus on bringing customers the utmost simplicity, peace of mind, and outcomes – whatever that looks like for each organization’s market. Companies are realizing the immense opportunity that exists in not only introducing more evolved iterations of its core service offerings, but advanced services that incorporate complimentary areas, sharing of expertise, and utilization of data.

As this focus on advanced services increases, the skillsets needed to execute on the outcomes customers desire change and grow. In a break/fix service environment, organizations have traditionally sought very mechanically inclined workers who were incentivized to fix fast and well but not really expected to think about or do much else. In this new world, a host of new skills are needed – the soft skills necessary to be seen by customers as a trusted advisor, skills outside of the historical competencies of the business as companies expand into adjacent areas, and skills that are well positioned to maximize the impact of data.

So how do contingent workers fit in where the necessary skills are becoming more – not less – sophisticated? Hear me out.

I talked recently with Chris La Fratta, Vice President & Head of Professional Services and Solutions Delivery at Philips, who is taking action to evolve and expand the customer outcomes that Philips enables. Chris and I talked at length about many factors related to the evolution to outcomes, and you can stay tuned for our full-length chat on this week’s podcast. That said, one of the points that stuck with me is how Chris is incorporating greater use of contingent workers to free up his W2 talent for the more sophisticated and value-add work that is fueling Philips’ service growth.

“At the end of the day, you can only focus on so much, and you must define what your core competencies are,” explains Chris. “And our core competencies have shifted from people who are really good mechanically and electrically to people more IT oriented, as I said, or people more consultative, which I think is even more kind of a unique skill.”

Being clear on what the focus is for skills allows Chris clarity on where to enlist help from contingent workers. “We've determined over time where we want to focus and develop folks. But guess what? At some point, when we ship product, there's a loading dock where there's tons of boxes of our stuff. We used to pay our staff whatever their hourly rates are to unbox things, and to stage things, and to prep them so that they can go into the hospital. That's a really easy example of where we've used third parties to supplement,” he explains. “It's not a skill that's highly specialized, it's not something that we want to develop a core competency in, and there's some variability around demand. So, if we have a really big fourth quarter, I don't want to hire 100 people and have them part of my fixed costs as we enter the next fiscal year, I want to be able to ramp them up and down as needed. It's really helped there.”

The examination of what’s value-added and what’s more basic can be applied throughout various service offerings and across the customer journey to determine where there are opportunities to free up your most valued resources to focus more on core competencies and development of their skills. “For instance, we do a lot of staging of servers and equipment that's pretty standard and can even be done remotely. So, there, even in the IT space, when it's something fairly basic like loading an image onto a server or doing some configuration, we work with third parties as well,” Chris says. “If I have a third party that shows up on site, they are part of the Philips team, they get treated as if they were a Philips employee, they get the same training, in many cases, that our employees would get. We really do a lot to ensure the quality is there. It's a little bit more difficult to control, if I'm honest with you, but we have a process to check in and make sure that the quality is there.”

While not without its challenges, the incorporation of contingent workers is a viable option to consider as you realize you can’t be a master of all and need to focus on developing skills around the core areas that will impact customers most. “The main benefit is being able to focus on what's core, and it offsets some costs and allows for a lot more flexibility,” says Chris. “It can be a tricky road to go down, but I think it's important. Like I said, the approach we've taken is we're allowing and promoting the development opportunities for our internal folks, so as we shift, they can grow. At the same time, it doesn't make sense for them to unbox equipment and to do basic configurations, so there we benefit from contingent help.”

I think we have to consider the fact that as service continues to advance and expand, we will have to make decisions around what skills are most important to invest more in than others. That will look different for each industry and each company, but how Chris is approaching this at Philips is great food for thought. Be sure to check out his podcast this week for far more insight into how Philips is evolving to deliver advanced services and impactful customer outcomes.

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April 30, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Living with COVID

April 30, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Living with COVID

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By Tom Paquin

Nearly twenty years ago, I was sitting in a seminar hall during a class called “Issues in Biotechnology”. The week’s lesson was on pandemics. I had originally taken the class figuring it’d be a relatively easy way to fulfil a science requirement for my major that I could coast through while focusing on college’s many more important activities, but over the course of that day’s seminar, I was at full attention.

I sat, horrified, as the professor described the likelihood that animal-borne diseases would emerge. The prevailing theory at the time was that we’d be struck with an “avian flu”, since in the late nineties several poultry farmers had started to catch diseases from their chickens, though those diseases had not yet mutated to a stage where they could transfer from human to human. This still happens all the time. The pandemic would be an upper respiratory disease, and would have a devastating impact on, in the words of my professor, the elderly and the very young. “It’s not a matter of if,” he said, “It’s a matter of when. I don’t mean to be alarmist, but we should all be prepared.”

It will likely come as no surprise that, for literal years, I was overwhelmed with a dire sense of paranoia that the dark cloud of pandemic was imminent. As I rode the subway, I peered suspiciously at the human petri dishes around me, wondering about the devastation that any one of us could inflict upon our surroundings. In the intervening years, H1N1 came and went, and the spectre of worldwide pandemic seemed like less and less of a threat in the face of science and technology.

2020, though, showed how much worse reality could be than my expectations.

But now, the US has vaccinated half of its population, and the world is following suit (I will note that my western-centric view ignores the persistent and significant challenges that remain globally, but I am hopeful and confident that a unified effort to combat the virus can support with the resources and expertise to overcome those challenges). According to the New York Times, we’re seeing exponential case growth invert into exponential decay, meaning we’re entering a new phase of our relationship with COVID.

I am confident that the state of Global Pandemic will be lifted, hopefully this year. Dr. Fauci thinks we’ll be in a state of normality in the USA by July 4th. But the trendlines all have something in common.

They never reach zero.

And yes—in the years since the “Swine flu panic” H1N1 has sidled itself into the shuffled deck of seasonal flus, and COVID-19 is likely to do something similar. And that is fine, in the long run, as our collective human consciousness makes sense of the new illness, but the fact that we have to live with the virus itself also means that we’ll be living, perhaps in perpetuity, with some of its effects. These effects, the tectonic changes in people’s behavior that we’ve normalized over fourteen months, will invariably impact service. For the next few weeks, we’re going to dissect s a few of the ways that things have changed, and what they mean long-term for service. Here’s a few of the topics we’ll be covering:

  • Meeting People Where They Are
  • Planning for Perpetual PPE
  • Decentralized Dispatch

With more to come as we reach the next, next, next, next normal.

On a personal note, my wife is nine months pregnant, with our daughter set to arrive at virtually any moment. In writing this series, I’ve had an opportunity to reflect on the world that she’s going to be born into. I think that it will ultimately be a better one than the one that we were in when the pandemic began. I will sure be trying to make it better for her in every way that I can.

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April 26, 2021 | 9 Mins Read

How To Nurture Creative Confidence to Fuel Innovation

April 26, 2021 | 9 Mins Read

How To Nurture Creative Confidence to Fuel Innovation

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I was recently chatting with Rangika Ekanayake, Sr. Manager of Software Engineering at IFS, and loved her insights around creativity. While she’s looking at creativity primarily through the lens of how to impact and improve UX in design, the principles she shares are applicable for anyone and any industry in need of thinking about how to further nurture creativity in an effort to innovate and maintain competitive edge.

In the world of service, we see an opportunity to grow revenue by offering a unique and differentiated experience or outcome to customers. The inception of that value proposition, however, requires a level of creativity that doesn’t always come naturally to every leader and every organization. The good news, according to Rangika, is that you have every opportunity – as individuals and as companies – to cultivate more creativity to fuel innovation.

Rangika is a self-inspired UX enthusiast with a deep passion for UX Research and UX Design and an enthusiasm for inspiring and helping others. She started her career at IFS 15 years ago as a Software Engineer and today is a Senior Manager of Software Engineering where she works with the R&D Projects leadership team to support continual improvement of software delivery within Projects and alongside contributing to the UX team in UX research. She has spoken on several SLASSCOM (Sri Lanka Association for Software Services Companies) webinars on the subject of UX Design and UX Research and has created a non-profit website, Journey2UX.com, to act as a repository of resources for industry newcomers. Here, Rangika shares her thoughts on how best to foster creativity.

Sarah: I think there can be an assumption that you’re either born “a creative” or not. Do you feel someone can be “born” creative? For those that aren’t, can creativity be learned?

Rangika: To quote Pablo Picasso, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Most people believe creativity is a trait an individual is born with – either they have it or they don’t. But I consider this a myth. I’m a strong believer that creativity is an attribute everyone has within themselves when they are born. But, because of socialization and formal education, some of us lose this creative impulse on our journey to adulthood.

For example, if we give set of blocks to group of children and ask them to build something, everyone will grab few pieces and they will start creating imaginary buildings, animals, etc. While at the task, how about we stop them and start to teach them to build a certain item in a specific way? Then there will be some who start doing it the way they were taught, and some will still prefer to do it in a way they imagined. Then, what if we punish some of them for doing it differently or if we tell them what they created is wrong or useless? Of course, some of them might stop what they are doing altogether or will start to build it in the exact way that we taught them, because of the fear of either getting judged, being wrong, or looking stupid. Then, consider the situation if we continue to do this for years and years. Day by day, some of these kids will lose their courage to become creative and some will still continue to carry it. When they become adults, society will categorize the people who still have the creative impulse as creative and others as noncreative.

But, can we boost up the creativity within these people who consider themselves as noncreative? Of course, we can. Because it is still within them, and we only have to retune their creative muscle. This is what’s referred to as helping them rediscover their creative confidence.

Sarah: How would you define “creative confidence?”

Rangika: “Creative confidence is believing in your ability to create change in the world around you. This self-assurance lies at the heart of innovation.” according to brothers Tom and David Kelley in their book, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential within us all.

Creative confidence is an individual’s belief that he/she is creative. When we were kids, we were often bold, inspired and acted daringly. Those days we were imaginative, curious, and endlessly creative, and we possessed endless capacity for innovation. So, in other words, creative confidence is our own self-assurance that we can regain that kid.

Sarah: As an individual, how can leaders foster their own personal creativity?

Rangika: According to Tom and David Kelley of IDEO, any individual can restore their creativity or creative confidence by overcoming their fear of failure, taking frequent doses of inspiration, and by stopping procrastination and starting “doing.”

  1. Instead of fearing failure, start to learn from it. In schools, we were mostly being taught to avoid making mistakes and it is the same story in most workplaces. Therefore, we often avoid it at all cost. But as it turns out, failure can be one of our greatest teachers. Thomas Edison once said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” So, we need to flip our mind to learn from failures rather been afraid of it.
  2. Take frequent doses of inspiration to life. As our schedules get busy and responsibilities increase, it is hard to find time for inspiration. But inspiration is the fuel for creativity. So, how do we get fueled up? Be curious. Try to look beyond the obvious. Try to schedule daily space in your calendar to think, take a walk, or daydream. Keep some form of idea notebook to capture things that cross your radar. Practice empathy. Also, one of the best ways to get inspired is to step out of the context — look at something you might never expect to be helpful or relevant to the task at hand.
  3. Stop overplanning and just start. Even though we have a creative idea, acting on it can be daunting. Therefore, to minimize the risk impact, adults spend lot of time on strategy and planning. But there are times where the best you can do is just get out there and take action — stop focusing on the huge, overall task and find a small piece you can tackle right away. Because creativity and creative problem solving is rooted in action. Studies show that teams who test five or more ideas at the same time are 50% more likely to launch successful solutions than those who explore a single solution.

Sarah: What’s your best advice for making time for creative thinking when facing many day-to-day pressures?

Rangika: As said earlier, try to schedule daily space in your calendar to think, take a walk, or daydream. It does not have to be a long duration – 15 minutes would do. No matter how packed your schedule might be, if you are willing to find some time, there will be a way. You can utilize the time you travel, shower, etc. But, the most important thing is to practice it consistently. Because creativity is also like a muscle; the more you practice, the more it is strengthened.

Also, it is important you keep some form of idea notebook to capture things that come to mind. Do not just let them drain away. In addition, when you try to generate ideas, focus on the quantity – shoot for 100 instead of 10. Aim for as many new ideas as possible. The greater the number of ideas you generate, the bigger your chances of producing a radical and effective one. On the other hand, it allows us to let our minds wonder without restriction and that’s how most of the best ideas are generated.

Sarah: From a company perspective, what’s key to creating a creative culture?

Rangika: If a certain company wishes to create a creative culture in their workplace, it is of utmost importance that they make sure to build a fail-safe environment for their employees. Because no matter how hard we request employees to be creative, if they don’t have an environment in the workplace where they can try out their ideas without the fear of being judged, evaluated or punished based on the result, employees will not bring forward their original ideas freely.

At “X - the moonshot factory," they live a simple mantra: "Fail fast, fail often." Terrible ideas and failure are not only embraced, but celebrated. In his TED Talk on “The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure”, Astro Teller, director of X, says, "We spend most of the time breaking things and trying to prove that we're wrong. That's it. That's the secret.”

In addition to creating a fail-safe environment, another aspect that companies need to focus on is encouraging inspiration and innovation. Because if we expect the employees to be creative, then we need to provide the space and time to be inspired and innovate. If their work schedules are tightly packed with other work items, even though they want to be creative and innovative, they won’t have the breathing space to do that. So, if a company desires its employees to become inspired and innovate, then they must empower their teams to be inspired; let them find ways to understand the users of their product, system, or service; and allocate some time to be creative.

Sarah: What are some tactical ways leaders can encourage their teams to build their own creative confidence?

Rangika: Most importantly leaders need to start, by believing everybody can be creative and by accepting failure as a natural part of the creative process. Just as the leaders encourage teams to be creative, they need to encourage the teams when ideas fail. Also, acknowledging a team’s hard work while reminding failure happens to everyone and motivating them to learn from failure rather than shying away from it will create a great impact on building creative confidence within the team.

In addition, consider introducing initiatives that encourage inspiration and innovation within team members - e.g. Innovation day, encouraging frequent field visits to get to know users better. Also, “Worst idea brainstorm” is a great method to help teams to overcome their fear of failure and to open up the imagination and help them get in touch with creativity. Additionally, an “Idea Diamond” is another method which encourages the teams to generate innovative ideas. Another tactic is starting off the discussions from the newest member in the forum. This not only opens up a fresh perspective, but also will make sure that these ideas won’t get shadowed by the perspectives of experienced members. Similarly, from time to time, disrupting the routine, such as changing the environment or team setup, can help teams to think and act differently. Finally, encouraging the teams to simply start rather than overplanning is a key factor.

Sarah: What final thoughts can you share?

Rangika: Creativity is not only for artists, designers, and musicians. It is not a fixed trait gifted only to specific people, and it is not only for kids. Creativity is essential for every individual, not only in their career, but also in their personal lives. Bill Moggridge, IDEO cofounder, strongly believed that most people are vastly more creative and capable than they know, and I believe the same. So, it is all about boosting up the creativity confidence within these people. But creative confidence cannot achieve only by reading, thinking, or talking about it. Rather, confidence in your creativity gets strengthen through action and practicing it often. So, try harder, give frequent space for your mind to roam free, start learning from your failures, get inspired, and simply just take action. The rewards and the individuality you will gain are well worth the effort.

If you’re interested in taking a deeper look, here are some references that Rangika suggests:

https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Confidence-Unleashing-Potential-Within/dp/038534936X

https://hbr.org/2012/12/reclaim-your-creative-confidence

https://www.creativeconfidence.com/about/

https://www.ideou.com/products/unlocking-creativity

https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-YScywp6AU

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_how_to_build_your_creative_confidence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEusrD8g-dM

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Back to Basics: Onboarding New Software Systems

April 23, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Back to Basics: Onboarding New Software Systems

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By Tom Paquin

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

We’ve obviously spoken about implementation in the abstract before in this series, specifically with respect to replacing an old service provider, or implementing service technology for the first time, but I feel that it’s worth discussing the processes and pitfalls of what happens when the rubber hits the road.

We’ve seen how this can fail before. It’s important to build systems with employees in mind. This has been the subject of much of our discussion about selecting a service system to begin with. But when you’ve gone through the bid and selection process, what does the act of implementation look like?

There are ostensibly two stages to this—handling the technology, and handling your people. Let’s start with the tech.

Ripping Out the Old Wires

Whether you’re bringing in an end-to-end service system to manage all areas of service oversight, analysis, and optimization, or you’re installing a peripheral piece of software designed to enhance or simplify an experience, odds are good that you’re going to need to reroute some systems, and some thinking. I don’t need to tell you that timing is key, and most businesses build their sunset plans to overlap with deployment of a new solution.

How that looks can differ from business to business, and we’ll discuss in more detail exactly how that nuance can be developed below. It’s a tough balance, because you don’t want technicians to lean on old systems, and when a database is ported over, then that’s the end of it. But there’s inevitably benefits in holding off shutting the lights off until it’s time.

If you’re moving from one vendor to another, it’s often imperative that you look at how vendors have handled transitions from your old vendor in the past. There may be a list of considerations based on precedent, or there may be one particular integration partner that is more adept than others at managing and coordinating the transition.

Enabling Your Staff

Once the transition has begun, it’s time to start thinking about how you on-board staff. We’ve talked about the importance of building teams of player-coaches in the organization, how imperative it is to develop pilots (thus overlapping old a new technologies), and setting hard benchmarks for your team before, but it’s worth revisiting again.

This organizational agility will likely outlast your relationship with an implementation partner, so the onus of how effectively you wield the powerful tools you’ve been enabled with will depend greatly on how they are absorbed into your company culture. In my experience, small pilots are a great way to see what works with a given product.

If you’re going to pilot a new solution with, let’s say five percent of technicians, it’s important that they are not all high performers. Your pilot should represent the broad demography of your service technicians, with older and newer employees, and employees at different levels of output. It’s up to you whether you want to involve different disciplines in a pilot. In my experience many businesses opt to run pilots in a specific division first, then expand it out, but it’s feasible to run a pilot across all different types of service functions.

Pilots are meant to be temporary, of course, so taking it live is the next step. With a major update, many companies make rollout an event. We see organizations shut down operations for a day, onboard new technicians, sell the value of the new technology, and make every resource available to ensure success.

With any technology initiative, starting off on the right foot is imperative. Set yourself up for success with the right tools, a solid implementation plan, and the right people to take it over the finish line.

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Mastering the Moment of Service: Art or Science?

April 19, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Mastering the Moment of Service: Art or Science?

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

In today’s customer-centric culture, the moment of service means more than ever. The moment of service is a moment of engagement, a moment of opportunity, moment of innovation, a moment of potential growth. There’s a whole lot riding on your ability to execute on those moments if you realize service for the powerful potential it holds.

For most businesses, mastering the moment of service has become a major priority. This mastery requires the business to navigate and streamline immense complexity to deliver what the customer wants in the moment it matters – a seamless and positive experience. So, is this mastery an art or a science? I’d argue it’s the perfect blend of both.

The Art of Exceptional Service

The art of service, at its root, is in adeptly uncovering, understanding, articulating, and addressing your customers’ challenges and opportunities in the form of your value proposition. A customer-driven value proposition requires relationships, listening, and trust. It requires an innovative mindset and a willingness departure from business-as-usual, and that in and of itself is an art many struggle with.

This art of customer-driven value propositions is enabled by the artful creation of a customer-centric company culture that recognizes the role service plays in success and growth. This culture welcomes innovative ideas and input and recognizes the criticality of employee engagement in delivering on the moment of service.

I also think that redefining the field service role is an art. Hiring folks to show up, fix something, and leave is a thing of the past. To master the moment of service, you need to redefine what service means to your business and reassess what the field service role entails. Most customers are looking for a trusted advisor, a more consultative and value-led relationship, and execution of that requires a different skill set than break/fix service does.

The Science of Service Excellence

To be impactful, the art of customer-driven value proposition, service-centric culture, employee engagement, and modernized service roles must be complimented by some science. One of the most important areas of science in service excellence is the evaluation, optimization, and standardization of processes. While arduous, this exercise is essential to creating a consistent and uniform experience to represent and reaffirm your brand.

Digital transformation and automation are other important elements of the science of mastering the moment of service. Customers want simplicity, and technology is key to being able to navigate and streamline complexity to deliver that simplicity. Whether it’s a consistent view of operations, more efficient planning and utilization of resources, remote service capabilities, or predictive analytics, today’s customer expectations can’t be met without a modern, cohesive digital infrastructure.

That digital infrastructure equips your company to master perhaps the most important science of this all: data. Data is what powers your moment of service – it’s what helps you operate efficiently and intelligently enough to be able to not only offer but guarantee the outcomes your customers want. But, in many instances, data is also an increasingly important part of the customer value proposition as well.

There are, of course, many more aspects to both the art and science sides of this equation. And then there are areas, like communication, that span both – communication is an art, but can be driven by the science of systems.

All too often, when companies struggle with mastering the moment of service and recognizing the potential of service on their business, it’s because they are focusing too narrowly on just one side of this equation. The art and the science are both very important and investing in resources who are strong in either area is important. But marrying the two is ultimately how you’ll master the moment of service and truly seize the service opportunity.

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Containerization is the Bellwether of Service Software Flexibility

April 16, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Containerization is the Bellwether of Service Software Flexibility

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By Tom Paquin

I have always been of a mind that the most important thing that software—any software—can do is to get out of your way. Even social media platforms, cultural cancers that they are, know that their key purpose (communication) needs to be easy, accessible, and provide the necessary feedback to show that it is working (“likes”, as it were). These are the keys of solid programming, and they’re how and why we use the devices that we do in the ways that we do.

This takes on a slightly different precedence in service, wherein the goal is not just to allow the technology to make completing actions seamless, the goal is to enhance the service process while not disrupting it in any major way. Here's an example of bad software design: If, in order to build schedules, you need to have availability loadouts three weeks in advance, and can’t update them same-day because of illness, or because of a high-priority outage that just came up, then that software is worse than pen and paper, and it’s actually an impediment to your growth.

It’s incredible how many software providers don’t understand this fact, and it’s why some firms struggle to get their teams to use the technologies at their disposal in the first place.

Today, though, I don’t want to talk about the user experience of software applications. We do that all the time. I want to take this concept outside of the day-to-day utilization of software, and look at the framework of the software itself.

Because here’s the thing: Service firms are complex. They are, frequently, a mismatch of cultures, either through means of acquisitions, or organizations working alongside OEMs, or distributors, or aftermarket part manufacturers, or contingent employees, or some Frankensteinian combination of these elements. And service delivery itself doesn’t fit into a neat box. There are different tiers (telcos, for instance, balancing commercial and residential service visits), different types of workforces, and different systems employed depending on the nature of a fix, or a routine appointment, or an emergency, or a predicted event, and so on, and so on, and so on.

On a frankly more basic level, some companies simply require, perhaps for regulatory reasons, their solutions to be managed on-prem. Others have managed cloud space of their own that they want to employ. Others, still, are in a position to move to the cloud. None of these (or any other adoption permutation) are wrong, and software that supports that flexibility will be engineered to support flexibility further down the value chain as well.

Service software deployment demands flexibility. This begins with containerization.

The concept of containerization, in its simplest terms, means that software is packaged (or ‘contained’ I suppose) in a way, with all ancillary processes, that enables it to be deployed at the discretion of the end user.

Today, the way that this most commonly works is that businesses build a cloud-first product, and they’re willing to sell it to you in the cloud, managing upkeep, upgrades, licenses, and operations for you wholly. Some companies consider this “The future” and refuse to practically look beyond it, even though it’s not only “the present”, it’s our very messy present. An inherently containerized product, though—one that lives in the cloud natively—can be just as easily packaged and deployed on a home server, with the same internal structure, same APIs, and to the same effect. Or that container can be handed off to another cloud host, managed independently of the “multi-tenant” cloud instance upon which the software was built. So “single tenant” cloud hosting.

Call it containerization, or Kubernetes, or whatever you want. To my estimation, it’s really the bellwether that defines product flexibility down-the-line. Software that cares enough about your business to offer you that degree of deployment flexibility understands your business. In my experience, that means that their actual functionality will be built to contour to the shape of your actual operations, not force you to work around them.

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The Future of the Service Workforce: 5 Pillars of Preparation

April 12, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

The Future of the Service Workforce: 5 Pillars of Preparation

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

The future of work is a topic that comes up in almost every conversation I have in one way or another. Service leaders are grappling with a lack of available talent, working to determine how the field service role is changing, and balancing the management and retention of both older and young workers who have significantly different needs and desires. There are many layers to this conversation, all of which we will continue to dig into here at Future of Field Service. The common understanding, though, is that preparing for the future of the service workforce will be one of the biggest challenges among our audience in the coming handful of years. Today I’m going to discuss five pillars of preparation that are key to setting your company up to navigate this massive challenge with the highest chance of success.

Pillar #1: Redefine

The role of the field technician has changed, is changing, and will continue to change. You need to work hard to consider how the role is being redefined based on your company’s journey toward Servitization or leveraging advanced services as a competitive differentiator or path to revenue growth. What does this mean for your needs today as well as for your needs over the next five years?

For most organizations, what’s happening is that the role is evolving to require more than the traditional technical skill sets. Today’s field technicians are needing more soft skills to succeed in the role of trusted advisor as customer relationships and service value propositions evolve. This trend will only continue, so it’s essential to map where your company is heading in terms of what services you’ll be providing and how and then how that translates to the skills needed from your field technicians to accomplish those goals.

Perhaps you can evolve the role of your field technician to meet your future needs; perhaps you’ll need to add new roles as your business model matures. Being clear on the redefinition, though, from what was required historically to what you’ll need over the next five years gives you the insights needed to determine where the gaps lie, how to reframe job requirements and postings as well as training programs and progression paths, and prioritize greatest needs.

Pillar #2: Redesign

Once you have better defined your current state as it relates to talent and what’s needed to meet your service objectives, you can work to redesign your recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and progression processes to be in line with what you need – versus what you’ve always done. As skill sets needed change, so too should job descriptions and recruiting practices. Training may need to focus more heavily on soft skills and relationship management, as well as use of technology, than it has in the past.

Many companies complain of a “talent gap” when really what they’re frustrated with is an “experience gap,” meaning they are accustomed to being able to hire technicians with years of experience and those tenured technicians are becoming harder to come by. This doesn’t mean that talent doesn’t exist, though, it just means you have to work harder for it than you have in the past. This is a new normal you need to adjust to, and it means redesigning your definitions of talent, experience, and fit.

Some of the top areas of “redesign” underway when it comes to creating a workforce for the future are modernizing job roles and requirements to attract a more diverse pool of candidates, being sure to create appeal for the younger generation, introducing new roles based on your redefined requirements, and – perhaps most importantly – thinking about how to foster more talent versus simply attracting it.

Companies like Tetra Pak, for example, have created programs to foster future talent. This need to become more creative, and take more ownership, around meeting the needs you have for your field workforce teams is I think one of the biggest areas of redesign that’s essential. You cannot continue to post jobs and expect a wave of ready-to-hire applicants; you need to become more inventive around how you can take smart, capable people and meld them into the talent you need to exceed.

Pillar #3: Outsource

Outsourcing field work isn’t for everyone, but it is a growing trend. And here’s why – what many companies are doing is outsourcing the more basic, traditional break-fix work in an effort to have more time and energy to focus on upskilling and developing their in-house talent to do some of the more sophisticated work around advanced services.

There have been some reservations around leveraging third-party workers, and I don’t think those reservations are entirely without merit. But as the gig economy grows it becomes a more practical choice for many, and with today’s technologies, many of the concerns around the management of those workers and the control over brand experience are being minimized.

Perhaps for you it isn’t a move to outsourcing, but to creating a hierarchy of field technician within your company – an entry level position that handles some of the basics and a progression of positions that tackle more sophisticated service offerings. However you decide to tackle it, you shouldn’t rule out outsourcing without doing some due diligence.

Pillar #4: Automate

Another critical element of the future of work strategy is automation. How can you leverage predictive technology to anticipate versus react to needs, and to better prepare technicians for the work they’ll do on site? How can you leverage AI for knowledge capture and management, so that as your most experienced technicians retire you don’t lose a lifetime of knowledge along with them?

How does remote service fit into your service strategy? Using remote assistance and AR for a remote-first approach can act similar to outsourcing in the sense of eliminating the most basic level of service requirements by handling remotely tasks that can be resolved easily and quickly.

How enabled are your customers with self-service? Self service fulfills the customer’s desire for more control and autonomy, while often reducing the burden of the service provider in some ways.

Today’s technologies are powerful, sophisticated, and ready to help you morph your workforce into the future. Examining your options around automation, what can be automated and how, is key to managing the significant demands on service organizations that are only increasing.

Pillar #5: Innovate

Like all areas of service transformation, the conversation around the workforce is one that requires an innovative mindset. Break free of the “this is how we’ve done it” and you’ll be halfway there. Your business is likely changing (or it should be!), and therefore your workforce needs to change too. Look at how other businesses in your industry but maybe more importantly outside of your industry are tackling this universal challenge. Be open to new ideas, new roles, new processes, and new technologies. Those that exceed at creating the workforce of the future will do so by thinking out of the box, by creating a unique culture and challenge for their teams, and by understanding that your frontline workforce is absolutely imperative to your success as a service organization.

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