Tag: podcast

A Plea to My Fellow Business Travelers

A Focus on Efficiency is Only the Tip of the AI Iceberg – Expert Advice for Considering What Comes Next

How Trends in Enterprise Asset Management Intersect with Service

August 4, 2021 | 24 Mins Read

Bringing the As-A-Service Opportunity to Life

August 4, 2021 | 24 Mins Read

Bringing the As-A-Service Opportunity to Life

Sarah talks with Scott Weller, Partner at Mossrake Group, about the work he does helping companies bring as-a-Service offerings to the market and how the microcosm approach can aid in overcoming the barriers in realizing the potential of as-a-Service.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be talking about what it takes to successfully introduce an as a service model. You may remember from the podcast, Scott Weller, who is partner with Mossrake Group. Scott, welcome back to the Future of Field Service Podcast.

Scott Weller: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here. Scott was on the podcast a while back with Howard Bowland from Schneider Electric, talking about their introduction of an as a service offering. I wanted to have Scott back because he has a lot of really interesting and valuable expertise in this area that I think our listeners will find a lot of benefit in hearing.

Sarah Nicastro: So, Scott, before we get into the content we have planned for today, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your background, and then we'll get started.

Scott Weller: Sure. So, Scott Weller. I'm a partner with Mossrake Group. And we work with technology product companies who are looking to grow through services. And these days, that conversation inevitably goes to as a service models and outcomes based business. Prior to Mossrake, I was the global leader for the support services business in Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and in our time, there we built a multi-billion dollar IT as a service business, that's now known as HPE GreenLake.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. Okay, so you have experience with this transition and evolution firsthand from your time at HPE and you also have a lot of experience helping organizations on this journey as well. You just mentioned two terms, and I want to clarify the intersection here of the terms outcomes based service, and then as a service. So, can you give some context on where you see those two things intersecting?

Scott Weller: Well, in our business, we, again, work with technology product companies, and usually, their identity is tied up in being product focused. And of course, they'll have services to maintain the products. But shifting to outcomes is a very different kind of animal. Outcomes is about putting yourself into the customer's shoes, looking at the business they're in, and looking at what they're trying to get done versus focusing on the particular asset. So, I suppose it's not required to move to as a service to be able to deliver an outcomes basis, but what we find is, is that... Well, we haven't seen an example of that, quite frankly. Customers really want to shift the way they procure, the way they consume value when they're focused on outcomes. And so, we see those almost being synonymous but they're not really synonymous, but in practice, they might as well be, from our experience.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. That makes sense. So, you mentioned the word identity, and this is a term that we've talked a little bit about. And when you're looking at transitioning to as a service, you have said that identity is a really big factor in that transformation. So, talk to us a little bit about what that means, what identity means for the business, and how it affects the journey.

Scott Weller: Well, so identity in a company is really around the unwritten rules, what we're here to do, what we value, what we're good at, what we're known for, and identity gets codified into the business model, so that the value chain aligns to it, and really, the businesses optimize for that identity, and even over time, as the business might evolve, identity is what survives. And so, if you try to introduce a new business model into an existing business, what can happen is the entire value chain can work against you. It becomes a barrier.

Scott Weller: You think about sales, salespeople have to move from a transactional relationship to one that's continuous and collaborative. And of course, there's the never ending questions about, how do you get paid? You will find people in your company who firmly strongly believe that anything that leads to a monthly payment, that must be in the purview of the financial services organization or an external financial partner. And probably, the most difficult transition is for product development. You have engineers and product management who identify with making the coolest thing, the fastest thing, the best, the highest quality thing, and now they're asked to be a supporting cast member in an ensemble trying to deliver unique experiences and outcomes.

Scott Weller: So, really, it's a fundamental shift, it's very difficult. And this is why you find a lot of mature product companies either haven't started on the journey or are still on that journey even though there are clear demand signals from the market.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, there's a massive opportunity with this journey but there's significant challenges in terms of intrinsically, that identity companies have and evolving that and overcoming what that means in terms of migrating the business towards this more modern approach. So, generally speaking, what's the path? What do organizations need to consider? What's the best approach to make progress here?

Scott Weller: Typically, when something this big, this kind of shift is needed, it's a C level decision. And, of course, what's top of mind there is, "How do we overcome the inertia within our company to do this and make the investments while still making our financials for the quarter and the year?" It's not an easy problem to solve. So, what we've seen is there are usually two paths that are taken. One is, if you're a technology product company, you engage a third party finance firm. And that's really problematic, because number one, it puts another entity, another brand, another identity between yourself and the customer. I mean, you've worked out maybe how to do billing, but that hasn't solved the problem of becoming an outcomes based or an experience based company, and customer see right through that. So, that to us is not even a good half step.

Scott Weller: The other approach, of course, that companies take is through mergers and acquisitions. And as we all know, acquisitions rarely fulfill the entire promise. It's very problematic. You're starting with two different identities trying to come together, two different value chains, mismatched expectations, and on and on. So, that's a very high stakes, highly visible play to make. It brings in all kinds of special help to make it work, and so it's really a challenge.

Scott Weller: So, really, our view is, we feel strongly and we've actually done this in practice, is that the microcosm approach is really the best one. The internal incubator, start small, an agile approach is really the best way for us to see this succeed, because in the end, what this approach does is it allows the new business model to essentially gestate within the existing machine and has to knock down all of these value chain barriers one by one, which is not a small challenge. But when you do it in a microcosm, it's just much easier, and by the time the bigger machine realizes what's going on, the model is entirely proven. And then the question is not whether it works, the question is, how do you go faster?

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Okay. So, one of the things I want to just touch on before we talk a little bit more about the internal incubator approach is this idea that the reason those other methods are problematic is because when you're looking at introducing as a service, it isn't about the financials, it's about the value proposition, right? So, that idea of just, "Okay, so we'll take our products from a CAPEX model to an OPEX model, and that will move us to as a service," right? That's basically faulty thinking, correct? Because customers are looking for, it's not about the method of financing, it's about the value proposition.

Scott Weller: Yeah. I mean, this is kind of a rat hole that you can get into in every conversation. And so how is this different than financing? And financing, really, if you think about it, is still very much a product focused, asset focused approach to the market. It simply is a different way to pay versus a very different kind of experience and outcome. Because if you work with financing, that's great and there's a place for that, but if you want an outcome basis, you've got to be thinking about what is the experience you're delivering? Who's looking after that asset in the customer context? Who's there to ensure the promise is fulfilled? Who's there to make sure that, as the customer evolves, essentially, the solution evolves with them? Again, a financing arrangement is still a transaction, versus an ongoing, continuous relationship that's really more like a collaboration than anything else.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. And I just wanted to clarify that to make sure people understand that they are two very different things. And when you're talking about getting the ultimate results of introducing this model, it's in the context of moving toward that outcome or experience approach. Okay.

Scott Weller: Right.

Sarah Nicastro: So, let's talk in a little bit more detail about the internal incubator or microcosm approach. So, this is something that we discussed in the context of the Schneider Electric example. I found it very interesting. So, in that instance, Howard in his region, along with Mossrake, has done this internal incubator type process. So, tell us a little bit about how that works and why it is a really viable option for companies that are looking to make progress on this journey.

Scott Weller: So, I don't want to make it sound easy like there's a silver bullet here, because it's never going to be easy. And I guess the other thing I would say is, it does require a visionary leader on the ground. And this may be why companies don't do it, because they can't find that kind of person where they need them. But once you have someone who's visionary, by that I mean they can see how this plays out, they're getting the demand signals locally, they can see how this can play out, they really believe in the idea, and they're willing to put their neck out a bit and have the courage to see it through. And I don't use that term lightly in the context of business, because it is high stakes even if it's in a microcosm.

Scott Weller: But with all that, I mean, really, it's almost like the antithesis to the big, monolithic, multi-year, very expensive programs that big companies tend to embark on when they need to make a transition. It's not common to say, "Hey, let's go do a small thing, see how the market reacts, let's see how a few customers react, let's go after this." And by the way, the local team has to be willing to do this as a second job. So, you have to enlist people who are game for this and have the right skills.

Scott Weller: So, it's not like a miracle has to occur, but a lot of the right things have to come together at the local level to do this microcosm approach. But then, as I said, I mean, I can tell you from our experience back at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and then more recently with Schneider Electric is, you do these small things, you test it, you come back, you refine, you pilot, you get a few customers, they tell you what's good and bad about what you're trying to do. And the thing then can grow. And if it's going to fail, it fails quickly on a small scale without any of the reputational risk and financial risk really.

Scott Weller: But again, once it's proven, companies can continue to study this and should we do it or should we... But I mean, there's no question that it works, the only question might be, well, maybe it doesn't work in every locale, and that's fine. But again, in my experience, what happens is once senior management sees this, they're like, "Okay, this is really good, and why aren't you going faster?" If you think of the question.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. So, the microcosm, so we're talking about taking a particular region or a particular area of the business and using it as that internal incubator. So, what does that process look like? And I know that at Mossrake, you guys are really working hand in hand as an extension of the team to take this from vision to reality, refinement to reality, etc. So, tell us a little bit about what that looks like.

Scott Weller: Well, like any other management consultant project with a client, usually, it's begun by this visionary leader who may not have the skills in their team, or they may not have the positional authority, or even the credibility. Like a new leader can come in and they're an unknown quantity, so they seek our help to really, first of all, determine, are the demand signals that they are personally seeing representative of the broader market? If so, then what is the opportunity in the market? And then get down to, okay, well, what do we want to offer here? Define that, build it out, again, using an agile approach, where you don't solve every problem at the beginning, you know that you don't know everything, and you start building.

Scott Weller: So, that's how we did it as internal executives back at HPE, and that's how we did it working with Howard at Schneider Electric, and that's how we do it with our other clients that are in flight.

Scott Weller: And there are times we've seen where, once this is all laid out, a client might say, "Hey, listen, we have so many things on our plate right now, we just can't do it. We think it's absolutely where we need to go. We can't do it." Others are saying like, "We're so late now. How do we do all this but speed it up?" And there are ways to do that, but also limits, because if you want to be thoughtful and build incrementally versus these large, monolithic programs, simply, there's a point where you can't make it go any faster.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. So, there's a couple of things, if I'm reflecting back on the example that I'm most familiar with, about the microcosm approach that I think are really interesting to discuss. The first is the role that you played in terms of, not only helping create the value proposition or the go to market, but then also acting as a resource in terms of almost training in real-time on how to articulate that to customers, right?

Sarah Nicastro: So, I found that very interesting because when you're making this big of a change in an organization, we're talking about changing the whole way that you think about, deliver service, and engage with your customers, it seems terrifying to me to just say like, "Okay, salesperson, go have this conversation and see how it goes." Right? And you guys played a very hands-on role in that process, so that through some cycles, you were able to help get those conversations comfortable and build those skills, almost leading by example, right? So, can you talk a little bit about that aspect of it?

Scott Weller: Sure. And I should say that we did what you've just describe, not just in the go to market, but across the value chain, having done it and lived it in another big multinational. But for sure, on the sales side, it's things like, what is the story? What is the message and how do you package that as sales enablement? And then how do you begin to train up sales people who are, in a way, predisposed to a different kind of messaging verses what they've might have been massively successful doing before? It doesn't necessarily mean that this is the kind of message they feel comfortable with, the storytelling might be quite foreign and uncomfortable to them.

Scott Weller: So, you have to intersect the right kind of messaging with the people who are able to receive it and take it to customers. So yes, we did a lot of that, shoulder to shoulder, as they say, with individuals. In the case of Schneider, COVID threw a wrench into our being physically present, we did some of that prior. But in any case, you do have to take that shoulder to shoulder approach and really support the sales activity with research.

Scott Weller: Back at HPE, I did the SWOT for a SWAT team approach, where some of my local leaders from the global team would literally fly out and do seminars, and go into customer situations and help either deliver the pitch or assist in delivering it, do post-mortems and all that sort of thing. So, yeah, I mean, you have to really understand that this comes down to people. Every aspect of this comes down to people. You talk to someone in product development, they say, "What's in it for me? I want to make my cool stuff." And so, really, it's very much about people all through this, and sales especially.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think, again, the value of this internal incubator approach is, one, it's at a scale where you're able to provide that shoulder to shoulder type of support so that you really are having that opportunity in a vacuum to get that story right, refine that message, train those skills and how to have those conversations, and get it right before you expand it out, right? So, rather than trying to do it at scale and have however many customer interactions potentially go awry, you're really refining that in this incubator before you start to take it out to the masses. So, it seems very smart to me. And I think that that was one thing I found really interesting.

Sarah Nicastro: The other thing I wanted to touch on related to the microcosm approach is this idea of, from the very beginning of it, you have the intention of documenting everything well so that there is an opportunity to, once you're successful, expand it throughout the rest of the business. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Scott Weller: Yes, and I completely agree that this has to be well documented, again, across the value chain, every aspect. So, all the sales. I mean, we essentially have quite a sales library built up and, essentially, training programs, also partner program well documented. So, really, every aspect is within what we call an operational blueprint, so that when we're no longer involved in the activity, the business is able to survive personnel changes and so on. It's essentially a matter of institutionalizing what you're doing to the point that it will survive personnel changes, and certainly, our involvement coming to an end. So yeah, I think that has to be really designed in upfront when you're going to go down this path, that somehow you're not going to have successful business in the moment, but nobody knows what to do when a new person comes in or an experienced person leaves. It's really critical that you have everything written down.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And I just think that's a really good point, because this isn't an internal incubator, like, "Hey, let's try this, see what kind of success we find, and then we'll figure out what comes next," this is doing it with the intent of, "Let's create the success in this microcosm with the ability to blueprint it and then take it throughout the organization." Good.

Sarah Nicastro: So, you've mentioned agile a few times, and I want to talk a little bit about this because I think this is a term that just gets misinterpreted, or misunderstood, or thrown around a lot, and I want to talk about what it is, and isn't, I guess, in regards to a project like this. So, tell us a little bit about what the agile process looks like within this microcosm approach?

Scott Weller: Sure. Well, again, it's a process that's, as I mentioned earlier, the antithesis to the big monolithic program, it's really meant to be iterative and collaborative, collaborating not just with the end customer in terms of, what do you think about this, but also you have to collaborate with your channel partners, your sales organization, how you run inventory, how you do billing, all of these sorts of things have to be brought into the process.

Scott Weller: And, again, the presumption is that you have a pretty good idea of the pins that you have to knock down along the way, but you certainly don't know everything. You have a pretty good idea about what will resonate with the market, but there are pieces that you can't know, and you might have to, maybe not do a hard left or right, but you have to be able to shift direction. And especially for the sponsor of a program like this, they have to have a rapport with their peers and management chain that allow them to come in and say, "Hey, listen, what we've learned is we need to shift a little bit to the left or right, and that's got to be okay. That's not going to kill this," right?

Scott Weller: And, again, keeping the reputational risk low, the financial risk low means that no one is going to lose their mind, their heads aren't going to explode over some of these kinds of natural shifts. And at some point in time, after enough work has been done, there should be a hard go-no-go decision, not unlike the classic waterfall model, you do need to prepare for that moment in time where you're going to say, "Okay, we've learned enough. Is this what we really want to do?" Because the next phase will inevitably require more people, more resources, more investment. And especially, if you've built a local successful business, now you want to take it on the road, and take it to other locales and try to build the business in those places.

Scott Weller: That's a huge commitment and investment, and pretty soon, the company, if they haven't by that time already, they're going to be talking to the market about it, it's going to become an investor discussion even. And so, you really have to be prepared for the bigger transitions. And so, there are some moments in time that are hard choice points, but not at the beginning, not in the initial build out, not in the figuring out, "Is this a business that works and is one that we want to be in?"

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think there can be this interpretation of agile as just completely loosey goosey, and we'll just go in and see what happens. I think the idea here is you have a good plan going in but you're open to evolving, refining, learning, in those early phases to make sure that before you take it out of that microcosm, you have something that's pretty well vetted and pretty proven.

Scott Weller: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: So, that makes sense. What I'm curious about, Scott, is, what does this all look like from the perspective of the pilot customers?

Scott Weller: Well, pilot customers, I would say, if they've become a pilot customer, they appreciate this approach. The individual, the sponsor on the customer side is probably, you could call them an adventurer, a forward thinker, and they like being part of a process like this, realizing that they're investing themselves, they're investing their own time, it can be a distraction to do this in their business, but they're game for it. And I would say, other than maybe a higher frequency of interaction, because again, it's a collaborative process, we try to keep the burden low and we try to essentially create a commercial arrangement that allows them to go down the road with us, but at some point, say, "You know what, this was fun and all, but we need to take our hands off this wheel and go back to the former way of operating," and that's fine.

Scott Weller: So, you have to give them a path out, you have to give them a path to double down if they really like what's happening. So, it does take a different kind of care process for this customer, beyond maybe your traditional product services, you've got to really look after them and make sure they're good every step of the way.

Sarah Nicastro: And what's your advice for fully leveraging success with a pilot customer once you've got to that point?

Scott Weller: Well, we do ask for references, if they would be willing to be a reference customer. Sometimes they have their good reasons not to be. If you're in a sensitive industry, maybe being seen as the first or not being seen as a conservative brand might hurt you. So, they say, "Well, listen, we love this but we just don't want to put our name on it." Other times they love it, they want to be associated with forward thinking and innovation. And so, every customer is different, but we do ask for that.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, we talked about the need for a visionary within the company to spearhead this, but as you mentioned earlier, especially early on in the process, you're also asking a lot of people that are going to be involved that are early on, both keeping up with the day to day and the traditional way of doing things while also introducing this and working on this microcosm. So, I love that you call them adventurers. I think that's really cool. I'm curious if there are, I don't know, common characteristics that you look for. How do you find those adventurers and enroll them in this journey?

Scott Weller: It's harder than it looks. You do depend on knowing people. And this is where the internal sponsor, they need to have their network of people, because you can find people who are really up for it but they're just bored, they just want anything else as a distraction, but they may not be the kind of people that you need at the moment.

Scott Weller: So, you look for people who seem to be a high energy, always looking to find ways to do things in a better way or have a better outcome, people who were maybe questioning the system every day, asking themselves, "Can't we find a better way to do this?" And it's almost like you know when you see it. And even then, not everybody can sustain the level of energy and output, because working today is hard, there's a lot of demands on people, and so sometimes people just have to excuse themselves on the process, that it's the coolest thing ever but they just don't have the bandwidth to do it. And even those who you get into these programs and they go on for a year or more, at some point, people may be looking at career transitions. And so, it's not like you can get your dream team set up day one and then they're there forever. People come in and out.

Scott Weller: So, this is where you're constantly evaluating people for this, and hopefully, eventually, as the business takes off, you can put people into this new business officially, and they don't have all the other distractions. But what we see happens, though, is, even when that happens, especially in this microcosm model, there are things that you have to overcome or build that you say to yourself, "Really, this should be a corporate initiative," like when it comes to IT systems, for example. "Why should a local team be worrying about ERP or trying to get these systems to bend to the new model?" So, there's always the next challenge, and people can get burned out.

Scott Weller: And so, it's not enough to be the visionary leader, you have to always remember that this is a people things, people are at the core of all of this, and you need to really watch how people evolve themselves personally through this process.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I would think, as that visionary leader, you need these adventurers, not only to drive progress, but to keep your own energy high. Do you know what I mean? If you're the only one that's kind of pushing this, right, not only is that not feasible, but that would be a pretty isolated place to be. So, if you can find this network of adventurers that are excited about the opportunity and willing to work alongside to drive it, it's beneficial in both ways.

Scott Weller: It is. Although I would just say that, really, the visionary leader has to be more a source of energy than a sink of energy. Unfortunately or fortunately that's typically how it works.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. So, maybe they can get some of that energy from you and Mossrake instead of the team internally, right? Because they need to be providing it, not taking it.

Scott Weller: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, this transformation to as a service depends on both internal and external influence. So, talk a little bit about how that materializes in the work you do with your customers.

Scott Weller: So, again, every customer is different. What we find are some common themes, though. I mean, even I would say more than ever, companies realize that what got us here won't get us there. We might be at the top of our game, but the world is evolving and changing so fast. The chances of getting blindsided, particularly if you've got a lot of momentum and you've had a lot of success, is people will double down on what they did yesterday versus looking for the challenge to do something different today. And that momentum becomes nothing more than inertia to be overcome in the next turn of the business.

Scott Weller: So, I think this notion of optimizing, optimizing down, what you've got today as a path to success, really, I think is more and more... of course, companies want to optimize. Why be wasteful in what you do? But at the same time, optimization can mean that a company is fragile. And so the next time you want to introduce something different, then, really, everything breaks, there's just fires everywhere. And so, how do you create a business that can be resilient through these transitions, and also, how do you engender in your people a kind of... Well, I always talk about three things; adaptability to the change, tenacity so that you can hunker down and get through it, and curiosity, because there are views that, really, without curiosity, civilization can't really evolve and transform.

Scott Weller: So, these three attributes are so critical to engender in your people. You have to hire for it, you need to encourage that way of thinking. I've just seen in a lot of cases people will say, "Hey, I listen to what you're talking about, and I have to admit, I'm not a very curious person. You give me a problem, I'm on it dog on bone. I'm going to make this thing happen, and that's great, but I don't think about, 'Well, what does my peer do? What does this other group do? How are we working together to create this outcome?'" And you can see that if you had an organization that had those kinds of attributes and then learning, "Okay, today we're product focused, tomorrow, we're going to be outcomes focused," you can see how having the right kind of mental model and attitudes within your people can make that transition really a lot easier or a lot harder.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. And that goes back to the point you made about this is all about people, right? I mean, that is the key thing here. And there's a lot of different enablers, there's a lot of different do's and don'ts, but your success or failure really comes down to who you have as a part of the journey.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Well, this is a lot of great information, a lot of good food for thought, and I'm sure there's a lot of other things we could dig into, so perhaps we'll do it again in the future. But for today, Scott, any other closing comments or words of wisdom that you want to leave the listeners with?

Scott Weller: In storytelling, it's thought that really there are only a few unique themes, like coming of age, or good versus evil. One of them is about courage and tenacity, perseverance. And I would say that that is the theme of moving to as a service and outcomes. You have to have courage, or some small group of people have to have the courage to think differently, to put themselves out there a little bit, to champion the cause, to fight the good fight to stay with it through and through, and those kinds of people are hard to find. It's much easier to play it safe and let somebody at the top of the company make the big decisions. And so, if anyone is listening to this that's at that point where they're ready to put themselves out there for something they believe, just go for it. It's well worth it, and you can, as we did back at HPE, you can literally change the direction of the company.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that's really good advice, and I think you're right that those people are hard to come by, and I hope the companies that have those people understand the value of those folks, right, because it's a huge asset. So, thank you for that, Scott.

Sarah Nicastro: Scott Weller, Mossrake Group. You can find Scott and Mossrake Group on LinkedIn, if you want to check out a little bit more about what they do and how they work with different folks that are on this journey. So, thanks again, Scott, for coming on and sharing your wisdom.

Scott Weller: My pleasure. Thanks, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: You can find more content by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @TheFutureOfFS. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS at ifs.com. As always, thanks for listening.

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Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today I have two guests with me to talk about some of the ways that we can tackle the talent gap. We all know that this is a problem in all of the industries that we cover here at Future of Field Service. This challenge is only going to increase in the coming years. And so we are committed to bringing you as much content as we can to discuss some of the ways that you can prepare and take control of the situation. So today I have with me the authors of a book, one of which is Michael Solomon, Michael Solomon, hi, Michael is an established entrepreneur and the founder of 10x Management, 10x Ascend, Brick Wall Management, Musicians On Call, Kristen Ann Carr Fund, and The We Are All Music Foundation.

Sarah Nicastro: So clearly Michael, you don't stay very busy. He is also co-author of the book Game Changer, which is a lot of what we're going to be talking through today. Another author of the book is Rishon Blumberg who graduated from The Wharton School with a degree in entrepreneurial management. He co-founded Brick Wall Management along with Michael, as well as 10x Management and 10x Ascend. And also coauthored the book Game Changer. So we are going to be picking the brains of these two gentlemen today about some of the tactics that companies should be considering and deploying to tackle the growing talent gap. So before we dig in, gentlemen, do you mind just telling everyone a bit about yourselves, Rishon, I'm going to start with you.

Rishon Blumberg: Yeah. First of all, we've known each other since third grade. So what I'm going to say to you covers a lot of Michael, so I'm sure he'll chime in with his own personal take on certain things, but basically we've done it all together. We grew up in born and raised in New York city. I'll take you back to the '70s and '80s, which was really a very interesting time in New York. It was incredibly entrepreneurial in a wide variety of ways. We happen to be exposed very early on to people whose parents were in the music industry. And so for us, it was our first entree into a career path, which at the time we didn't know, we just knew, oh, someone so's dad is a huge music entertainment lawyer and someone so's mother co-managers and artist and someone so's father is a concert promoter.

Rishon Blumberg: And then we both fell into the entertainment industry and started to management company in 1995, Brick Wall Management. And then that led naturally over the course of about 15 years to the creation of 10x Management. When we saw that there were different types of people that were being considered talent. I think that one of the things that we'll talk about today is the fact that we believe all companies need to consider their employees as talent. They're so valuable to everything that a company does, that they have to be treated that way. They have to be thought of that way. Once you start thinking about people that way you really start to treat and value them in a different manner. So we started to think about different types of talent. We saw that chefs were having managers and agents, their celebrity chefs, all of a sudden that need representation.

Rishon Blumberg: And so we felt the tech talent where there was a huge supply and demand gap would be an interesting place to test out the ideas that we had been running in entertainment for a long time. So we started 10x Management, technically in 2012, but we really started the company in 2011. We launched the company, soft launched the company in 2011. And the book is really a culmination of the lessons that we've learned working with all this different type of talent over the course of the last 26, some odd years. So that's a little bit of background, Michael, I'm sure you can color in.

Michael Solomon: I just need to acknowledge that he glossed over some of our earlier entrepreneurial endeavors, not all of which were legal. So we had a great fake ID business and we did keg parties in high school. And the only reason I bring that up is I think it just speaks to, I don't know that entrepreneurs are born versus made, but we definitely had the entrepreneurial bug from the beginning. And I think that's a through line that we see. And then the other through line being the talent and distilling the lessons that we've learned for managing what now includes musical talents, music producers and writers some directors and filmmakers, and then over to tech talent and entrepreneurial talent and getting to see other than maybe people in a major talent agency who work with writers and athletes and actors and directors.

Michael Solomon: We got to see such a broad base of talent and see what they had in common and to distill that into this book and really, why does that matter to companies now and why to companies need to think about this differently. And even as we, we'll get further into this, but even as Rishon was using the word talent, I'm thinking about the difference between the term human resources department and talent. It sounds important, which sounds valuable to the company. And I just think that we need a really big paradigm shift about how companies think about the people that make their workforce happen.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That makes total sense. So first of all, kudos to you guys for staying friends through all of this and-

Michael Solomon: We're not friends.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Can't stand each other. And I think it's a spirit, honestly. But I also think it's interesting that you bring that up. What led you to create the fake ID business back in high school, which transition to another company into another company into another company. There is, I think an element to the conversation we're about to have of not only looking for the checklist skills, but learning how you can qualify or identify some of those less tangible spirit type, so if it's spirit or initiative tenacity, some of those things that you might find in a candidate that doesn't have all of the checkbox skills, but has the thing. That would make them ultra-successful, despite that.

Sarah Nicastro: So all right. We'll get into all of that. Now, Michael and Rishon, and I spent a few minutes chatting before we started recording this podcast and I found out some of you listeners know that I'm in Erie, Pennsylvania. There is a band from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that my husband loves called the Clarks. And these gentlemen actually have managed the Clarks for, I think you said 26 years or something like that?

Michael Solomon: Very close to that. I think it's 25.

Rishon Blumberg: Yeah. It's about 25 years.

Sarah Nicastro: So small world, and that is very cool. But while we chatted, I also got them up to speed on some of the challenges that our listeners face in terms of the changes in business strategy, the changes in leveraging service as more of a strategic opportunity and what that means in terms of how the skills and personality traits and leadership traits that companies are looking for within their talent have changed and are changing. So before we get into some of the nitty gritty, I guess, you mentioned this Rishon at a high level, you took some of your experiences over all of these years with all of the different types of talent you've worked with and put it into the book. What do you think it is in terms of the changes in business landscape that make a book like this so necessary and relevant right now? So Rishon, do you want to take that?

Rishon Blumberg: Yeah. I mean, I think that the purpose of your podcast and what you focus on is exactly the reason why we felt that this book was super necessary. So we had been working for about 10 years in helping to place exceptional 10x, excuse me, 10x level freelance tech talent with companies. And we kept finding all of these procurement issues. Either companies weren't set up properly to really work with this kind of talent or understand why they needed to work with this kind of talent. And then some companies were set up exceptionally well. So we saw that there was a divide in perhaps understanding and information around what was necessary in the marketplace. And I think what people that are watching this podcast are seeing is there's a difference between the things that you need today from your talent versus what you needed 15, 20, 30, 40 years ago.

Rishon Blumberg: And that talent gap creates this supply and demand imbalance. They have a demand for these people, they need these people, but there isn't a great supply. And when you have that situation, you have to really change the way that you do business. So this book is really the first half of the book is all about what companies should be doing. And part of that is a cultural shift from the top down ways in which we believe 10x level talent needs to be worked with. And 10x level is really that is this concept of somebody who's a very high performer, high achiever. The second half of the book is about what people can do to push themselves down that 10x spectrum. But it all relates to what you're talking about, which is what can companies do? What do companies need to do to find the types of resources that are crucial to the success iteration and growth of their business? So that was really the impetus behind writing the book.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think a couple of the points you made about just calling it talent instead of workforce, or instead of a resource. There's a lot of disruption in the industries that would be listening to this podcast right now. There's a lot of big, big change in customer expectation and customer demand. And I think there's a number of areas that we discuss quite regularly within our content where, you see organizations that are reacting quite adeptly to that disruption in multiple ways. And they're redefining their business models. They're redefining what their service offerings are. They're snatching up this 10x talent and recognizing the need to bring in a fresh perspective or to introduce a new area of the business, et cetera.

Sarah Nicastro: And then there's people that are quite stuck in legacy thinking, culture, technology and it's really holding them back from evolving at the pace that they need to. And so I think discussing those things as it relates to like you said in your book, how do you get ahead of this and how do you capture some of the talent that is in such high demand is really important topic. So, yeah. Michael, go ahead.

Michael Solomon: I was just going to jump in there and talk about one of the things that when we wrote the book, which was before the pandemic, we were writing and talking about the need to allow certain people to work remotely because they're going to give you better results that way. And you can get access to people you'd never otherwise get access to. And I don't want to say that was a radical idea because this had already begun, but we were really trying to help companies understand the value and the need for that. Move fast forward over the last 16, 18 months. And not only do people want that, you now are seeing this huge wave of people who will not go back to the office, they're quitting their jobs when they're being told to come back to the office, which was far bigger illustration of our point than we ever could have possibly conceived of.

Michael Solomon: And that's one attribute. So when you start to think about your people as talent, and you think about what does talent mean, and how does talent get treated in the world? It's really about understanding who they are and what they need and what they want. And that doesn't mean that you have to be everybody, when we talk about this, they think, "Oh, we're just going to give them everything they want." That's not where we're coming from. This is about being human first and understanding that people have lives and nobody was born on this planet to work. That's not what we're here for. I don't know what we are here for, but I know that is not the purpose of being a human being.

Michael Solomon: And we may derive pleasure and purpose out of working, but that's not the only thing. And as soon as you start to understand and look at what somebody is driven by, you now can appeal in trying to hire or retain or manage them to them. And that's the paradigm shift is it's no longer about what can you do for the company, but it's a little bit about how does the company fit into your plans?

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Okay. I have a few thoughts, but I want to take it in order. Okay. I mentioned this to you a bit before we started recording, but let me recap. I hate when I have to generalize our whole audience, because it is a variety of different industries, different size organizations, different regions, it's a global audience, et cetera. But for the sake of the conversation, I'm just going to generalize a couple of things in terms of the challenges that are common here in recruiting this next generation of talent. So I mentioned the fact that one challenge is the role itself is evolving. And so while companies are trying to seek talent, they're also redefining it which can be complex.

Sarah Nicastro: But beyond that, we're talking about industries, manufacturing, HPAC, telecommunications. Some things where these aren't necessarily the sexiest jobs. When you ask the six year old, what do you want to be when you grow up? My son will say a firefighter or a doctor or a teacher, there's some common things that people visualize and you don't really hear field technician most often. I mean, I, myself, when I entered this space 13, 14 years ago, didn't even know what field service was. So that's a challenge. So the unsexiness or even just the lack of awareness that these job opportunities exist, combined with some of the verticals within the industries we reach are maybe not as glamorous as some candidates might seek.

Sarah Nicastro: And then you do have issues with flexibility that maybe aren't as big of a consideration in tech for instance. So travel requirements, set schedules, service level agreements, et cetera. So those are some of the challenges that being said, these folks are all faced with the need to manage the incumbent talent that they have, while hiring a whole new generation of workforce to carry the torch and carry the torch in an evolved and improved way. So based on some of the things that you cover in Game Changer, even if it needs some modification for our audience, what are some of the elements that these organizations need to be considering in terms of what today's talent is seeking? So, Michael, do you want to take that one?

Michael Solomon: Sure. I think the starting point is asking the talent, what are they seeking? I mean, as you talked about incumbent talent, you have to survey that group of people to understand what they like and don't like about their jobs. And that's not something that I think many of these companies were giving a lot of thought to, but that may be part of what informs how you put out offerings to bring in the new talent or to train new people. Because this is, I don't know enough about this specific field, but I have a feeling that it's going to be a requirement of the companies to build the runway to the talent of the future, to train them, to teach them, to create mentorship opportunities. And if you don't start out by understanding what is the talent want, what do they like? What do they hate?

Michael Solomon: You're shooting in the dark. And when a big part of what we've learned over our entrepreneurial journey is you have to start with a little bit of data. You can start with a hunch. I mean, our entrepreneurial background is, hmm, that sounds like a good idea. Let's do it. And it's only over the last 15 years that we've thought, hmm, that seems like a good idea. Let's see if it actually is. And then if it is, we can do it and if it's not, we can iterate. So I think that the starting point is looking for what people want. And then also as you're actually hiring individuals, understanding what is their why? What do they care about in life?

Michael Solomon: We have somebody on our team where it's become very clear that they are very happy, they like us. They like working with us, but they're there for the money. The money is there, they're going to stay. And we have other people for whom the money is not the driver at all. It's the nurturing environment and the opportunity to grow and learn new things and constantly be challenged. And until... On the macro level, you want to get data about the group, but on the hiring level, you want to understand about the individual, not because you're going to tailor everything around them. You're not going to create a new job for them or a new job title or a new job description for them, but you might sell them on different parts of your company once you know a little bit more about them. And you might even change your offer based on their needs.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. I think one of the thing, as you were answering, I was thinking as challenging for just some of the folks that I've talked to about this and in our space. When you talk about surveying the incumbents, that gets tricky in the sense of, in a lot of cases, there's some real generational differences. And so what the incumbents like about the job, or don't like about the job or what drives them or et cetera, could be glaringly different than the people that these organizations are looking to hire. That being said, that's not universally true and it's certainly still a good advice.

Sarah Nicastro: But I think, there's a situation here where a lot of these folks are trying to better understand how these roles fit with a younger generation and how to within what's possible and reasonable to still deliver the outcome, to evolve the working environment, a company culture, et cetera, in a way that will be appealing. So I'm just wondering if you guys could maybe share just based on your insights, with the next generation of talent, the younger workforce, what are some of the things that are most important at that macro level?

Rishon Blumberg: Well, their purpose. I think that that's something that I don't think we can gloss over that. It's also something that I think high achievers are in general. So I think there's something in common with being a very high achiever and Millennial and Gen Zs, which is that they're purpose driven. They want to know what kind of difference they're making. And that's why we emphasize heavily how important culture is in a company and how important from the top down the messaging needs to be, because that is part of the allure. Culture can be really sexy even at an HVAC company. If you treat people well, if you put forth very clearly what your purpose is, we're here to help ensure that people don't burn up, like in Portland at 113 degree temperatures, we want to have, we want to make sure that the HVAC in people's homes are always working, that the downtime is limited because people suffer from that.

Rishon Blumberg: When you start connecting, as Michael mentioned earlier, the why of what the company does. I think you can really attract a different type of employee. I mean, in reality, I think what you're talking about in the field service businesses is very much like a concierge business where something goes wrong and the person that it goes wrong for, wants somebody to come there and solve their problem with a smile and make them feel better. They want to be made whole and that requires obviously a lot of technical skill, but it requires a lot of EQ. It requires the emotional capacity, the empathy to understand the pain that they're going through. I had a great experience recently with my cable provider. And I've been with the same cable provider for probably 15 years.

Rishon Blumberg: I've seen a conscious effort and differentiation to make the quality of service better, to make it feel like they actually care that I'm having an issue. And that's got to be from the top down. That is a cultural shift at that company. And that is a huge differentiator. So that's what I would say is the number one takeaway.

Michael Solomon: I think to the point you're making, and this is going back to what we were saying earlier, is if you're interviewing somebody and you now know that they're mission driven, they care about the what and the why, if you're an HR person, and you're still sitting there telling them about the benefits and the money is this, and you get two weeks and you're not talking about, "We save lives. We want to make sure people don't die in heat waves and cold snaps. And this is essential work, and we're not often thought about that way." And you can connect that to that person and make them feel like, "Oh my God, I'm going to be a frontline person. I'm going to be saving lives." I'm being a little bit hyperbolic with all of this, but there's actually truth to it. I mean, I happened to-

Rishon Blumberg: When you express those things properly and by properly, I mean, you actually walk the walk and talk the talk, and you live that day in and day out the company you create many evangelists for your company. And that's really what great companies do and why people want to work at those companies because other people talk so positively about it, both on social media. Obviously we live in a world where reviews are instant anonymous and frequent.

Rishon Blumberg: And one bad review can change the trajectory of a company. So you have to constantly be working to reinforce the culture that you have to create these evangelists who can really go out and talk about how wonderful it is to work with this organization. That, yeah, okay, we're an HVAC company, but what we really are is this, we help ensure that people stay warm when it's cold and cool. When it's boiling hot, et cetera, et cetera really changed the narrative of what you're doing. And you can attract a different type of person.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that's a really good point. And that idea of purpose has come up a lot in our conversations. The other one that comes up quite frequently, that I'm just interested to get your opinions on is the idea of, again, making some big generalizations. But the idea that while a certain generation of field technician may have been happy to do the same job day after day, year after year for 25 years. A lot of younger workers really want a progression path. And so this concept for organizations to do a better job of obviating that ahead of time for candidates and clarifying what some of the growth opportunities are. So that not only do they know from the beginning they exist, but the stage is set for what that looks like and how they would get there in terms of both, I guess, initial appeal and retention I don't know what your thoughts are on that.

Rishon Blumberg: We have very, very clear thoughts on that. At 10x Ascend, what we do is we help people negotiate their compensation packages, their new compensation packages. And we have something, a tool called lifestyle calculator that has 24 different attributes of a compensation package that they have to weight against each other. So you have a total of 100 points and you have to weigh these different things against each other. So you can see really, you can challenge yourself "What's important to me?" And you can see graphically where those things rank. And one of the things that I think that does both for the individual and for the company is it helps them understand what's important to that person. One of those things is career progression. So want any time that that ranks in somebody's lifestyle calculator, we want to make sure that that question is asked very clearly of a company so that they know going in.

Rishon Blumberg: And so I agree with you. I think that it's super important for companies to assess the importance of that for the candidate, but also to be out front and explain what that progression really looks like, what their expectations can be, what the timelines can be, what success metrics look like, what does success mean for that company? So we're all about that. And we think that it is super important, especially at the outset. The hiring process is the place where you set the stage for what you know about this person and that process helps them to be onboarded much more effectively. So I agree with you 1,000% you've got to make those things clear. You have to understand as an organization, what that is too, right? You have to be very intentional about this process. It's not something you can wing. You have to know what the culture is. You have to know what your values are, and you have to know what your offerings are and what success looks like at the various offering levels.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense.

Michael Solomon: I would just add to that, that I think that many of these service roles, there's not a natural progression for a whole cohort of people to move up the corporate ladder. I don't think that works when you need that many service people. And part of what I think companies are going to need to do is recognize that some people will be able to move up and others will not going to be able to advance them. Either we're going to be able to retain them by creating very specific retention bonuses that are, if you're here at the end of your third year, you get this. And if you're near your fifth year, you get that or understand that there's going to be a degree of turnover, because that's the nature of where things are right now. And we're going to plan and constantly be looking and planning.

Michael Solomon: I mean, we started talking about what we're seeing happening right now, about three months ago. And it's very clear to see these trends and that's on a macro industry scale when you're dealing with the service industry and certain kinds of workers. You need to be reading the tea leaves and surveys are one way there's other data that's always being generated by industry leaders that's really important. And just going back to the survey for a second, the survey should be done in a way, if it's done well, well, you can tell that young people have different needs than people have been from a different generation. And what those are and how those and people who live in suburbs have different needs than being, that's part of a well-orchestrated survey so that what you get in terms of data really informs your next moves.

Sarah Nicastro: Makes sense. Okay. So Rishon, in the book you guys talk a lot about importance of trust. While that might seem like an obvious thing, I'm sure you wouldn't bring it up if it didn't get overlooked or under prioritized quite often. So talk to us a little bit about trust and why it's so important and maybe some of the reasons that it gets under prioritized or lost in the employee, employer relationship.

Rishon Blumberg: Yeah. I mean, we come at trust from the angle of what managers need to do in order to effectively manage people. And that's where that bond of trust comes into play specifically in the book. And what's so crucial about that is if you are a manager who instills that kind of trust and faith from your team, the type of management you can do is very, very different. If they don't trust you and you don't trust them, it's a whole different ball game from a management standpoint. So what we really talk about is ways that managers can develop trust and also what team members can do to bring that, to earn that trust. But one of the things obviously, and this is a natural thing, is to really stand up and fight for the people on your team and ensure that they get the things that they need when they need them.

Rishon Blumberg: We believe a manager's job is to provide an environment for the team to succeed, not necessarily to become an impediment themselves. We use the example. I can't actually remember if we use this specifically in the book, but I certainly talk about this frequently. If you remember the movie Office Space where you've got management floating around talking about TPS reports, and did you get the memo about the TPS reports? And you've got to come in over the weekend and they don't really care at all about who these people are. They're just cogs in the machine. And that's the old way of work. That doesn't work anymore. The people that are in your employee now are too important. Technology allows you to do more with less. So the people that you're working with, you have to value more highly because there aren't as many of you can't throw numbers at the problem.

Rishon Blumberg: So managers have to know who these people are and when you get to know somebody, you develop trust, when you're there for them day in and day out when you stand up for them, when you defend them, when you create an environment for them to succeed and do the best work that they can do, that builds trust and trust is a very, I think, underrated tool in business. There's a lot of backstabbing, there's a lot of political infighting and office politics, and that really undermines trust. Trust is about you showing up for somebody day in and day out. And when you don't, that trust bond is broken like this, and it's really hard to repair. So you can't really undervalue what trust means in the hierarchy of management and employment.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's a good-

Michael Solomon: You build trust one drop at a time into the bucket and you lose it all when the bucket falls over, because you breached the trust, it's all gone and you're starting usually from even worse than from when you started.

Sarah Nicastro: I think it's really interesting because I think trusts to me really comes down to treating people the way you want to be treated. And so I do think that the pandemic gave us an element of greater humanity. And maybe an opportunity here to prioritize that a bit more going forward. And maybe that's just wishful thinking, but the other thing I wanted to point out Rishon based on that response is a PSA for people listening, which is don't focus so much on the recruitment of your frontline workers that you don't put equal, if not more focus on management, because you won't keep good hires if you don't have good managers.

Sarah Nicastro: And so, that's just something that can't be overemphasized, you're absolutely right. That's what makes or breaks all of this. Like you said, Michael, the culture has to be top down, but if your managers aren't carrying that out for you, then anything you can do to get good talent in the door is going to be-

Rishon Blumberg: You're going to lose them.

Sarah Nicastro: right.

Michael Solomon: Can I make one little subtle comment on treating people the way that you want to be treated? I think that's where we are coming from. And now we need to shift to treating people the way they want to be treated. That's the big difference, a golden rule versus the platinum rule, if you will.

Rishon Blumberg: And the key you to that not to jump in here is if you don't understand who these people are, if you don't have a sense of what is important to them, you can't do that. Yes, you may treat them the way you want to be treated, but they may not share the same values that you share. And they may be different things. You would treat somebody who's 27 that doesn't have kids differently than you would teach somebody who's 36, that has two kids. What they need is going to be different from what the other person needs. And so you have to try and meet them where they are not force them to come to meet you where you are.

Michael Solomon: And I just want to add the technology is also creating so much opportunity if people are willing to think outside of the box. So what we're talking about is customizing things to make it more flexible for the employees. So they can live the best life that they want to live, however they want to live. So if I were managing a big team and this is much easier, said than done, I'd look at Uber and say, "Wait a minute. All I hear from my team is that they want flexibility. So what if I make it that all of our employees use an app like Uber and set up their schedules."

Michael Solomon: And all of a sudden, we going to have surge pricing because no one wants to work this Saturday and overnight shifts. So we're going to pay a little bit more. And then all of a sudden people want that. And the whole idea that you could create within your infrastructure and get out of the well, I need you to be working 40 hours a week and I needed to like yeah. Make it so that it could be really flexible and it works. And it's not at the detriment of the company. There's ways to do things that are so different than whatever what came before them.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think that's a good point. I mean, creativity is a really important aspect of tackling this problem, not only in evolving the job descriptions and the way that you present them to people, but to your point, the job itself. Like, are there legacy criteria that just aren't super relevant anymore? Is there things that are holding people back from taking these positions that maybe you need to find a resolution to? I mean, there's yeah. Thinking outside of the box is an important,

Michael Solomon: Yeah. The working in the office thing is that is the thing that just completely changed because of an outside input, but there was no reason that it needed a pandemic to cause that change, innovative companies were already doing that. And when you think about all of the areas that change can happen, we've barely started scratching the surface and you just opt to not allow, well, that's not how we've done it, or that's not how it's done where that's not, that should never be the reason for anything that can be for a reason for why did we do it that way? But that's it.

Sarah Nicastro: I think too, it just made me think, Michael, that you need to look not only at your competitive set, but far outside of it for inspiration on how to be creative. Like you said, the innovative company is already doing it. Well, if you're someone listening to this podcast, that's really struggling with hiring, now, again, I'm not trying to minimize that this is a real proven challenge. Like we're not talking about, you're not trying hard enough. That's why you're not finding them. There is a gap, but you still have to do whatever you can do to do your part to close it. Don't just look at what's the other biggest HPAC company doing to get talent? But look at Amazon and look at some of the companies that are having success and that doesn't mean everything they do, you can do, but that's part of the creative process of getting some inspiration and understanding better what's important to those candidates.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I want to talk about the criticality of setting clear expectations. I think for our audience, this is particularly important because those expectations are evolving in many instances. And so even for the existing talent, there's a shift in what that role can look like and what is desired. But let's talk a little bit about why and how expectation management is so important. So Rishon, do you want to take that one?

Rishon Blumberg: Sure. You can't really succeed at something if you don't know what the expectations are. So until a company can clearly explain to somebody what the expectations are that person can't really meet or exceed those expectations. And we look at expectations setting and delivering on expectations as a form of trust building. This is all part of building that trust in the person either that you're managing or the person you're delivering something to. And so if it's not super clear what those expectations are and what success looks like, then you're going to see failure more often than not. Because again, you're not meeting them where they are and you're not treating them with the golden rule or the platinum rule. So that to us is an element of building trust is understanding what the expectations are clearly explaining them. Also trying to elicit from the person that you're managing or the person that is your manager what it means to be successful in a given role.

Rishon Blumberg: Even before you start setting expectations of specific project-based needs, what does success look like? Manager, what will it look like for me to be successful in your eyes? And also getting a lot of feedback when expectations aren't met, it's very easy for people to make excuses or sweep things under the rug, or maybe play the blame game. 10x-ers people who are high achievers, don't do that. What they do is they get feedback, they try to solicit from people, either what went right or what went wrong, because you want to learn from those things. So the next time the expectation is set. You have a better sense of what success looks like.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think from an employer perspective, there's nothing more frustrating than ambiguity and not knowing what it is you're working towards. So not only failure or even if not failure, that frustration that you're causing is a problem.

Rishon Blumberg: People want to succeed. So if you can't explain to them what success looks like, they're not going to be happy.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Michael Solomon: And it has to be measurable. It's got to be something that you can measure.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, absolutely. And I think hand in hand with expectation management is another theme you guys talk a lot about in your content, which is empowerment. And I would say in many instances in our industries, empowerment is something that has been lacking particularly in some of the frontline roles. Again, it's more of you're an employee. You clock in and do this job. You go home, et cetera, using service strategically changes that whole relationship with that talent has to change because it's no longer that type of vibe. It's more, hey, we're relying on you to build the customer relationships. You need to be a trusted advisor, et cetera.

Rishon Blumberg: You're an ambassador in the field.

Sarah Nicastro: Exactly. And so if these companies want to have talent that will take that on, there has to be an element of hiring good people in setting clear expectations, but then giving them the latitude to do it in a way that is authentic to them. So Michael, do you want to talk a little bit about empowerment?

Michael Solomon: Yeah. I was actually going to use an example that I think I read about, and we knew somebody who was involved, but in near New York City Parks Department, at some point in '2000s went from whatever system they were to saying, "You employ on this part of the park and you own this part of the park and you own this part of the park, it's your responsibility." And this is whatever the specifics were. And the parks turned around because people were taking pride in "This is mine." And they were looking at somebody else's and it was so empowering to those employees who before were just like, "You mow the lawn over there, you mow the lawn over there," it allowed for a complete transformation.

Michael Solomon: And it also allowed not only did it empower them to do the job and see the result, but I think it gave them a sense of ownership in a way that never would have happened with the prior model. And that's not necessarily perfectly applicable to field service teams. But I think the idea that you get out of that is really important. And again, technology, I don't want to keep coming back to this, but we happen to represent technology. Technology is making it so much easier to do these things well, so this is creepy, so it's not the right example, but when the person showed up at Rishon's house to fix the cable or do whatever they were doing, there is no reason that that database couldn't have said, "Wife, Isabel," that's risky to say, how's your wife because maybe you got divorced, but the whole idea that you could create a system that allows for a little bit, the last person was here on this date, and this is what they did.

Michael Solomon: And is that holding up well? And all of these things that are just so easy, if you make them, if you build them into your systems to make things seem so much more personalized and also if you're the person who's delivering that information, you get to have a different level of engagement with your customer.

Sarah Nicastro: Mh-mm-hmm (affirmative). Exactly. I think the parks example is a good one. And I think that while that might not be completely transferable to the examples we're talking about the very first podcast we recorded was with Otis Elevator and it was 120 ish episodes ago. But what stands out in my mind from that is the gentleman I was interviewing said that they look at their frontline field technicians as the company's most treasured resource. And I thought that was really smart because they recognize that in an organization that's trying to use service strategically that is often the face of your brand. And there's a lot of power in that experience. There's also a lot of insight that those employees gain from those experiences that can be very valuable in setting strategy or deploying technology.

Sarah Nicastro: And so, this idea of not just giving them a sense of ownership because you think it might be important to them, or it might help them work harder, but really valuing that relationship and that input I think is a really good point. Okay. I have already gone over time and talk long enough, but to close let me ask you guys each one more question. Rishon, anything that we haven't talked about today, or to summarize a most important point, what would you give as a last key piece of advice when it comes to finding, hiring and retaining top talent?

Rishon Blumberg: This is something we have talked about, but I want to underscore it again. And it's the idea of the top-down mentality that you can have managers that are great, but if it doesn't come from the top down, it is not something that is going to be practice company-wide and it's not going to be practiced day in and day out. And culture being so important today, you're going to lose employees if you don't live the culture at every level. So to me, that's the biggest takeaway. I think of all companies at this stage of the game is you really have to lead from the top down. People need to see the head of the company, the C-suite, really living by the same ethics and values that they expect the lower level, subordinates and or other team members and talent at the organization to live by.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, good. Michael, what would you say is the biggest trend in the next, we'll say one, three, five years, whatever you think that people need to be preparing for related to how we work and that will impact hiring?

Michael Solomon: I'm sorry to say that I think the biggest trend is the jobs are going to continue to evaporate at record numbers and an accelerating pace.

Rishon Blumberg: You mean automation? Due to automation?

Michael Solomon: ... of automation and AI. And we're having a moment right now where people are being very selective about jobs because they can be, and I suspect this is one of the last moments that that's going to happen. And as a society, and I'm going very deep with this, we actually really need to think about how are we going to, two problems are going to keep people out of poverty and what are people going to do with their time, talent and energy when there's no longer a full-time job that's available for everybody? And those are fairly existential questions that are not super helpful to a manager. But I think those are very big trends. And I certainly think mission-driven work is becoming more and more and more relevant and important. And the more you can figure out how your company connects to people's missions, the better you're going to do in hiring and retaining and managing.

Sarah Nicastro: Mh-mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. All right. Well thank you both very much, Rishon, can you tell our listeners where they could find more about 10x and Game Changer the book?

Rishon Blumberg: I can do that, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you.

Rishon Blumberg: Gamechangerthebook.com is a website that we have that has a lot of information on the book. It has a bunch of content there. It also has a fun quiz that you can take to see where you fall on the 10x spectrum. How 10x you are as an individual. And you can also take it on behalf of your company to see how 10x they are. And all of our contact information is there as well, LinkedIn, Medium, et cetera. Gamechangerthebook.com.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. Well, thank you both very much. I enjoyed the conversation. I'll probably have to have you back at some point if you're willing, because I have a whole list of follow-up questions already, so.

Rishon Blumberg: Love it.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being there.

Michael Solomon: Thanks Sarah.

Rishon Blumberg: Thanks so much.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. Thank you. You can check out more of our content on futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @TheFutureOfFS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS Technology at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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Removing Barriers to Digital Transformation ROI

July 21, 2021 | 38 Mins Read

Removing Barriers to Digital Transformation ROI

Join Sarah as she talks with Philip Carter of IDC, Fredrik Tukk of Maersk Drilling, and Marne Martin of IFS about why research shows that only 25% of companies achieve ROI from digital transformation and what can be done to increase likelihood of measurable success.

Sarah Nicastro: Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's event. We are here today to talk about digital transformation and what it takes to achieve ROI on your digital transformation initiatives in today's landscape. We know that digital transformation is a key enabler of creating better customer experiences and moving toward delivering outcomes. But a lot of companies fall prey to some traditional practices and behaviors that can inhibit the level of success that most folks are looking for. So we're going to dive in today to some of the things that you might want to work on doing, to achieve the ultimate success, and maybe some of the things you want to avoid doing to achieve the ultimate success. My name is Sarah Nicastro. I run industry versus resource future of Field Service, and I will be your moderator for today's event. I am joined today by a wonderful panel, and I'm going to ask them now to briefly introduce themselves. Fredrik, I'm going to start with you.

Fredrik Tukk: Thanks Sarah, for the introduction. My name is Fredrik Tukk, I'm head of Innovation Scouting for, Maersk Drilling, which is a Danish headquartered, offshore drilling operator. And my role is I'm building the ecosystem with the outer world, focusing mostly on startups to bring in, to help us solve the products we are running.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. Well thank you for being here, Fredrik. Phil, would you mind introducing yourself?

Phillip Carter: Sure. Thanks Sarah. And thanks a lot for having me. Hi everyone, my name is Phillip Carter. I'm the Chief Analyst for IDC in Europe, and I also run our global C-suite tech agenda program, quite a long title that apologies, based in Munich and, yeah, looking forward to another learning adventure with this group on digital transformation and action.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. Thank you, Phil and Marne.

Marne Martin: So, I'm Marne Martin, the President of the Service Management, Global Business Unit, and it really is a pleasure to be with a great IFS customer, as well as IDC who we work with on how we continue to achieve the digital outcomes that are so in demand today. It's really a pleasure to be part of this panel, Sarah, and thanks for hosting.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks Marne. Okay. So we have, three different perspectives on a very important topic, which is going to make for a very fruitful conversation. So Phil, to start us off, I'm hoping you can share a little bit of context from the research that shows, how the pandemic has impacted digital transformation efforts and, and what you're sort of seeing right now in this space.

Phillip Carter: Sure. Yeah. So I think what happened in 2020 was an inflection point for IT spend and digital transformation efforts more specifically because it was the first time ever we saw a lack of correlation between GDP trends and IT spend. Normally, so if you go back to the financial crisis, significant drop in GDP, IT spend follow that very closely. Look at 2020, the biggest drop in GDP since World War II, and IT spend held up remarkably well, and that was driven primarily by investments in digital transformation. So we expect that to continue into 2021. Actually our research shows that we will hit $1.5 trillion investments in digital transformation globally, growing at about 15%. So we are literally hurtling towards our digital destiny.

Phillip Carter: We're moving towards a digital first mindset, not just at a business level, but also at a personal level, societal level. I think we can feel that we can see that. But the problem is that our pre pandemic research showcases that only 26% of organizations are really delivering an ROI from all of those investments. So that's the digital ROI gap as we call it. And we need to close that, in order to drive the next phase as we move to reignite business, across the board.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That makes sense. I know that as I conducted interviews with business leaders throughout last year, there were kind of two ends of the spectrum. There were folks that had already invested heavily in digital transformation and we're feeling very thankful that they had done so. And then there were folks that realized how much they were lagging behind and how critical it was that they get up to speed. So the efforts have increased, but we have that 25%, ROI metrics. So why is that gap so big?

Phillip Carter: Yeah. So, that's a good question. And I think what you described there in terms of that K shape, we call it the K shape recovery in a sense at an organizational level, because there are some organizations on the up slope of the K, that are leveraging the investments in digital technologies to drive competitive advantage into the market. And then the ones who are fighting for survival based on the fact that they were slow to adopt some of these key technologies. And so the reason for this major digital ROI gap, we also asked, we've kind of went into the research on this and ask the follow on questions. Like what's the problem here? And the primary reason is the inability to scale due to organizational silos. So that's the key thing, the key piece of feedback, these barriers across traditional organizational structures which are linked to the legacy technology architectures of the past.

Phillip Carter: But second on the list, which is also interesting, and I know Fredrik, can talk to this, is that the feedback is that IT and security leaders slow us down, so that there is a sense that business and IT need to come together in a more cohesive fashion in order to drive that scale, we call it the digital dream team. So moving from the C-suite to the future, which is the digital dream team where every business function becomes a technology function. But, they need to raise the tech IQ across all of those business functions, but IT needs to be at the table as well. Technology needs to be part of that discussion and helping to drive the outcomes that are required to pose that ROI gap.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So Fredrik, can you tell us a little bit your perspective on how, what Phil's describing aligns with what you've experienced?

Fredrik Tukk: Yeah. Thanks Sarah. And thanks Phil, for the analysis for sharing that, that's really interesting stuff. Yeah. And as Phil also alluded to, things are happening much faster these days, and technology is taking more and more a central role in many ways, but what you used to have is that IT department was building the foundation for the company and say, you can execute then you can get the data from us. But these days, many times you find new technologies or new vendors that comes to you with a different technology perspective where you can execute. And the lifetime also own this, and especially around the COVID times, it hasn't been focused on the ROI. It's been focused on actually delivering a value to the customer that might not be measurable. One example I have from our industry, when you couldn't travel now.

Fredrik Tukk: So not as you used to in the, during COVID, when we need to have a technician or a maintenance person out to the rig, you fly them out by the helicopter and do the maintenance. But now in COVID, it wasn't so easy. So you have to find a way of actually utilizing new technology and actually do remote maintenance, for instance, where you utilize the people on board, but you have the experts on shore. And that's something that has been more focused on, you don't have a direct ROI on that. That's not a business decision, it's a necessity to keep the rig going. So you need to find the solution, where then technology played a major part that, that solution wouldn't come from IT, in the first instance, you need to find someone who can deliver that to you today, and just make sure that it works because you have a maintenance problem or a challenge on the rig.

Fredrik Tukk: And that's why you need to find other ways of working with these solutions than the traditional way, as Phil alludes to. And also then the first and foremost, it's not your ROI, because that's more a strategic business decision. I'm saying, "We do this so we can have an ROI on it that we see that this is good for the future of the transformation of the business, but here is more specifically focused on solving an issue here now that you might only have for six months or 12 months, but you need to solve it."

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. That makes sense. So, Marne Fredrik is speaking to sort of the internal look at what this means and what's needed in terms of evolving to look at things a bit differently, but I'm wondering if you can speak to, how a technology provider like IFS, what is the responsibility there, or what is the assistance that IFS can provide in helping close this ROI gap?

Marne Martin: So let me talk to pick up a couple of things from Phil and Fredrik, and then answer your question as part of that. So first I would say that Fredrik raises a critical point that often is not communicated or well understood, what technology investments support, the continued evolution of the business, i.e., the growth of a healthy business profitability, et cetera. The strategy that they might already be executing on, but they do need additional technology to continue supporting that growth. So effectively the ROI is already in a way buried into that growth strategy of a business. And then you also will have what I call inflection point investments, that will genuinely give ROI on their own. And often those either enable an increase in revenue or greater profitability, or something like that that has a very tangible ROI.

Marne Martin: So I do want to layer in that clarification, because we often find gaps that we can help bridge as a vendor, looking at say, upside cases, what are continued execution of strategy cases, and then what are really say a ROI cases. And we do that through business value engineering, and then how we plot the project and the outcomes that maps to kind of which of those buckets is primary in a business. Ultimately we want all of our customers here at IFS to grow and grow faster ideally than their peers. When you think about the digital dream team, one I love that concept. And I like to talk a lot about sport analogies. And since two thirds of the panel is in Europe, I'll give an example about Premier League. So often the business feels they are the offense, and we need them to be the offense, but there's either a perception. And sometimes the reality that IT is playing defense and slows down the offense.

Marne Martin: So we need to be thinking about how we get a full team to be working together. And you have the coach for the leader that will really bring them into the Premier League. And that's where I think often when we're looking to scoping out and moving also from the handover of the signaling to the implementation, to the longer customer success phase, we often don't have that coach or a leader that can bring, say the offensive and the defensive elements together to work as a team and specifically a Premier League team. So that's where we have activities and actions that we can continue to drive and be better at, as part of IFS as a vendor. But we're also looking to how we can enable the leaders and the coaches in an organization like Fredrik is in his organization to be more effective. And to the extent that there isn't that type of leader in the digital dream team, that we call that out and work with our customers to address that.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. That makes sense. Fredrik, can you talk a little bit about, from your perspective, how would you articulate what it is about a traditional or legacy IT mindset that just does not work for today's digital transformation efforts?

Fredrik Tukk: Sure. Yeah. And really good points by Marne there. I fully agree with your analysis there, it's really interesting. The things we see, I see happening both here and in other companies, when it comes to this digital transformation is that there is for some natural reasons as well, lack of flexibility and adaptability to take on new technologies and test them out on the side more or less to the legacy system. And I have examples where we have come up with startups we're working with, that comes with a technology that might be set in a different cloud setting, for instance, a different cloud solution. And then we say, "We need to have that." They say, "They need to be hosted in whatever AWS or whatever."

Fredrik Tukk: And then if I come to my IT department, they say, "No, we are Microsoft, no discussion." And that just shows the flexibility, because if you could do that to be more flexible, and I understand why they also can't just say yes to everything, because it's a gigantic task of evaluating this and from a risk perspective, and everything else, since you need to have some structure as well, but with increased speed in change, in digital and the need for being out in the market, go to market needs to be fast. They need to be able to be flexible in that sense. We have an example where we now developed a solution with an external startup, where our, IT department's struggling for years to find a solution for building a performance driven tool. And the startup comes in and do it in two months, when we eventually get to go ahead for it.

Fredrik Tukk: It doesn't say that the old is the best solution, but it does say one example being, where you need to be taken into that flexibility and see who else can actually come in and do it in a non-traditional way. And by that solving your problem and go to market much faster.

Marne Martin: Sorry to jump in Sarah, but I think as we, it's like the emerging technology often the digital dream team, or a lot of these companies don't have say incubation or early adopter phase programs, or if they do, they get stuck in POC. So, how are they able to embrace new technology, whether it's from an existing vendor or a startup, and then really commercialize that, understanding the different phases of technology maturation, adoption, et cetera, is it always as crystallized and taking that sort of approach in companies? And I think that's what handicaps them to a different degree that they're not thinking about say technology, say development, almost like how you develop talent, that you're putting it to work, you're continuing to test it. You're continuing to evolve and challenge it. And eventually going back to my Premier League example, you have your Premier League star.

Phillip Carter: And I think also just building on that. I talk quite a lot about this notion of four wheel drive innovation, which is taking the speed and mindset from the digital innovation initiatives around the edge, into the core as well. And that's basically saying, "Okay, we need to evolve quickly so that there can't be two speeds of technology investment or technology adoption, or business direction." It needs to be one speed. And that speed is a lot faster than it currently is. but that involves people like Fredrik who sits, digital innovation initiatives, pushing those, the agenda on the frontiers to come also to bring that mindset into the core, well across all of the different business units. And that's part of the digital dream team stepping up to this new level around digital investments and outcomes associated with that.

Sarah Nicastro: That's a good point. So I think I have a related question Fredrik, to follow-up on the point you made. Okay? So bear with me. So Marne gave the analogy of offense and defense, right? And so my question when you talk about, having that startup come in and put this solution in place in two months, that you had been struggling to do internally, how do you do that in a way that doesn't further that offense defense divide, right? And kind of exacerbate the problem of that divisiveness within the organization?

Fredrik Tukk: Yeah. That's a really good question. The way we have done it is that you need to, you need to work together, you need to make sure that both parties move, because there's no like one answer is the right one. It's not that you only do startups, so you only do core, but you have to cooperate, both need to move away from where they are. So in the beginning where we actually took in the startup to improve the existing solution that the internal team had built, to emphasize that, but in that process, they also came to realize that actually the startup had a better solution that we then went with. So that that's one way of doing it, to work together. And the other thing that is, building on Phil's point here is that, it's also things that companies like us or any old company with a legacy, not only in IT, but the legacy in general and during the digital transformation, is we don't use to that.

Fredrik Tukk: Now we're starting to build software, basically in our company, we're launching or building that. And we don't have a tradition, IT doesn't have a traditional company. We need to find new ways of how do you do that? What's the competencies we need? Do we want to build them? And the classical discussion we can have that as a separate discussion. You want to build them in house then, or do we want to buy them? And all these discussions, that's something which all companies I think are struggling with in order to see, how do we want to do this? And that's, of course, again, something you need to do together in cooperation, we need to bring in the startups to challenge the existing IT, to some extent, and they need to come back to us and challenge us and say, you can't do that because it's a lot of other legacy systems and we need to have a control, and it's also risked with security and everything else.

Fredrik Tukk: But I think it's also a sort of a middle ground. And it's a transition period as well, where you go from being, saying that IT used to service the traditional business, while now we are getting into more, having a software side to it, at least, where we develop software and that's requires new skills.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. So there's an issue of pace. I'm sorry, Phil. I didn't mean to cut you off.

Phillip Carter: I would add to that, because I think it's a great point that, Fredrik made, but I will also say that what we see here as a way of driving that alignment across the teams is a focus on metrics that everyone signs up to. So if you're coming back to that remote maintenance example, that use case that Fredrik highlighted at the beginning, if you've got a metric around meantime to resolution for that use case, and IT, and the business, and digital or oh, working towards that, suddenly there's a different level of alignment. And you bring that speed from the innovation areas, into the core, as part of the fact that you guys are all going to be measured on that outcome. And therefore the behavior is in line with what is expected at the end of the day.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. So, we are talking about fostering more collaboration. Okay? We're talking about, Marne the point you made about, you need a strong cultural leader, i.e., coach, right? That's going to help the team see that we're not offense and defense we're one team, right? And then, Phil, to your point, if you can align around metrics or measurements that everyone agrees upon that are driving toward a consistent goal, those are all things that can help alleviate the issue of these silos, which is, as you said, Phil, one of the biggest contributors to the ROI gap, open to the floor, so any of you can jump in. What else? So what else are the important considerations or pieces of advice for folks listening, in terms of breaking down these silos, creating this collaborative culture and aligning more toward a common objective?

Marne Martin: I'll jump in with incentives and compensation, and then I'd love to hear Fredrik's thoughts from being in a company and obviously, Phil's from the research. So often we see and this ties into, I'd say, bridging the divide between speed and outcomes is that, we need the key businesses focused on the outcomes that matter most in their transformation projects to make sure that they deliver against them, that you don't have scope creep or other opinions that take you away from why you did the project in the first place. But we also find that sometimes with business and IT incentives, how they're compensated and what project success means to them isn't aligned. For example, if IT is compensated on speed of implementation, they might say, "Hey, let's just copy what we have. That's what we know best. And therefore we can be the fastest at that."

Marne Martin: When really the business won't get what they wanted out of the technology investment to meet their goals without taking that into account, the change management and additional training, et cetera. So I'd be really curious to hear more. And in general I see this across every single customer we support, in these initiatives I'd be really curious to hear, Fredrik's view on how best that can be tackled pragmatically, and then also Phil's related to the research and his recommendations.

Fredrik Tukk: That's a very, very interesting point, Marne. Again, so, yeah, my first take on your question, Sarah is also, I think that most of the products we have now that are, you could call this digitalization projects. They are actually initiated by us in innovation, not by IT. And the reason is also, I think because of the culture we've fostered and built up in innovation where it's a dare to try, it's fine to fail, you can fail. But if you do fast, instead of doing this, I don't say that everybody does waterfall, but it's like bigger products most of the time. I mean, and the face implementation is a big product and our thing.

Fredrik Tukk: And of course, that's one thing. But on the other end, these digital products we run we need to try out faster and dare to try, and they can fail, and that's fine. But also, like you say, Marne the whole incentivizing of how you run these projects and why you should do it and everything is super interesting. And, I guess, Phil, have some good comments on this research from other companies as well.

Phillip Carter: Yeah. I mean, it's top of mind, around kind of time to value. So that's the balance between speed and outcome, just thinking about the time to value story. And I think there are a few things that we see changing. Number one, regardless of the technology project, they are getting shorter. So even if you think about a large scale ERP project of the past, that took five years, that's no longer acceptable. It has to be months, weeks, at least in terms of some level of time to value from the project. Secondly, the idea that a business case is created once and then thrown out the window once the project starts is also not acceptable. So you have to have a dynamic business value realization approach for the week long or two weeks, or three week, the sprints that are put in place in that much more agile fashion of rolling out a project, regardless if it's going to take a year or two to finally end, but you have the checkpoints every week or month to say, "Okay, how are we relating to the metrics coming back to this, or metrics and the incentives and behavior?"

Phillip Carter: So I said with that, to, Marne's point, on an ongoing basis. So it becomes a much more dynamic. It becomes, an element that the elements of that dream team are engaged with and are measured on, and therefore are, they're bought in upfront and then they actually contribute to making a success. The last thing I would say is that, you look at the software vendor relationship with buyers overtime. And historically, there has been a mismatch in terms of expectations. And now we see that there's a big change in, Fredrik's point around, the rethink around bill by partner, acquire, that's happening, it's really happening.

Phillip Carter: And if a software provider isn't able to deliver that time to value in the shorter timeframe that I described, the buyers of technology will find a different way to do it and to deliver it, to, Fredrik's point earlier two months to deliver that time to value, because the business has to get that outcome in a much shorter timeframe. So those would be the three things that I would highlight associated with that story around value realization.

Marne Martin: That's actually a great, those are great points. And it made me think of something else. So, I talked about, sometimes we don't have coaches or leaders to the degree needed to really drive a transformation, but I'll also say that sometimes projects aren't a bit scope for what they are. Some companies really are going through a learning journey, even though they're contracting for something, they don't know, say what value or what actually they want delivered yet. Okay? Other companies have really well understood their innovation plans, their business models, where they want to go, et cetera. And then we're really, that brings almost like a template if you will, for execution. And then it really is about optimizing time to value. So I think it is super important.

Marne Martin: And we're trying to do a better job working with our customers, with the idea of this return to value understanding, are we implementing off of kind of a well understood strategy template, they know what they want to do? Or is this really more of a learning journey that we need to assume that, we need to move as quickly as possible through the design phase, knowing what we know, but then we're going to have multiple cycles potentially of rework UAT, et cetera, or we'll have different phases of adoption, et cetera. So, we need to be able collectively all of us to drive for more clarity on not only say the digital maturity of a company for the point that everyone has made, but also is this a learning journey project, or is this really more of a template implementation, business value realization?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Marne. And it makes me think earlier on in the conversation, as we're talking about the silos within the company being one of the biggest barriers to ROI, in the content that I work on, those silos are also one of the biggest barriers to servitization or advanced services, or realizing the opportunity of more strategic service. Right? And so you kind of have two parallel journies happening where, to your point, depending on where the company is at in sort of the business journey, what's the business model? How are we innovating? What have we been and who are we trying to be?

Sarah Nicastro: And how well-defined that is and how much alignment exists on those objectives, and how much the silos have already been eliminated in that effort will have a huge impact on what that digital transformation journey looks like. Right? Because it is really, the huge enabler of all of that progress, right? So that's a really good point of kind of the, intersection points along those settings.

Marne Martin: For sure. I'll make one other point, which I know Phil has research on, and perhaps you won't ask Fredrik to comment, but, and I'll explain why in a moment. It's interesting, and there was a really fascinating piece of research that I read in the last few weeks about how digitally competent most CEOs are. Right? If you think about how most CEOs are promoted and get to the C-suite, it's a lot of the business acumen, the relationships with customer, shareholders, et cetera. And the majority of their career, they won't be in the digitally active cycles like we are now, whether, just kind of how Moore's law is to say bleeding into everything that we do in technology, including how organizations need to adapt or, this post-COVID era. So, I read this statistic that only about 25% of CEOs feel that they understand how to drive themselves digital realization.

Marne Martin: And it made me wonder that we should look at perhaps the correlations, of the 25, approximately percent of companies that are getting ROI from the digital investments. Does that match to say the more digitally aware experienced CEOs? Yes or no? How do we not only need to think about business and IT at the implementation level, but also of how we're working with the C-suite and boards. So, I'd love to hear your thoughts Phil, on this. And again, I have no idea if there's actually a statistical correlation or not, but I just thought it was really fascinating research.

Phillip Carter: Well, yeah, absolutely. In line with a lot of what we're seeing on it. So based on our C-suite survey, we asked the question, so who's most likely to be the next CEO in your organization. And first of all, it was COO, second was external hire and then third was CTO. So that's the first time that we've seen the technology leader on the leader board effectively on the career development path. And it reflects a new reality where to your point, you need that different understanding around digital and technology capabilities, in order to deliver the new value. So if you look at, there's really interesting dynamic happening at the moment where there's a correlation that we're looking at between digital maturity and actual valuation. So market valuation, because we've got an index that tracks digital maturity by company.

Phillip Carter: And we look at the stock price overtime and you can see a clear correlation. So what does that mean? Well, for the CEO, it means if I'm chasing value, then I need to chase tech, which means I need to ensure that I've got the right level of skills in the organization. And if I'm the CEO, then I need to also ramp up my capabilities in that respect. I need to appoint the right technology leader. And there's a huge amount of change in the technology leadership happening in the market at the moment, because of that. And I might have to acquire some tech companies, which as you see that ramping up, we've had two inquiries in the last week of healthcare device manufacturers asking about software acquisitions. So, just I think you will see, so it's and the CFO linked to that, is going to have to become a lot more savvy around valuation of tech as they make those investments around what's the price to pay for the tech.

Phillip Carter: And you, again, build by partner. So that's a fascinating part of the outcome of this acceleration to our digital destiny that I highlighted earlier. But I don't know, Fredrik it would be great to get your perspective on this, because I know the CEO of, Maersk Drilling is kind of big behind the digital transformation of the broader organization, but any thoughts on how you see that evolving?

Fredrik Tukk: Yeah, it's an interesting observation, Phil and yes, our CEO three years ago when we brought this up, that we wanted to drive digitalization much more and try it out. He was behind that, and has been supportive of it all the time. So he's actually... And, I guess it's also because he sees his own limits within this space at the same time he sees that it's a good thing that we as an organization learn this and try out stuff. So he was very supportive of that, but it's like I say, it's not only in [inaudible 00:34:23], I've spoken to a lot of other C-level people. And one guy in another company he said to me, that when we were discussing, he said, "I used to not believe in this, with a lot of digitalization. And I said to people, you can't make money by getting clicks. I was wrong." He said.

Fredrik Tukk: And that's the whole new economy basically. So he said that they changed their minds. So the more example, if they see, and the more transformation that is happening around, more and more companies now also C-levels saying that we, we used to make money off of our core business. And now we see startups come up or other companies moving much faster and we need to do something about it. And so they are awakening to some extent. So that's interesting to see.

Phillip Carter: What's starting, because I've done a bunch of CEO interviews recently and what I'm starting to hear is that the untapped potential around tech as being open to them. So they seeing this, one of them is a train operator and they managed to get access or transfer ownership of a new trained in the midst of a lockdown completely remotely, similar to the remote example that Fredrik mentioned earlier. And now they're not going to go back to an onsite delivery of that asset, it's going to be complete... Because they realize it's cheaper, it's more efficient and the customer experiences data. So that's just a portal into the potential that's in front of them. And I think as a result of that, the next question is, "Okay, how do we make sure that this is scalable and outcome is driven across the organization?" But I hear a lot of what Fredrik described in terms of, I used to think this way now I realize that it needs to be done differently and it's going to be a big part of the business model moving forward.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It almost seems, in terms of the CEO role that it's really overcoming any sort of legacy thinking or culture, it's more of an awareness and a willingness to put the right team in place than it is necessarily having to have, the skills themselves. Right? And, and I think that's reflected when you start looking at the organizations that are making the most progress and then, look at what the mindset of that leadership is. Fredrik, I wanted to come back to the point about, looking into the future of digitalization, your thoughts on some of the work you're doing on building out that ecosystem and the importance of co-innovation with customers. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Fredrik Tukk: Sure. Yeah, because we come to realize yes, as Phil said before as well, that you need to take these decisions on, do want to build it or buy it or co-created, or have a strategy on that? And the best way we found out is that if you... We need to start with the customer needs. And it's so easy to forget that, but you say to the bigger organization, they think that you have a lot of knowledge, you build something, that then the customer doesn't really want to need, or at least don't want to pay for. So you need to involve them early on, which we do now in all the products we're on, basically stores based on a customer need.

Fredrik Tukk: But then again, if we need to have the flexibility and the agility, to build these things, we don't... If you're going to scale up that internally or taking an external supplier, that you have a traditional working relationship with, it mostly takes too much time and as Phil before, the lifetime expectancy of solutions, now the digital ones are shorter and things go faster. It's easier to copy as well from your competitors. So that's why we are looking and taking more and more startups to actually deliver this to us. Because if you find the right startup and that's, of course the challenging is, is to find the right data flows, to find the right startups and evaluate them, to make sure that they can deliver this.

Fredrik Tukk: But if you find them, because I can guarantee you, they are out there, whatever your problem is, as startup, you can do this today. There's many, and they are also developing so fast. They also die very fast. So you have to be aware of that. You need to be quick and you need to help them to grow. But if you do that, then you have a much more flexible, structure. And as Phil said, as well, the example I gave before, where we now built a solution with two months, I never met that startup physically. I found them online, we negotiated online, they delivered a demo online, they deliver the product online.

Fredrik Tukk: We have been talking to them, I have teams all the time. So we never met them, you don't have to. Before it was like, you need to see them in the eyes and say, "Hey, yeah, and we need to have a beauty parade with X number of companies as procurement would ask you for." And these days, when we find someone that is like, we can do this maybe for 80% of the solution, we co-create the rest together, because that's the fastest way forward we see, so.

Marne Martin: For sure, I think, related to the innovation cycle and how we build an innovation here at IFS, that is something that continues to accelerate. And of course, we're doing it both for point solutions, as well as a broader platform. The start a point is interesting, having done startups in my career, early on in my career, I still love how we can partner with these startups, right? And even IFS as a vendor, there are times that we also will work with them on how we can enable, say a go to market structure, how we can think about embedding them into our applications to accelerate what we're doing and even acquiring them.

Marne Martin: So, what's great is that you see vendors like, IFS that are really looking to how they can be more flexible, faster and more progressive in terms of bringing innovation of the various type that's needed by customers, to satisfy their end customers. But also, one of the parts of, that I enjoy at my job, is getting to know these startups and the ones that are, validated as being in our key verticals and impactful for our customers, thinking about how we can either partner on a go to market or continue to make some interesting acquisitions.

Fredrik Tukk: Yeah, and that's a good point, Marne where everybody's like you say, trying to be more agile, more flexible to you also as supplier can see that, you have the opportunity to bring in knowledge on some cutting edge technologies, to improve your product. But it's interesting, because there was one of our biggest products that came to be a couple of months ago and said, "We have this huge challenge, and we think it's going to take two years to build it, but we heard that you are connected to startups, can you find someone that can do this?" And I had this, and I presented them with three startups. They interviewed two of them and came back to me and said, "That's amazing. These guys can do this in three months. And they are exactly what we're looking. We didn't know they existed."

Fredrik Tukk: And that's also an eye-opener for my companies to see that there are other ways of doing this, than the traditional way. And that's also where you need to be. It doesn't say that startup is the only answer or the answer all the time. It's just that, that alternative that many corporates hasn't considered that before. And now you see that with the increasing pace and everything, you need to look into it at least to see if that's an option.

Marne Martin: To be pragmatic. Again, a lot of companies won't necessarily be as progressive as Fredrik's, and there'll be concerned about the risk of the startup, them running out money before they can deliver et cetera. So, it's always a balancing act, but it's absolutely is true that there's such a vibrancy of new technology and innovation that's present today. So, for example, if there are startups that can get validated with an enterprise customer, but maybe stall out at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,000,000 and in revenue, which is often the case, at that point, they often have an inflection point, do they say start the private equity journey and how that is?

Marne Martin: Do they align with the strategic, et cetera? And I think, here at IFS again, we are working to be more and more nimble, and we bring a lot of very impactful technology to market as part of ERP, FSM, EAM, et cetera. But also, sometimes I laugh at Fredrik who'd be, almost our corp dev department, letting us know which startups he thinks are most cool for us to go look at, to talk to.

Phillip Carter: I think it's a new business model for Maersk Drilling to be the startup to connect that.

Marne Martin: Exactly the issue in point.

Sarah Nicastro: There you go.

Marne Martin: But you really don't know it. Having run startups myself. I mean, there is such a big step for a startup to move from alpha to beta, to really true enterprise GA. That is not to be underestimated by anybody. But to the extent you can get a startup at exactly the right inflection point, and do that at a value that is accretive, per Phil's point, that is really interesting. And of course, something that we also do at IFS.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Good. All right. So I'm going to ask you all one, sort of closing question of my own, and then we're going to try and have a couple of minutes for a few audience questions. So just in terms of summarizing our conversation so far today, if each of you had to give sort of one key piece of advice for listeners on how to prepare for the future of digitalization, what would that be? So I don't know who wants to start. Phil?

Phillip Carter: I can go-

Marne Martin: Can I go first and then Fredrik-

Phillip Carter: ... Yeah. You go on.

Marne Martin: ... and Phil wrap it up, with their insights. So, we've talked a lot about technology and what have you. And technology is what powers our daily lives, our businesses, our future. But the one piece of advice I have to all of you is don't forget the people aspect of it and specifically you need the right type of leadership to be successful, whether it's a digital transformation, new business models, your company continuing to perform. So you need to make sure that you are analyzing, assessing, recruiting, developing, making sure they stay happy, the leaders in your organization, the people that are going to make this happen. Because technology doesn't get implemented on its own, business value doesn't get realized on its own and if you don't have the right leaders in your organization, then you will be, not able to leverage technology projects, opportunities that you otherwise have.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Phil, do you want to go next?

Phillip Carter: Okay. Yeah, I will let Fredrik close it off with his wise words. No, so why recommendation is get the order right. And what I mean by that is start with the business. So what is the use case? And then the measurement associated with that. So then you measure and you drive the performance of the back of that, and then comes a technology. So use case, metric technology, and then build up, the use case journey. So that becomes the new digital roadmap to prepare for the future where horizon three, the longer term mission is clear and the whole digital dream team is on board and agreed on that ultimate mission, and then execute along that roadmap. So get the order right.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. And Fredrik.

Fredrik Tukk: Yeah. I'm trying and find some value based on all these fantastic advice, as you know, from Marne and Phillip, mine, and it's a personal reflection basically, but I came to realize this, in the last couple of years, got to try, don't sit and plan for too long. Don't sit and think, oh, we should find someone else, we should do this. We should plan more, give it a go, give it a try. The worst thing can happen is you fail. But if you do it small and fast, no big harm done. And the other thing then to do that is to start small. And then when you notice it's actually functioning, then you can scale it, but don't plan for this massive product that's going to take four years, it's like dare to try.

Sarah Nicastro: Very good advice.

Marne Martin: I love that. I mean, the soft skills of courage and curiosity I think are under analyzed as necessary components to successful digital transformation. I think that's a fabulous point Fredrik.

Fredrik Tukk: Thanks.

Marne Martin: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. Okay. All right. Let's get to a couple of audience questions real quick before we close. So the first is you mentioned the digital dream team, but for a company where projects have traditionally been led by business or IT, how do we determine who the coach is? So who leads the digital dream team?

Marne Martin: So I think coach the change. Phil will have some other insights on kind of the personas or the roles perhaps that have been most successful. But I think you need to look for the people that can work through the conflict. Make sure, keep the team on track, being able to motivate and drive the courage and the curiosity to actually get it done. So there are certainly, and I'd love to hear Phil and Fredrik who kind of the archetypes or the personas that also most frequently rise to the top, but, I encourage people. Don't just think of it from a functional perspective. Think about it as who has the enablers to it done and that that person might come from finance, or might come from sales, or might come from operations, IT, you don't know necessarily where that person comes from. It might also be a C-suite sponsor.

Marne Martin: And then, you can figure out once you have the person that has the right leadership and soft skills to run the change, how you compliment that. I love the point that Fredrik made that, you don't necessarily need a CEO, that's a CTO, but you need someone that sets the agenda and make sure that the project, the talents are all staffed appropriately.

Phillip Carter: Yeah. I mean, I would say building on that, that it's much less about the title, but more about the personality. And so I think it's the classic T-shaped person, someone who's strong in key detail areas where it linked to the project at hand. So they need to understand at least the domain associated with the use case, but then have those emotional intelligence so to speak, in terms of courage, in terms of curiosity, in terms of engagement, bringing people along, dealing with the friction, picking up the ball, running with it. So I think that that's more of the personality type that should lead. But then there's the question of, it shouldn't be business or IT driven. Now my view on that is, if it's more of a specific area, which is driven by a specific business function, then the business needs to lead more clearly.

Phillip Carter: If it's more kind of a platform based approach, which cuts across multiple functions, then IT probably needs to play more of a role or maybe not IT, but that the technology leader, that digital leader that should be able to cut across those areas. And I think that the new type of IT leadership are able to orchestrate, and so budget stakeholders, architectures across that platform. And if they're not able to then new people step into that frame, and those are the new leaders, right? So the new digital leaders that we see emerging, that would be my take, I don't know if Fredrik, if you've got a perspective on that.

Fredrik Tukk: No, I fully agree, Phil because like you said, if on one hand, the business are closer to the customer and the market, so they might have some insights, but they might not have the understanding of how to drive, or to tell what the solutions should be, then it's better that you keep actually the IT department who are more in the forefront of the technical development to lead it, so I fully agree with your analysis there.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. Let's get to one more question, real quick before we close, which is our last digital initiative, did not go well. And how do we bounce back from that, from a cultural perspective?

Marne Martin: Fredrik, I think you have the lead off answer on that one.

Fredrik Tukk: It's an interesting question of course, you know what I mean? There have been probably marketing needs as a big thing, and the big change, and if it's a failure, then no one has the belief in the technology. If it's a specific technology they were doing or that product, and then how do you get people convinced? And again, back to my point, I think then you need to start small and maybe you should launch a couple of other initiatives, that you can get some pilots or something that shows that this is actually working. And then you take the biggest steps and launch it at the biggest scale, because then people will build back the belief in it, and see that it is actually working. But if you do it in a different way, maybe... And then of course you can make an analysis on that specific products and why did it fail?

Fredrik Tukk: Was it resistance? Was it lack of knowledge or the resource? Or whatever it might be, you find the reason for it. But then again, I'm a fun believer in saying that you can show and prove that it's working in a small scale, then it's easy to scale it. So that's my point. I'll take on that. And Phil's probably have some good points as well.

Phillip Carter: Yeah. I think what we've heard is this notion of moving to a ritual descent type of model, where you are willing and everyone accepts the idea that you should take feedback. If something doesn't go according to plan, then you have an open discussion and people provide their feedback. You're not allowed to defend yourself. You basically hear the feedback and that there's no blame off the back of that, and you move forward quickly. So that, that's a culture that, I mean, you've got to develop that culture overtime. If you're used to have a blame culture, then it's difficult, that's the objective, if you can get to that, then it's amazing what can be done because it's a sense of honesty, but at constructive feedback, as part of the conversation.

Marne Martin: 100% agree with that, I think, organizations that are very, very political and kind of what I call zero sum type organizations that someone, there's winners and losers, that's really hard to implement the type of culture that Fredrik is talked to, dare to dream, dare to fail, dare to innovate. So, the advice that I have is absolutely, even though people don't like doing postmortems and sometimes it's hard, do one that's very honest and think about how you remove the impediments of the past failure, and then make sure that you're doing projects for the right reasons. I can't comment too much on the reason for the failure without understanding more, but it might be that had the wrong expectations or the wrong team, or what have you. So, digesting it so that you don't repeat, say the reasons for the failure again is really important.

Marne Martin: But you also have to have a culture that does allow people to move forward and take some chances. Because even the best performing people in the world, and I'll go back to my sports analogy to wrap up, every time they have a strike and goal, they don't make a goal, every time, LeBron James in the U.S takes a shot he doesn't necessarily make a point, right? Even the people in the hall of fame in baseball, didn't bat 100%. So you have to figure out what your tolerance level is for failure and mount that into the cultural expectations of the business. Obviously you want to minimize that, if you think about statistical normal distribution, you want most of your projects to be successful. You might have some small tail positive ones that far exceed the expectations, but you're also going to have some failures, i.e., your small tail negative outcomes. And in that you have to recognize and move forward on.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. Very good insights. So Fredrik, Phil and Marne, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you all being here and sharing your wisdom. So, thank you for that. And everyone that joined, thank you as well. Be sure to visit IDC and IFS, to find some of their content. You could also check out Future of Field Service, and hear some stories from the industry. Thank you for being here and hope everyone has a great day.

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Modernizing Technician Utilization for Today’s Field Service Objectives

Ian Pattinson, former VP technical operations at Rogers Communications, talks with Sarah about how the perception and responsibilities of a field technician have changed, the need to prioritize use of your most skill resources, and how compensation can make – or break – performance.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're going to be talking about an important topic, which is modernizing technician utilization. We all know that today's field service objectives are far different than they were five years ago, even in some instances a year or two ago. What are the ways that we can modernize how we're leveraging our field technician resources? I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Ian Pattinson, who's the former vice president of technical operations at Rogers Communications. Ian, welcome to the podcast.

Ian Pattinson: Good morning, Sarah. And thank you very much for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here. Before we get into the meat of the conversation, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.

Ian Pattinson: Oh, great. Good morning. Well, I've loved working in the telecom industry for the last 25 years. I started out in technology development, network operations and technical support, and then grew into a VP roles and product development, new business general management, and most recently completed field technical operations with the very large Canadian cable and wireless operator that you just mentioned. I'm really an executive that thrives on driving change transformation with a very hands-on delivery of achieving the plan and its results.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, great. Well, we're excited to have you here sharing some of your experience. We're going to talk about how to maximize utilization, but before we do that, let's talk about some of the ways that the perception of, the use of, the responsibilities of field technicians have changed in recent times.

Ian Pattinson: Yeah. Yes. It has been a massive change, and I really look at it both in two ways, that it's changed both internally within companies and externally in the industry. Firstly, internally, from a service provider perspective, it's really changed from being what was a necessary installation obligation that we had on a hundred percent of orders being done by generalist technicians. Now in a world where we've got advanced self-installation by customers themselves, and then incredibly complex homes because the customer's homes are coming increasingly more technically complicated as we begin to 15 plus devices and beyond in homes. The technician has really become that key strategic asset for the service provider who is the trusted technical advisor that is welcomed into a home by customers and really becomes the face of the brand. It's also one of the biggest operational costs.

Ian Pattinson: It's a massive opportunity to drive compounding material improvements across the P&L. Then looking at stonewalling at the greater marketplace, there are several iconic consumer brands out there that have already delivered on new spectacular service experiences. Combined with pervasive social media and these increasingly more complex homes, customers’ expectations have really increased, and their tolerances for problems have really decreased. That has really increased the technical needs and skills required by technicians. I think if we even look more recently and you touched on it there, the pandemic has really created a massive public visibility to the frontline technicians who have taken on great personal risk to actually keep delivering on the essential home services that we all now rely upon. They are very much front and center part of a service provider brands.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. What's interesting to me, and on this podcast, we have folks from a variety of different industries. Even as you look outside of telecommunications, that key concept that you brought up, which is technicians being leveraged more strategically, that might look or feel a little bit different industry to industry, or whether you're servicing consumers versus businesses, et cetera. The reality is, in almost every situation, every industry, every organization that we're talking with that is a key objective, is to evolve that relationship from one that is transactional, obligatory, as you said to one that is strategic and value added, and more relationship-based and really a way to differentiate the brand. I think that's a really exciting change, but it's one that requires a lot of evolution in terms of evolving what that field technician role looks like. I want to talk next just about what has that happened first? Which, in my opinion, is this recognition of the potential that that role can hold beyond that transactional historical duty.

Sarah Nicastro: What do you think is the difference between organizations that adopt this mindset or this belief that they can leverage technicians strategically versus organizations that don't necessarily see that potential?

Ian Pattinson: Yeah. I think that's a great question. It's a big change and it's an enormous opportunity for companies. In my experience is that the change starts with the text being seen truly as that new strategic asset opportunity and formerly becoming part of the corporate strategy so that it spreads company-wide to get that buy-in and becomes embraced as that key opportunity, because it needs full cross functional collaboration, everywhere from finance to marketing and, and beyond. It's not just about the operations groups going in and doing something new that might be marketed. It is a true cross functional collaboration, because it's really about evolving the entire service model from recruiting, training, compensation, career development, rewards, process redesign, and then the critical dispatch systems that are actually the lungs, particularly a service providers business. It's also really critical to transparently involve the frontline workforce themselves to help collaborate on the new strategy and achieve that real buy-in where they really believe in it and live it. When this all comes together, it's really amazing to see the sea change that gets delivered for customers, employees and the company.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. But the coming together part is not so simple. I have a couple of questions on that. The first is just, you mentioned the buy-in of the frontline workers themselves. In your experience, I'm just curious, if you had to maybe tie a percent to how many are excited about that opportunity versus hesitant or resistant to doing something different than that more historical model?

Ian Pattinson: Well, it certainly starts up, starts out and it's a multi-stage process. This is not a one-time thrown speech to the front line that they've all heard multiple times and it's lip service. It has to be a change management program that is organized advance with those cross-functional teams, because again, it involves changes to compensation and rewards and process redesign, et cetera. Like any large change management activity, you've got to go through those different phases. In the initial stages, there are going to be a third, a third, then a third. There's going to be a third of the group that are really pumped and really get it and, are really bought in right at the very beginning. Then there's going to be a group that's kind of in the middle, and then there's a group that has seen it before, done before, it isn't going to work. So, the change management strategies that have to really address each of those different constituents, because you've got to have everybody on onboard.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. The other question I wanted to ask is, we talked about the importance of this being a cross functional effort and there needing to be alignment company-wide on the evolving use of service and the technicians themselves. What's your advice on what it takes to achieve that alignment?

Ian Pattinson: Well, again, I think it's back to that formal change management program. My experience has been that we've got some incredibly great suggestions and techniques that have come from some of the cross functional teams. If I go back several years to when I was in the product organization, I didn't even know what the name of our dispatch system was. Now, that's a really critical component of it, and we really got some great, great suggestions and techniques that came from the different cross functional groups. Confidence breeds confidence. If it's just coming from the operations team, it's not as real as when it is becomes part of the vocabulary of the entire organization in terms of what the opportunity is, and then it becomes electric and contagious, and you receive tremendous buy in.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So the next thing I want to talk about is, we're talking about maximizing the use of our field technician resources to really evolve our service model to one that is more strategic and more focused on customer experience, customer relationships, being seen, as you said, as a trusted advisor. To do that, there's an element of re-skilling or up-skilling, and getting your technicians to the point where they're confident enough to handle those interactions, but there can also be an element of eliminating some of the work from their plates that isn't that value add work. I want to talk a little bit about that idea of how do we prepare our technicians for this new role, and then what's the opportunity to leverage contract workers or to offload some of the duties from them that are not that value add strategic work that we want them to focus on?

Ian Pattinson: Yeah, I think you're right. As those customer homes become more technically complex, so does their work and their tools, the skills required and the training that's needed. Not every technician can be a top level expert on all skills and all points in time, and then in the future, with technology changing so quickly. I think if you just look at the wifi, for example, how much wifi has changed in the last three years with WiFi 6, 6E, pods, dynamic channel selection, bands tearing, et cetera. It's a complex world. With generalist texts and generalist orders, this creates a growing risk that the order may not get implemented with the [PFO Spalding 00:15:17], and the reality is that there is a stratification of complexity of orders, and this is a big opportunity, both at the more complex at the orders as well as at the lower end.

Ian Pattinson: By breaking down the install and repair process into several technical skills and levels, joined with all the disposition and telemetry data that is widely available now, this enables the matching of the skills of the technician to the specific attributes and needs of the customer. This dramatically increases the probability of getting it right the first time, first time right being really, really critical, and eliminating a lot of the breakage and the inevitable downstream costs that create a much better customer experience. I think if we continue the example of wifi and using your example there with contractors, there's a big difference. If we look at two different kinds of homes, there's a really big difference between the installation and troubleshooting and training needs that are required for a fairly low value order that is just basic wifi in a small home versus a high value order that has near a gigabit Wi-Fi speed needs and intermittent interference issues from a large home.

Ian Pattinson: With dynamic skills-based dispatching, the highest skilled technicians are dynamically dispatched to these complex overs, and the lower skill resources are a lower task and time order, and can be assigned. Those technicians are also creating a career development opportunity for those lower skilled technicians. Lastly, with the dynamics skills dispatching, simple orders don't end up getting overpaid if you've got just a single task for types of orders, and then the complex orders don't end up being underpaid where quality gets risked because not enough time has been allocated.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Ian, over the coming years, how do you see the use of contract workers evolving? Do you see it growing? Do you see it staying the same? What do you think the role leveraging that type of workforce plays in this quest to become more strategic?

Ian Pattinson: Yeah, contractors are a big asset, and I think there is a bit of a false word out there that contractors just do the low-end work. My experience has been that some of the best quality work is done by contractors, but the contract partners really enable the ability to post in terms of capacity and can be an opportunity for other types of low value work as well, based on dynamic dispatching.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. Okay. Let's talk next about compensation, you've brought up compensation a couple of different times, and the need to consider what your compensation model and strategy is as you work to evolve the role of the field technician to become more customer centric. What's your advice around this topic?

Ian Pattinson: Oh, yes. This is absolutely critical. This is probably one of the penultimate examples of where that strong cross-functional collaboration is required to evolve the compensation model and career development, frankly, from what has been a traditionally a tenure based model to a skills and quality based performance model, truly cross-functional. Quality levels need to be determined and continually monitored based on a variety of a bunch of different data points, like day of the install success rates, task codes usage, post-install device telemetry performance in terms of how well the home was actually operating after the installation was done, along with correlations with the post-install technical support call dispositions and customer satisfaction surveys. My experience has been that after only a short time, the data clearly demonstrates the correlation between specific quality problems, and skill and compliance gaps.

Ian Pattinson: Automatically tagging under threshold performers for management triage and attention of retraining is really, really important. It's beyond just the compensation and career development and rewards, delivering this new model also requires investing in a new training curriculum, data analytics reporting is fundamental, and that moreover allocating the right amount of task time to do the work properly, and then empowering individual technician discretion when additional time is required, because now they're actually being measured and performing based on quality. When that quality gets delivered, it just pays back in spades. It takes senior management conviction to drive that change management program that we were talking earlier on to create what can be slightly more complex order stratification, and increasing and decreasing task codes, but the total cost of ownership improvements do come from what are reduced downstream, repeat calls, repeat visits, more satisfied customers with higher retention, higher tenure, and frankly, more satisfied the technicians that do a better job.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I want to come back to that, but I have one question before we talk about the impact on employee and customer satisfaction, which is, you mentioned a lot of metrics, and so when you start measuring on quality, there's a lot of ways that you can look at that quality and a lot of those metrics that give you insights, as you mentioned, on where are the gaps. What do we need to address? How do we improve this overall? What that makes me curious about though, Ian, is from an employee perspective, how are those, or are those metrics, do they need to be simplified in a way where maybe the company is looking at 15 different criteria to glean the insights they need to determine who needs training or where do we need to intervene? Or what are the common themes, if any, that we see?

Sarah Nicastro: But I assume you don't want the technicians having to follow 15 metrics of their own performance to gauge their level of success. Is there an internal versus employee facing way that you would order those things, so that for the technician experience, it's a little bit more streamlined and they're able to easily see how they're tracking? What would that look like?

Ian Pattinson: Sure. I think it starts with that the scorecard has to be transparent, and it has to be easily explainable, otherwise it's not credible and you won't get that buy-in. I mentioned a couple of the different dimensions that are fairly well understood by the front line, and you would give them full visibility to that. And then the more complex, deep analytics that is going to cause the model to keep evolving, is really the more private side of the ongoing analytics. But credibility of that is absolutely critical. It impacts people's compensation, and so it's got to be credible, it's got to be transparent and explainable and easily understood.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. You mentioned that this takes a lot of hard work, but when it's done well, there's a positive impact both on employee and customer satisfaction. The customer satisfaction part seems pretty straightforward to me. You're evolving the model to focus more on quality and really focus more on the customer experience, so I can see how that would have a positive impact on them. I'm curious, though, if you can speak a little bit to that, and then also, how and why does this impact employee satisfaction so much?

Ian Pattinson: Certainly. Totally agree. It's fairly straight forward on the customer side that more satisfied customers are going to call less, tenure is going to be higher, et cetera, and that flows through the entire P&L. On the employee side, I don't think it's well known in the industry that most techs really do care about the work they do and they want to get it right for customers. I think this is starting to become more visible. If you think about it as a tech, and I've been there, it's quite demoralizing when you don't have the skills or the tools to be able to fix the problem. Nothing worse than being embarrassed in front of the customer that you can't fix the problem, or you've got to have someone else come back to do the work. Again, conversely, when you do have the skills and the tools to fix that complex for the customer, you become the hero with the customer. To me, it's a bit of a simple philosophy that happy customers stay longer and drive less trailing costs, and having employees stay longer and do better work.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it's really the ultimate story of teamwork, because they want to do well, but perhaps in certain situations, they're just not set up process-wise or system-wise to have that opportunity to always be doing well. If you recreate the process and you put systems in place that essentially do this element of matching the right skills with the right roles, then they have almost a bullet-proof chance at success when they arrive. That makes sense. They feel more fulfilled because they're showing up, they're getting work done, they're making people happy, and then they're moving on to the next thing, instead of being at jobs that they're not equipped for, or what have you. Yeah. It's a win-win. We've talked quite a bit on Future of Field Service about the correlation between employee engagement and customer satisfaction, and I think there can tend to be... I don't want to say an overemphasis on the customer side because it's critical, but sometimes companies overlook the real importance of, how does all of this impact our employees? How do our employees feel? What do our employees need?

Sarah Nicastro: Because if we can get that right, our chances of success getting the customer side right are infinitely higher. That makes sense. All right. Ian, the last thing I want to talk about is the role of modern technology in all of this. There's a lot of internal alignment, which we talked about. First, you have to have the right mindset that this evolution is possible and it's a fit for your company. Then you need to get everyone on the same page, including the front line and cross-functionally, and look at how do our processes need to change? How does our compensation model need to change? Et cetera. But the other big element of this is leveraging modern technology. Talk to us a little bit about how important that is in this ultimate mission.

Ian Pattinson: Certainly. I think earlier used the term that the dispatch systems are truly the lungs of the service provider organization. Yes, the billing system may be the heart, but dispatch systems are the lungs. It really is a massive enabler of a lot of the customer, employee and financial opportunities that we've been talking about here today. My experience has been, moving to a standard based product that was cloud-based really resolved kind of three key issues with an old on-prem system. The first is that the old platform just couldn't deliver on the new strategy. It had been so highly customized, was no longer standard product, and hence was incredibly slow, expensive, and risky to change. It's just a horrible, dangerous combination there. Secondly, that the infrastructure on prem became quickly outdated, had slow latency performance from more and unpredictable usage, needing expensive hardware, uplifts, and then, of course, corresponding software dependencies from the new hardware changes, again, driving millions of dollars of costs and moreover orders to implement. Change quickly is absolutely critical. Come to the last key area was around stability and availability problems.

Ian Pattinson: I know the on-prem systems typically around 98% availability, when you do the math on that, that's seven days of downtime per year where no appointments can be made, technicians stuck in customer's homes and thousands of frontline staff waiting for systems to come up and extremely frustrating for customers. Again, my direct experience of moving to a cloud-based standard product resolved those three key areas. System availability went to over 99.9%. That's less than 10 minutes per month, which is just huge. We'll talk about building credibility with frontline technicians, systems stability is one of the top three for them. Number two, incredible system latency performance, because the cloud-based platforms can dynamically adjust to sudden increases in demand. But I think, most importantly, that the standard ultra-low customized product really enabled the ongoing rapid delivery of new features and capability that keep the platform current with constant new product development improvements and security updates.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It's interesting when you talk about the use of technology here, it can't do all of the hard work for you, but without it, all of the hard work is for not. If you did all of that hard work, all of that alignment, all of that change management, and then you still had outdated, unreliable technology in place, it's all for nothing. It is, like you said, the ultimate enabler of having success with making the most of your technician resources and your service objective. Good. Ian, before we close, do you have any other comments or words of wisdom that you want to share with our listeners?

Ian Pattinson: Well, I don't know if it's wisdom, but let's face it. I think you've pointed out there, dispatch systems haven't historically been sexy to work on and frequently seen as non-strategic cost centers. They don't really get changed that often. Frankly, I mentioned earlier on most people don't know the name of the platform. Even when I was in the product team, I didn't know the name of that platform, but moving to that standard product cloud platform is just so enabling of improving the entire service model. It is, again, just amazing to watch the results both financial, customer and employee, like we've talked about, that get delivered when the company embraces and collaborates around the new platform. Frankly, it's something, having done it, I'm really proud of what our team delivered.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. For those listening that are using really outdated technology, now is the time to do some research and find something that will take you into the modern era. Good. Well, Ian, thank you so much for being here and sharing your experiences and insights. I really appreciate it.

Ian Pattinson: You're quite welcome.

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

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How to Change to Win

July 7, 2021 | 25 Mins Read

How to Change to Win

Sarah welcomes Rias Attar, accomplished business strategist, transformation expert, operational excellence leader, project and change management professional and author of the new book Change to Win, to discuss how strategy, delivery mechanism, and culture all play a part in embracing change to respond successfully to market pressures.

Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we are going to be talking about how to change to win. Many of you are on some path of change. You're transforming your businesses. You're transforming your departments. You're transforming the service that you provide to customers. We know that change is very important but can be challenging. So today, on the podcast, I'm excited to welcome Rias Attar. He is an accomplished business strategist, transformation expert, operational excellence leader, and project and change management professional who is also the author of the new book Change to Win. Rias, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Rias Attar: Thank you, Sarah. Thank you for having me here.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here. So before we dig into the conversation about change and how to change to win, tell our listeners a bit about yourself.

Rias Attar: Well, I have been in the project management, transformation business optimization field for the past 25 years or so. I started in finance, and then I moved into project management and turnaround and transformation, being inspired by a couple of CEOs who I've seen doing magic at their organizations, turning around their businesses and moving them from deficient to profitable. I worked for different companies like General Electric, DHL Express, Caesars Entertainment. I also have done some work for companies like Dannon, the yogurt company, Maple Leaf Foods in Canada, some other smaller organizations as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Interesting. Yeah, I like that you referred to it as magic because it certainly does seem that way sometimes. I wrote an article not too long ago talking about how much of this is art and how much of it is science, right? It's really a little bit of both, but there might be some magic sprinkled in there too, for sure. Good.

Sarah Nicastro: As I said, I've been in this space for about 14-ish years and there's so much change that's happened. And while it is really exciting in a lot of ways, I realize that it is also incredibly taxing and challenging for the people that are required to spearhead that change. So one of the things that happens, I think, is that people and/or companies or both can get stuck in the, "Nope, we've always done it this way. We can keep doing it this way," mentality. As the pace of change, I think, in the overall environment speeds, those people with that mentality sort of fall further and further behind. What do you see in that regard? How many of those people or organizations do you think there are compared to those that are willing to embrace change? And what is it, do you think, that keeps people stuck in that mindset?

Rias Attar: Excellent question, Sarah. We are part of a constant change. The problem though is I think over the past maybe 20 years or so, that change has accelerated significantly. And I have to say probably over the past maybe year now with COVID, things have even accelerated at a much faster pace. The issue that I see most of the time is as human beings and even businesses, we start small, we start aggressive. We want to conquer the world. We want to learn things. We want to do something good. So we reach a point where we actually are successful and doing very well. And then we start building walls around us and build that comfort zone.

Rias Attar: So as we think that we are now great and we know everything and we are doing very well, we start to get very kind of complacent a little bit, may be the term, and maybe a little bit of resistant to change, because we now have this comfort zone. We feel happy and easy and safe and familiar. The newer companies that are now coming with cutting-edge technology and they're nimble, they're coming now with their own phase of, call it, conquering the new world. So that's where they start to get into the customer mindset a lot easier, and maybe adapt quicker while we are kind of somehow stuck in that comfort zone.

Rias Attar: So I feel that organizations that feel that change is a threat may suffer versus the ones who actually see the change as an opportunity generally succeed. They try to get out of that comfort zone to learn new tricks. They expose themselves a little bit into that danger zone and then to that learning zone. And then they start realizing their new growth zone. Once they get into that limit, they look back, and they will say, "Why did I not start earlier? I wish I started earlier. Oh my God, I don't believe I was locked in that comfort zone. Now I see a whole new horizon." This is kind of what you just mentioned, because this is what I refer to in my book, Change to Win. I ask the leaders, "Do you know what the business death sentence is?" It's actually a sentence that business leaders and owners often repeat, which is, "We have always done it this way." That sentence becomes their own death sentence, their business death sentence.

Sarah Nicastro: That's really good perspective. I think you could almost say that there's even a less obvious death sentence of today's businesses, which is, "It's working well." Right?

Rias Attar: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: To the point you just mentioned, if you look at this almost as a continuum, I mean, there's these people that are, "No, we're in our comfort zone. We've always done it this way. We're going to continue to do it this way," either out of fear or pride or ego or complacency, whatever those things are. And then there's people who don't perceive themselves as averse to change but have achieved that level of success you referred to where they say, "No, I mean, we did innovate and we're doing great, so we can stop it here and just bask in our success."

Sarah Nicastro: It reminds me of a conversation I had with a gentleman named Sae (Kwon) who at the time was with Cisco. We talked about weighing the decision of disruption, right? So when do you decide to disrupt things? But talking about the fact that in the world we live in today, as prevalent and fast as innovation occurs, if you wait until you recognize the need to change to change, you're at best keeping pace, right? So for you to really be ahead of the curve, you need to be doing it when you are successful. Does that make sense?

Rias Attar: Yeah. I mean, you see the thing is there are maybe two phases here. The first phase is realizing that you actually have to change and realize that fact because, again, you're faced with market conditions or you are faced with customer demands, with newer technologies, with competition, with a higher input cost, with new mergers and acquisitions in your industry that are posing stress, maybe with crisis and catastrophic events like COVID-19 and else. So you realize that there is a need for change. So this is the first hurdle, you realizing that, "Okay, well, I have to change." Right? That's the one thing. Because many people do not actually that shift. To your point, they will just get stuck with that, "This has worked in the past. Maybe we just need to continue." Well, maybe. Maybe you can still maybe are able to succeed at the limited success factor here, but how about maybe if we can multifold, maybe if we can increase that success? How about maybe you don't yet realized the opportunities you have? And maybe that success that you currently enjoy has a limitation maybe a couple of years, three, four years. If you do not do something about it today, you would be way behind in a couple of years or so.

Rias Attar: That's the first hurdle, realizing that you actually need to get out of that comfort zone and get into that change. The issue that we find most of the time is that companies and individuals, sometimes, when they realize that they need to change, okay, they say, "Okay, got it. We decided to change." They leave that comfort zone, they get exposed a little bit into that danger zone. They hit the break, and they go back to their comfort zone, all right, because they see so many issues. I mean, we can talk a lot about this. They may have legacy systems. They may have issues with their culture and internal culture, maybe there's industry, whatever it is. So they pull back without really continuing that momentum. And that's kind of another aspect of, okay, you started change, and somehow you either face some limitations and decide to pull back, or you're stuck in that endless gray phase, which is always not reaching your future state. You're always lingering in that interim state, which is what we sometimes we get stuck into, right? So there's really those two phases, I really feel, happening.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, okay, that makes sense. If we look at the differing opinions or emotions around change, so you have people that view it as a threat, and then you have people that view it as an opportunity. Let's use the term people and businesses interchangeably in this context, right? So what do you think is the key to shifting the mindset to perceiving change more as an opportunity than a threat?

Rias Attar: I mean, these days, if we don't change, really, I don't know how long we will be able to survive. I mean, the thing is with everything that's happening to us, I mean... Again, I hate to always refer to COVID-19, but because this is where we are at this point of time. But when you're faced with something like this, the companies who are nimble or that are nimble and able to adapt quickly, those are the ones that are actually increasing their market reach. They are increasing their market segments. They're hitting record-breaking profits because those are the ones who actually were able to adapt quickly and leverage the new environment to their advantage. So if you do not really change, there's so many companies that just filed for bankruptcy because they couldn't adapt to that change. I'm just giving you an example.

Rias Attar: So it's really a necessity, but at the same time, I always go back to the vision of the senior leadership team or the owner of that organization. Are they there for the long term? Are they there for years and decades and generations or are there for months, or maybe just a couple of years? I guess it depends on their priorities. So that vision and mission really set the tone. If their mission and vision is long-term, then yes, they need to figure out how they can leverage those threats and turn them into opportunities. I always also refer to this as reversing the risk from negative risk to positive risk and capitalize on those and potentially either introduce a new product line, a new service, a new way of thinking, a new culture, a new innovation, or something like that.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Talk to me a little bit more about that concept of negative risk versus positive risk. And maybe just contextualize that a little bit more for the listeners and talk about why one is really good for the business and the other is not, right? Talk about that a little bit more.

Rias Attar: Yeah, I mean, definitely. Look, when you are in any market environment, there are just so many, again factors, new interest to the markets. Globalization is another one, right? Now we're borderless with the internet and with connectivity. I mean, companies in China and India and somewhere, they're competing for the same products and services that the companies that are in here in the United States because they can provide maybe similar services. Maybe not the product, like physical product, but maybe a service per se. So how can you compete when you're seeing all those companies who are providing the same or similar service or product at a fraction of a cost? How can you? You see this as a risk, and then you come back and it's like, "Okay, well, I'm going to lose my business if I don't do anything about it. So how can I leverage that as an opportunity?"

Rias Attar: Many times when we are the only company in the field, we don't really need to innovate. We don't really need to think outside of the box. We don't need to bring new products or services. We're just happy because we're the only ones. But the interesting element is when we are faced with threats. The companies that generally succeed will take those as an input. And they start to generate even more products or complementary services or something similar to that, that would make them superior in that marketplace and even a better profit margin and a better customer segment and so and so forth. When I refer to the negative risk, turning that into a positive risk, that is particularly something that those market leaders... And again, you don't need to be a market leader sometimes. Maybe you don't have the capital or the money to be a market leader. You can probably be a strong follower. Maybe you can see a leader in the market who is doing something, and then you learn from their mistakes, and then you go there and capitalize on that, and you become also successful in your industry.

Rias Attar: But the point here is we should never stop. We should always seek improvement. And that's how we call it continuous improvement. You should always seek opportunities to improve, whether in innovation, whether in technology, whether in reprocessing, maybe in different people, like training and bringing your people skillset to another level, whatever. It is people, process, technology, and data. We'll talk about data also in a second, yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. All right, so I like that point of negative risk versus positive risk. All right, so let's talk a little bit, Rias, about the insight you provide in the book. So we're talking about how businesses can succeed in transforming operations to meet evolving market demand, so how can they change to win? So you talk about some different elements that you know people need to address with some balance. So let's walk through these a bit. We have strategy, delivery mechanism, and culture, and change management. Talk a little bit about each of those. Obviously, you can't give the contents of the book away in a 30-minute podcast, but give us some food for thought.

Rias Attar: Yeah. So remember, we just talked about realizing the need for change and bringing that mindset that I need, or as a business, I need to do something safer, better, faster, maybe cheaper, right? So let's say you recognize that need... And again, there's a whole section in the book about resistance to change and what that means as so on and so forth. But let's say you realize that, "Yes, I need to change." Many companies they realize that need, they hire consultants. They put neat presentations. They assign fat budget for that transformation. They tell their employees that they need to change. And then few months later, nothing happens or it happens very, very slowly.

Rias Attar: What I noticed was there is the three, I call it, the three-legged stools in my book, which, as you just mentioned, the strategy, the delivery, and culture. I would actually like to explain this in an example. Where are you located at Sarah now?

Sarah Nicastro: I'm in Pennsylvania.

Rias Attar: Okay. So you're in Pennsylvania, and you decided to go to New York City. You have a powerful vehicle, a good engine, a powerful vehicle, and you hit the road but you don't have a Northern star. You don't have a navigation system. You don't have a map. You don't have a strategy. You don't have a vision of where you're going. You may end up in Miami, not in New York City. Because, again, you don't have that Northern star that guides you. You have a powerful engine. You're doing work. You're burning tires, you're burning fuel. You're wasting time, but you end up in a whole different place. And that may not be ideal. That place may be actually not optimal for you, or it could present some danger as well to your business.

Rias Attar: The first thing I talk about is let's have a set strategy. Let's make sure that our strategy is good and it's aligned, and we have a good one solid roadmap for the future. Now suppose that you have that roadmap, but you don't have a good vehicle, and that vehicle stalls every few miles or so. Run out of gas, there's something wrong with tires or whatever, or mechanics. You may never reach your destiny. Even if you know exactly where you're going, and you have perfect roadmap, you may never reach that destination, and you may actually reach that destination, but it would probably be too late. That boat may have sailed. So you may need to have that balance between, "Okay, I have the right strategy. Now I have that good delivery mechanism."

Rias Attar: In business, you cannot do things alone. You need to have people around you. You need to have people smarter than you and better than you to help you deliver your objectives. So you need to have, or you should have, the good culture and build so that people will not jump ship along that journey, and then you will be alone and probably never make it to the finish line. So that's why you always need to have that equilibrium, or maybe balance, between strategy efforts, delivery effort, and cultural efforts. Sometimes you put way too much money and effort on strategy, but we don't do a good job on, "How can we put a good project management methodology? How can we put a good operational excellence methodology? How can we make sure that we actually deliver those objectives?" And sometimes we do, but we don't really do change management very well so we don't really help our people adapt to change quickly or properly for us to reach that end state.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. So that makes perfect sense, but I want to challenge you a bit on the change management topic because this is a topic that comes up all the time in our conversations. It is probably the go-to answer when I ask, "Well, what went wrong?" That being said, while it is widely recognized as an area of importance, it continues to be under-prioritized, under-invested in, and under-executed. Do you have any tactical advice for this whole concept of creating a culture of change and managing change well?

Rias Attar: Yeah, I mean, there are many concepts for change management. The one I normally use is called ADKAR, which goes for awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and then reinforcement. When we are introducing any change from current state to any future state, the first thing we do is we want to bring awareness to people, to have that awareness element. And we announce it. We announce this initiative that we want to change, right? You want to hear people saying, "Yes, now I know what you're doing."

Rias Attar: Next one is desire. You want to move from just awareness to the people desire to be in that journey. And you want to hear people saying, "I decided to help." Right?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rias Attar: And then when you reach that point, the next phase is knowledge. You want to provide them with training, with coaching, with support to help them cope with that change. So then you will hear something from them like, "Now I know how to do it." Now, the most important element is that there's a huge difference between knowledge and ability, which is the next phase. Now, Sarah, you and I may be, let's say, the last people on earth. I may have some issues with my heart. And I will say, "Sarah, in order for you to save me, I'm going to give you 17 books on how to do an open heart surgery for me. Will you be able to operate on me after reading 17 books?" Probably not.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Rias Attar: You may need years of practice. I would actually be scared to have you operating on me-

Sarah Nicastro: You should be.

Rias Attar: ... because that ability, that difference between knowledge... You acquired the knowledge, you already read 17 books. But there's a huge difference between knowledge and ability. That's why we say change management is important because you have to go through all those phases. And then of course, data is reinforcement. Reinforce that message. Reinforce that change. Many organizations realize that change management need maybe at the 11th hour. And then they were like, "Oh, wait a second, we need to work with our people. And we need to bring that adaptability. We need them to gain that change adoption." But probably they're too late. So why investing in people is so important? Because there are the ones, most of the time, that are using the system. They are the ones who are facing customers every single day.

Rias Attar: Investing in people increases competitive advantage. It ensures happier customers. It actually solidify the business growth. It increases the efficiency in work and actually attracts more quality talents. I mean, good people attract good people. So that's why investing in people and investing in change management will pay its dividends because you will be able to reach your destination faster and better and more efficient.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay, all right. Another question I want to ask you related to change management, so you brought up COVID a couple of times, and one of the things that I've noticed is when COVID first began unfolding, I wrote a few articles about how situationally, it was actually increasing open-mindedness and making people more receptive to the idea that we need to change because it was this huge force that came through. For companies that needed to quickly adapt, it just was something that they changed. And then I think there was a number of people that were like, "We can do it."

Sarah Nicastro: As time went on, though, another conversation that started to surface is the idea of how weary people are at this point, right? So now that we're 15, 16 months into this whole thing different industries, obviously different regions, the journey has looked different for different folks, but just the idea that a lot of frontline employees are weary. COVID has taken its toll on them as it has on us all. So the question is, with that in mind, how do you continue the necessary journey of change while being conscious of maybe some of the emotional exhaustion or mental burnout of the people that you ultimately need to get on board?

Rias Attar: That's actually a good question as well. I mean, it's definitely something that businesses are seeing. People may have lost some loved ones as well, and that may have also added some pressure, and to your point, they are tired. Many people have went through furloughs, and now they feel the need to go back and think about job security and so on and so forth. I mean, it's always nice to keep close to your people and hear what they're saying and what's bothering them, what ideas they may have as well. Because remember, the brightest ideas come from the frontline. They're the ones who actually see customers every day. They're the ones who actually use the systems and tools every single day, so not the executives. We sit in our offices.

Rias Attar: Sometimes we have that visions, but if we do not listen to the feedback. And that's the power of data. I think collecting data, collecting feedback from people would help us understand where to navigate, whether it is some sort of like, "Should we train them on new tools, like the science aspect, or is it more about like comforting and more about maybe just maybe train them and coach them on the art, which is like how to deal with new different situations. Maybe it's just more about providing them with other ways to do their business and how they can do it efficiently. I think the message here is, again, remember, it's continuous improvement.

Rias Attar: Many organizations now post COVID, and again, remember, those are the many, many successful organizations who were able to bring new tools and techniques and made them so efficient, they're looking back, and it's like, "Why we didn't do this before COVID? I wonder why we haven't done this now." So now they're thinking about this now post COVID era, it's like, "You know what? We should probably continue doing this. Many organizations, for example, are now utilizing Zoom and other video conferencing tools and maybe not leasing expensive space anymore because they feel, I mean, it's unnecessary.

Rias Attar: So going back to your original question about the people and how weary they are after COVID, I think it's important to retrospect a little bit and look at the positive side and think about... And now we're towards the end of that, hopefully, that cycle, and now we're posing for a new growth hopefully, and what that looked like, what will be the next phase? Let's think about that. Let's think forward. But realize that if soliciting feedback and listening to your customers, your employees would hopefully help you significantly position your business for success.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It makes sense. It's just a point I wanted to bring up, because to your point, you can't overlook the people, part of this, right? So depending on the industry, the company, the region, the role, what have you, I think it's important to take that temperature check and just be cognizant of the fact that we as humans have gone through a lot. And so maybe there's an element of this next wave of change where you need to put some effort into re-energizing or giving people some reassurance or whatever that looks like for your team. Okay. Rias, I wanted to ask, I'm curious your thoughts on the role of technology when it comes to changing to win.

Rias Attar: Yes. It's no secret that technology, especially over the past 20-plus years, it's improved significantly. Everything from a technology perspective really starts with data. I always like to bring that topic because before maybe the internet era, data was so precious. We used to lock those data in our offices. And now, since we are plugged in, probably there's not so much data that we can hide or we don't have access to. But the problem now there has been an explosion of data. And so what do we do with all this data? So this is where you start, from a technology perspective, you probably need to collect the data, whether it's in regards to your current technology that you're using, your competitor's technology, or your customer's needs, what they want.

Rias Attar: It always starts with data. What exactly I need to do based on current benchmarking, where I am compared to my customers, where I am compared to... sorry, compared to competition, compared to trends, compared to customers' expectations, and so on and so forth. So after collecting this data, you start to transform this and work on changing from just simple data to information. What does this data tells me? So moving from data to information, and then that information tells me, "Okay, you may need to move from servers to cloud." So maybe you need to move from, I don't know, green screens to what we call green screens, which is like the old Microsoft AS400 system to the new maybe Windows or latest systems. That gives us a knowledge. Now, the information becomes a knowledge. Now we know what to do with it.

Rias Attar: Now, the art is using that knowledge and create a wisdom. So what exactly we want to do with it? So now we collected the data, we formed some information. We now acquire the knowledge. Now we have to do something about it. When we talk about technology, the newer organizations, Sarah, usually are quite nimble. They kind of have the latest and greatest tools and techniques. They don't have that technical debt. We call it technical debt, just the old codes and systems, and solutions. So they are able to move quickly and swiftly between different demands or market changes and so on and so forth versus the fairly older organizations who have huge systems in place. They're finding it very hard to change that technology that they have to adapt to the newer customer demands and customer needs.

Rias Attar: Sometimes they may have to reap and replace this whole technology, which that journey takes years of preparation. It's not that easy. Everything is connected, most of the time, in that kind of spaghetti-like diagrams. The one thing that I think COVID taught us was the roadmap that used to take us 10 years or five years, now we have to do it in months. There's a lot of urgency. There's a lot of now we're doing this at a much-accelerated pace. Because we probably do not have time. If we do not do this now, new competitors will potentially eat our market share and will drive us out of business. So technology becomes not only a need, it becomes a necessity. And now you don't have to always have the cutting-edge technology because you may not really be able to afford it. Or it may be very expensive for you. So you have to balance. Do you need to have the Toyota or you need to have the Ferrari? That's where, I guess, the business, it depends on the industry, but sometimes you just need a vehicle to move you from point A to point B. Sometimes you may actually need that higher cutting-edge technology. Technology becomes not only a need, it becomes a necessity and opportunity for success in the new era.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I like the point you made about a lot of the newer, more innovative by nature companies have less of a technological legacy to overcome, right? So they're starting fresher in that regard, which makes it easier to iterate and continue to modernize versus someone who's trying to do this wholesale upgrade to current times and then go from there. Okay. All right.

Sarah Nicastro: We're almost out of time. I just want to talk about one last point, which is we were talking at the beginning about the, "We've always done it this way," mentality and breaking out of that, right? We talked a lot about the recognition that it's time to change. But the reality for 2021 and beyond is that it is never not time to change, right? This isn't a situation where you break out of that mindset once, you chart the path, you walk the path, and then you are done with it, and that's that. This is really a more ongoing situation at this point. So talk about that and what you advise in terms of having that continuous improvement mindset and looking at this less as a project and more a state of mind, I guess.

Rias Attar: Yeah, an excellent point. I highly recommend that the strategy also becomes a little bit fluid. It depends on what's going on. Sometimes you may set a five-year strategy, which is good, but sometimes things happen, and you may need to adjust mid-course a little bit and adjust your roadmap based on things that happen. I mean, there's this agile kind of mindset, which is like, "Okay, let's go through an iterative delivery. Let's not keep stuck in this. Okay, we set that strategy for five years." Now, this is good. I'm not saying this is not good, but sometimes things happen. And when things happen, you may want to adjust mid-course a little bit in order to hit that bullseye. My recommendation is to always stay close to customers, understand your market needs, understand what the customers are saying, what they are demanding, who are the new players in the market. You may probably not know unless you start learning from customers. You may need to reevaluate your own processes and your own technologies and your own way your people are dealing with customers based on feedback that you're getting from customers.

Rias Attar: Now, again, sometimes you may get an overwhelming feedback. You just need to filter exactly what actually makes sense to your business. You may sometimes need to draw that some sort of customer journey for your customers, starting from the need, or want, or awareness all the way through like research and concentration purchase, maybe returns, maybe disposal, and then maybe advocate or promote of your service and product. The point here that I'm trying to say is try to stay close to your customers, listen to them very well. Try to stay close to your employees, and also listen to them very well. Have a good strategy that you set in mind. And the same time, make sure that you always, maybe every year or so, try to revisit that strategy and see if it actually makes sense.

Rias Attar: And then as you go along, make sure that you have that delivery mechanism. You want to make sure that you are advancing towards that strategy, whether that strategy is organic or inorganic, what exactly you're trying to achieve, and then how you're going to achieve that. And then, as I mentioned, that continuous improvement mindset is based on continuous feedback that you get throughout your journey from your customers, from your employees. Make sure that you are actually hitting that mark. If we continue to realize that we always need to think strategically and think about how we can get out of that comfort zone to that growth zone, and during that path, we realize the feedback, or we re-evaluate the feedback and we change mid-course, and then we actually capitalize on certain things, I think, generally speaking, you will be able... or those businesses will be able to be positioned for success and realize sustainable competitive advantage. It's not only periodic competitive advantage but sustainable competitive advantage.

Sarah Nicastro: It makes sense. Rias, let folks know where they can learn more about you and where they can find the book, Change to Win.

Rias Attar: Yeah, so they can always go to riasattar.com, R-I-A-S-A-T-T-A-R.com, or they can find the book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, on Target, like anywhere. They can just Google Change to Win, Rias Attar, and they will find it anywhere there. They can also reach out to me on LinkedIn or through my website, www.sayaplus.com, S-A-Y-A-P-L-U-S.com as well. They are more than welcome to ask any questions.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. Well, I appreciate you being here very much. Thank you for sharing some tidbits. And everyone, be sure to say hello to Rias on LinkedIn, and also to check out the book. In the meantime, you can find more content by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn, as well as Twitter @thefutureoffs. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS by visiting ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening!

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AT&T on The Future of The Call Center

Ian Schmehl, Vice President, Sales, Service, and Digital Operations – AT&T Mexico, talks with Sarah about the criticality of call center and field service collaboration, the growing role AI is playing in the call center, and what the future of a “no-call” center will look like.   Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're going to be talking about the future of the call center.` The call center and the field service functions are inextricably linked. Today we're going to be talking a bit about how the call center has evolved and how it will continue to evolve into the future and what that relationship with service should look like. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Ian Schmehl, who's the Vice President of Sales, Service and Digital Operations for AT&T Mexico. Ian, welcome to The Future of Field Service podcast.   Ian Schmehl: Thanks Sarah. Good to be with you.   Sarah Nicastro: Before we get into the nitty-gritty, tell us a little bit about yourself.   Ian Schmehl: So you're correct, as far as my opera area of operation right now, I have responsibility for AT&T Mexico. Basically it is the call center operation, including digital. I live in Mexico City. I have a very supportive wife and two growing daughters who are seven and eight, and we've been located there for almost five years.   Sarah Nicastro: Cool. How far apart in age are your daughters?   Ian Schmehl: They're 18 months apart.   Sarah Nicastro: 18 months. I have two boys and they're 16 months apart. So totally get that life. Speaking of which, I shared this with Ian before we got started, but it is raining here in Erie, Pennsylvania today. I do have not only my two children, but a couple of extras playing in the house. If you hear any background noise, just know that they are fully supervised and please disregard. Good. So, Ian, you've been with AT&T for a long time, I think around 21 years in a variety of roles. So tell us a little bit about your trajectory with the company. Some of the different functions that you've served in and how that led to the role that you hold today.   Ian Schmehl: Sure. You're spot on, it's been 21 years. That seems like a sort of flew by. I've had probably 16 different jobs working in pretty much every area of the company. From network operations, to marketing, business development, technical roles, business development, and product development. Even HR, where I had a labor role, including negotiating with the union. I've moved. I lived in seven different cities, six in the US and now the current location in Mexico City.   Ian Schmehl: As far as trajectory goes, I've been very blessed to have these opportunities and it moved up to the point that now I'm at the Vice-President level. When I would go through the different roles, it wasn't always a promotion. It was just getting more and more experience. I think that that's allowed me to have the perspective I do today. Because I really am not a specialist. I'm a generalist. I would do different roles and learn about the company and the industry. And now I think that one of the most critical parts tied to service in general, whether it's field service or call center, customer services, getting that relationship right. And that's what really excites me today, as far as the opportunities we have to do better in that area.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think that being in those different roles and seeing the organization from different perspectives, it gives you some really good context for different areas of the business. It's interesting because we see... To really keep pace with the change that exists today and to succeed in service and realize its potential. There's a lot of silos within the business that have had to, and continue to need to be broken down. Right. And that situation of a call center in a silo field service, in a silo, you know, these different things, based on the customer experience, but then also the nature of digital transformation and just how the business needs to collaborate better. Those things are really... Those lines are blurring in a lot of ways. I would imagine your experience outside of the function you're in today and being able to see that from different perspectives is helpful.   Ian Schmehl: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the piece of it, when you intertwine technology with it, the adoption of technology, the implementation of technology. Ends up being a really key skill set, not just to understand that sometimes it takes time, right? Sometimes it doesn't work and being able to adapt and overcome based upon that experience has been a real key.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting even the name of this podcast is, Future of Field Service. Right? But in some ways the name in and of itself is misleading because it's not about field service. If you look through the content we're discussing, it's really a service as a whole and the customer experience in its entirety. Right? I think that we've even had conversations about that, like should we call it something different? But the reality is the name is still applicable in terms of what people look for and the types of things we're talking about. It's just far more encompassing then it was 10 or 15 years ago. Right? So all of that being said, we know the call center is certainly a critical aspect of the customer experience. What would you describe the relationship that you typically see between the call center and field service?   Ian Schmehl: I think I see our role as being a support to the field. While there are issues relative to the wireless network, as it relates to the customer, the field for us is the retail store. What I can say is it's an extremely close relationship. My peer is the Chief Revenue Officer. I'm in very constant communication with him. And our role, right, is to provide feedback to them. I see ourselves, our team as service for the field. So we have two customers, right? Internal and external. Us being able to provide that feedback based upon an interaction with a customer makes it such that the field can get better and we can get better by giving them that feedback.   Ian Schmehl: I think that that's critical because as service evolves in today's age, the idea of measurement and the things around how those two teams work together and function together, is critical. And to your point, it starts to blend. Right? Because if the interaction is occurring in the store and then it necessitates a call, right? And we don't want to call, right? Because it typically means there's a problem. Then my obligation is to make it so that that field experience is better and maybe there's an adjustment that's made there as well.   Sarah Nicastro: So as we look at the interdependency and the connectedness of those functions and what I mentioned earlier in terms... For organizations, they're really looking to impact the customer experience. You have to look at how you break down silos. What would you say organizations can do to improve the relationship between the call center and field service and make that codependency more effective? And really drive better customer outcomes?   Ian Schmehl: Yeah. It's top of mind. Because there absolutely are silos and it's a lot of work to break them down. And many times the call center is viewed as beneath the retail experience, right? Oh, you're just in the call center. I think there's two pieces to it. The first is teamwork and accepting that you have to operate as a team. And the second is data. So go into teamwork, one of the things we've done is we've literally had learning sessions for the field. For the sales organization to better educate, what does the call center do? What does the day in a call center look like because they're totally different. The retail experience is simply productivity. How many widgets, right? Hitting my number versus a call center, and that measurement being totally different. And what do I see? And what's my experience. They're having the customers in front of them, and we're hearing the customer. And many times what we're hearing is feedback relative to what went right, or what went wrong with that first touch and that first experience. The second bucket I see is data.   Ian Schmehl: I once heard a gentleman, I work with say that, "Never believe anything unless you're coming with data," right? Everybody else is not of as much value. The reason I site data is because if you can educate the team member who you're working with and tell them the why behind what you're saying and bring them proof, I think it's an easier conversation because you know what the problem is. If you can identify... Or frankly what they're doing well. I think that the relationship can become better and has become better because you're giving everything. You're telling the whole story. It's not just, well, in this particular store, we had 17% of our calls or this region, and that's tied to this leader and that was bad. It's okay. Where are we doing right? So when I talked to my peer and I say, "Hey, here's an area of opportunity, but did you know this? And did you know this is where we never get a call?" That's how I see you break down the silos, teamwork and data.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. So if you think about your history and AT&T and the different roles that you've had, and the perspective that gives you, related with the current initiatives that you're leading in the call center. All of that gives you a unique perspective on what you feel the future of the call center will be and will look like. I want to talk a little bit about some of those key, I guess, predictions or considerations or things to think about. The first are around really operations and skill sets. Tell us a little bit about some of the opportunity for evolution that you see here, or some of the things that you have underway at AT&T.   Ian Schmehl: Sure. The traditional notion of a brick and mortar call center, I think is going to be rethought and analyzed. I'm not going to say that I think that we're going to move to a virtual distributed model, a hundred percent. I know there are companies in the industry. There's one in the airline industry that did that. But I think rethinking that with respect to the benefits, is a key theme now. And the really easy benefit to look at is cost, right? If I don't need to have this building and I don't need to pay this rent or lease or whatever, then why wouldn't I focus on that because I don't want the high cost. But the other piece of it ends up being tied to recruiting. And so if you don't have to be in one city and you could actually recruit in a specific demographic area, say... Have call center experience where there are a number of people concentrated in that particular city.   Ian Schmehl: I think that's a big help. But the key part of this is you have to still be able to achieve the operational excellence with respect to quality. Monitoring, and the hard one, honestly, is the teaming. The teamwork. Being able to see somebody, being able to relate to the people. And then frankly, that goes back to leadership. You can get the new talent pool, you can have the geography, you can cut your costs, but if you can't drive the results, then you're not going to necessarily see this huge seismic shift. I think what you're going to do is you're going to see adoption of technology and you'll see monitoring become more important speech analytics, AI. But the call center itself for it to shift, it's going to need those things.   Sarah Nicastro: Now, what does that look like in terms of the skill sets? How do you see the skills needed for, let's say the ultimate call center. What will that look like five years from now, or 10 years from now?   Ian Schmehl: I think with the adoption of AI and psychometric or personality testing, you're going to see a shift toward personality profile and matching. Said differently, if I get a call and I know that Sarah has this disposition, or as good at this, I think you're going to become more targeted with respect to who gets the call. But to your question regarding profile, I think that there has to be a passion for the job. I think there has to be a deep understanding of the experience. So you're not just answering the call and solving the problem. You understand the customer journey better.   Ian Schmehl: I think you end up having more holistic understanding of that customer experience in order to solve it. And it's no different than today, but I think you have to have people who love their job. So that will never change. I think that the obligation of companies is to make that easier. Many times what happens is the call center is the last place people go and they end up not getting their problem solved. Irritated with the company and never want to call because they're on the phone and they're told they have to wait for two hours.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. So as you think about the change in the matching of skills, the change in use of technology, the change in maybe a more distributed structure versus a central call center. How do all of those things impact the ability to successfully measure effectiveness? What needs to change related to how we look at or modernize the measurement of call center?   Ian Schmehl: I think that to my previous point, we need to be looking more holistically at the customer journey. Identifying the pain points and providing the feedback loop. There's an opportunity to measure service resolution based upon that journey. And what this means is you have to have that partnership across the customer life cycle. Now, with respect to measurement, I see an opportunity to measure the journey. Let's go back to what I said, as far as the partnership with retail.   Ian Schmehl: What I see in the future is the ability to measure the buy, the use, the pay, the service, as a team. If I live in Phoenix, right? And I'm part of the Phoenix team, we all succeed and fail together. Now, there are people in the industry who've done this at a more micro level with pods. I do think that's an innovative way to measure. You get away from AHT. While a net promoter score is important, I think that you would look more closely at churn lifetime value and ARPU with respect to the revenue that's being brought in.   Sarah Nicastro: You saying that makes me think that's almost a further progression of breaking down those silos. Right? It makes everyone have to think about the context outside of their own point of impact, right? And to really see that bigger picture. And not only see it, but feel in some way responsible for that bigger picture. Right? That's the goal.   Ian Schmehl: It is.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So I know when we talked previously, you mentioned the vision you have for what you refer to as a zero touch approach or a no call center. Tell our listeners a little bit about what that means, what you think related to this and what you see that the future might bring.   Ian Schmehl: Sure. And so this is nirvana. This isn't necessarily tomorrow. It's a lofty goal. I see this starting with data and access to data. So everything hinges upon data and you can't make good business decisions if you don't have it. So you start with the access to data. You move into operational control. What does operational control means? Means you understand your operation, where you're going to improve it. With respect to what you now understand because of that data. From there, your goal is to drive operational efficiency through the analysis or those data analytics. That you're able to... Basically glean, the learnings that you can glean from that. From there, and this is where a number of people are today, is you need to push on digital adoption and automation. You'll hear it. You'll hear it called digital transformation, or omni-channel from a number of years ago. But that's the sweet spot that you were able to move up.   Ian Schmehl: The reason it's important is because what I do in that area with respect to digital needs to be the right thing. And what I do with respect to automation, where I'm not going to have a contact also needs to be right. The last step in this is customer delight and resource optimization. So what that means is I'm going to be able to make sure that every time I have a contact with a customer, it's going to be a delightful experience.   Ian Schmehl: If they have to call us, it's going to be great, right? And I'm going to have the correct resources assigned. So how do you get to zero touch? You have the balance between digital and automation with that end goal of that delight with the customer. Nobody wants to call a call center. What I'm going to do is I'm going to have predictive, proactive versus reactive. Leading to no touch. So what we've been able to do following this principle is to decrease our calls. They're now one-third of what they were three years ago. A digital adoption has moved up to 31%. So pushing that envelope is the vision. Like I said, it's nirvana and it's a goal, but it's out there.   Sarah Nicastro: From a digital tool perspective, what are the key ingredients? I mean, what are the tools that are foundationally critical to building out that vision?   Ian Schmehl: You have to solve for what your universe is. And what I mean by that is if you're a contact center, you have to identify which contact method you're going to go after optimizing. Most people traditionally had been used to calling a call center, right? Pretty much everyone has an IVR because you need to route efficiently. However what's happened in the future... Most recently is people are willing to text or they're willing to chat, or they're willing to interface with an IVR that has intelligence tied to it. Such that you can create a ticket. The answer to your question is that you need to figure out what the smart meds are based upon your operation, where you're going to yield initially the most savings. With a balance toward the customer experience, such that you're moving toward that delight. One of the things you can do is, make sure you're optimized first in your IVR, relative to workforce.   Ian Schmehl: Then you take your call reasons and you identify, how is it that I'm going to drive down the number one reason for my calls? An example would be, pretty typical example is bill inquiry. People call about their bill. They don't understand it. They don't know why a charge is there. They can't understand why they're being overcharged or what changed in their plan, et cetera, right? What do you have to do to explain the bill better? Or you have to fix the bill. So as it relates to digital and tools, what you could do is you say, "If you're calling for this reason, you can do this." So now you're identifying what area of pain the customer's having communicating back with them that you're solving that problem. And you're doing it as fast as you can.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I know that you have said you see the call center of the future as a profit center versus a cost center. How will that occur and where do you feel you are on that continuum today?   Ian Schmehl: Yeah, this is a heavy lift. It depends upon the market segment industry that you're sitting in. So this is one size fits all and you can do it everywhere. I can say that relative to where we are in the continuum, we made that shift. We did it relatively quickly. But going back to your question about what's the profile for the future, what is that call center resource look like? This is tied to personality. So the number one goal is still is absolutely serving. Resolving the customer's issue the first time they call you and making it as whizzbang, amazing as you can. Right? But then what has to happen is you have to get that broader understanding so that they know Sarah does this with my product. Sarah has bought 10 pair of red shoes in the past four years. So I'm going to offer her a discounted pair of red shoes.   Ian Schmehl: When you're able to solve the customer's next problem, it's a better experience. And it doesn't feel like it's a sale. You're actually making their life better. I'll give you an industry specific example. Let's just say you called Sarah and you've gone over your data. You've done that for the last three months and you're irritated. You don't know how this happened. You didn't know that you could go over your data. You're calling me. So what do I do? I sell you a control so that you can't go over your data. So it's simple. Or if I know that you actually have not had a new phone in X period of time, I look at your profile and I'm intelligently trying to offer something. So in the call center, it's not... Unless you're doing outbound sales, you're not going to be doing new customer acquisition, and that's not what we do. We do service, so it's upsell, cross sell and add-ons.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Makes sense. What would you say in... You said you've been in your current role about five years, right?   Ian Schmehl: Yes.   Sarah Nicastro: What would you say is the biggest lesson you've learned specifically related to optimizing and modernizing the call center?   Ian Schmehl: I think that the call center is misunderstood. First thing I recognized and frankly it came from my own perspective because I didn't understand it. I'd like to think I understand it now. It sounds like I'm repeating the same thing, but I learned just how valuable data is for the call center operation. I learned that making decisions that are data-driven is critically important. And I also learned that partnership, to your point with the field, you will not succeed without it. Because if you tried to operate in your own little silo, to your point, you're just going to stay in your own little silo. And you're going to be stuck managing and measuring in the old ways.   Sarah Nicastro: What do you think... If you think about from a technology perspective, again, looking at the future. Not what's been done so far, but what becomes possible say in the next five years. What do you think is the most exciting thing to pay attention to?   Ian Schmehl: I think AI, prediction, matching. I think those are very interesting areas. I think that if you can provide, if you can anticipate needs, if you can anticipate contacts. Such that you are predictive. Proactive versus reactive, all tied to that. But absolutely AI I see as a really interesting area. I also think that where we are today, we're not there. Particularly in the call center space. There are some interesting tools that can match personas, but I think that when we get really good at that it's going to become much more personalized. It's not going to be a cookie cutter matching with respect to that. I think it's going to be, I know, it's you Sarah, that likes red shoes.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that's a really interesting point that you brought up that I think could be useful. I'm just thinking some of my own experiences. Where you talk about like the personality matching and stuff like that. And to your point, if you have people calling that are frustrated, what are the different ways to not only diffuse that but get ahead of it. And be proactive in offering different solutions and things like that. So, okay. So 21 years AT&T. Looking at the history overall, not just call center specific, but in general, what would you say are the biggest lessons you've learned in that time? And as a leader.   Ian Schmehl: First thing is it went by quick. I learned that. I think that the different roles and leading different teams, I've recognized, and this was... My mom taught me this actually that the two most valuable things dealing with people are patience and humility. Having the different roles I have, being able to tag onto that, hold on to that and understand that, has been very valuable. That's one of the biggest lessons. Related to it, I've always looked at it that if I've had a team, people don't work for me, they work with me. I think that realizing that you're kind of all have a common goal and while you may be identified as a leader and you have the obligation to lead and the responsibility it's all about people. And all about relationships and how you treat people is very important. I don't think that necessarily has just to do with one company. It's probably more of a bigger lesson, but that's what I've learned.   Sarah Nicastro: Good. Well, definitely true too. All right, Ian, any closing thoughts or comments?   Ian Schmehl: I just want to thank you. I really appreciate this. I think it was a great conversation. You ask some really, really good questions and obviously have a very, very good insight with respect to the industry and this area. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.   Sarah Nicastro: Well, thank you. That's very nice. I appreciate you being here and sharing your experience. Thank you for coming on. You can find more content by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @TheFutureofFS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening! </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-12 col-lg-3"> <div class="form-wrapper"> <h2 class="form-tittle">Stay Connected</h2> <iframe src="https://info.ifs.com/GM-CP-CU-2012-12-FoFS-Newsletter_IFrame.html">

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Lenovo On Embracing the Opportunity of Service

June 23, 2021 | 32 Mins Read

Lenovo On Embracing the Opportunity of Service

Jimmy Auw, Director of Central Asia Pacific Services at Lenovo, talks with Sarah about four major focus areas that come into play as Lenovo looks to seize the potential of service.   Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast, I'm your host Sarah Nicastro. Today I'm going to be talking a bit about the opportunity of embracing service and the potential it can bring to your business with Lenovo. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today Jimmy Auw who is the director of service operations for Central Asia-Pacific at Lenovo. Jimmy welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast.   Jimmy Auw: Hey Sarah thank you for having me in this call, interesting podcast right?   Sarah Nicastro: Yes.   Jimmy Auw: So thank you for making time, I know it's a bit late in your time zone and thank you for making up the time for this event.   Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely, my kids are in bed for the night and I'm ready to party, so that sounds good to me all right. Jimmy thank you for being here, I appreciate it. We have a lot of folks on this podcast and we're talking across industries, across geographies about this potential that service presents for business growth, business transformation, business expansion, business differentiation. And I think these conversations are really, really interesting because they vary a bit industry to industry, company to company but there is this major trend and common thread of this huge potential.   Sarah Nicastro: I think that there is this energy right now around almost being in the cusp of a real evolution of service and what is possible in terms of transforming customer relationships and really just growing business in new and exciting ways. So I love having this conversation and I'm excited to talk about what you see. But before we do that let's just talk a little bit about your history, your background. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Lenovo.   Jimmy Auw: Okay thank you Sarah. My name is Jimmy Auw. I'm currently leading Central Asia-Pacific service operation in Lenovo like you already shared earlier. So basically I'm managing the customer service operation end to end, covering the Central Asian-Pacific countries. Maybe to be precise ASEAN countries and covering also Hong Kong, Taiwan, Koreas and surrounding smaller markets, approximately for 14, 15 markets in my region.   Jimmy Auw: And personally I've been in this industry services for 15 years plus, mainly in the IT, computer and telecom industry. I'm a married man, two kids, one boy one girl. They're starting to grow up, I think that's a short introduction about myself.   Sarah Nicastro: How old are your children?   Jimmy Auw: 10 and seven.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay.   Jimmy Auw: The boy one is 10 and the daughter one is seven.   Sarah Nicastro: Mine are two sons, and my oldest will be six this month and then my youngest will be 5 this year, so they keep me busy.   Jimmy Auw: Enjoy the moment.   Sarah Nicastro: Yes, I know it goes fast. Okay, good. And how long have you been at Lenovo?   Jimmy Auw: About six years plus, I think six years and couple of months.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay, great. Let’s talk a little bit then Jimmy about your perception of this opportunity around service that I spoke about. Tell me what your thoughts are on it. Just based on your own personal experience in the different roles you've had at the industry level, what you see specifically within Lenovo. Talk a little bit about that potential that exists and your perspective on that.   Jimmy Auw: Okay, of course when you talk about services, there are some company that's specializing in the like hospitality, of course service will be their nature. But when it comes to the IT industry, the company that's usually selling hardware, services is after sales. We quite be familiar with people calling after-sales services. Service only happens after-sales, In fact maybe not all customers will ever experience the services in the past.   Jimmy Auw: Let’s say maybe the failure rate is 2%, 3% percent, assume if you're selling a million machine maybe only 2%, 3% customer will ever see you with services. I mean that could be something in the past but I think seeing the future, maybe it's happening now services is starting to change, they are transforming, at least from my own view. Now we are seeing services as something that may start as the starting point when we want to talk to our customers. It could be if you also feel everything now being take like services. People are quite familiar with device as a services even now you're buying software, in the past you're buying application you need to pay upfront, very expensive.   Jimmy Auw: But now you can buy with a subscription. It's also part of the service, so you buy per your usage. I think people are also start to shift the perception from services as after sales, with services as something to start immobilization. And if people in the past were always thinking services as a call center, I think people need to change the mindset that it's not about the cost anymore, it's about how will the image of your company with the services, in fact, how you can start making revenue, making the profit itself from selling services.   Jimmy Auw: So pretty much what I can feel from my own view, service has transformed and the transformation is now getting even faster, not sure if the COVID could be the reason but I guess once we start to do this working from home, school from home, most of the customers of a company they're expecting to have more solution. So solution itself might not be just a PC, I mean, you can always buy PC, you can always buy laptop, smartphone, but what is the solution provided to accompany those devices to meet the requirement?   Jimmy Auw: That's definitely something that is hitting up. I saw some of the market and quite interesting. It's the education, how we tried to provide solution to our education, the school government, how they can make the remote learning, remote working to be more effective. How the teacher could use some whiteboard but it's going to be online so that kids could see what the teachers are writing. I think it's better than you just send a PDF file. Like it or not, we're definitely be going there, pretty much very fast.   Sarah Nicastro: I think that's a really good point Jimmy about to what degree did COVID amplifier, multiply this potential for service. And the example that you shared around education, it makes me think, when you think about as a product based business looking to embrace the service opportunity, right? There's a lot of layers to that. Because on one side of the coin you have businesses that really see that potential and they're very intent on leading that charge and leveraging service to seize that potential.   Sarah Nicastro: And then there's businesses on the other hand that are very comfortable with the product centric approach and they're very rooted to how they've historically done things. That's tough, right? What that mindset is dictates a really different path. But if you want to really leverage the service opportunity, you have to become more customer focus. It's one thing to know as a product manufacturer, here's a product that our customers want to buy. But to your point, customers can buy that product a lot of different places.   Jimmy Auw: Yeah.   Sarah Nicastro: I think when you look at leveraging service strategically, what you're really talking about is problem solving. And I think that what happened with COVID, particularly around the education topic is it surfaced very apparently a challenge that was easy to see, identify and start to innovate around. But the reality is those opportunities in the form of the challenges your customers have are in every industry that you sell into, in every situation that your customers are in. It was just a really good exercise, I think for companies that haven't already started this path to dip their toes into thinking as a service company or a solution provider instead of just a product manufacturer. Does that make sense?   Jimmy Auw: Yes, I agree. I mean, there could be a challenge on some companies that they are very familiar, I'm not saying traditional but if you're working in the hospitality industry, it's very easy because you know everything about services, everything about knowing your customers, customer is always right, how you can give the right things to comfort for the customers. But when you think about the other company or the other businesses, they might not have this, how to say it, the nature is not like that.   Jimmy Auw: It will require some mindset change, it will require a lot of support from leadership to understand that this is the right vision of the company, we need to transform. I mean, having said that, Lenovo Luckily, we have a great support from our leadership. In fact, I'm not sure if you read the news, we did the reorg again in the last couple of months, we set up a new organization, we call it SSG, Solution and Services Group.   Jimmy Auw: So basically, we will start focusing this organization to think how we can give solution and services to our customers. So we have a different organization running the basic hardware of box solution, but then we have another organization, they're specifically running to see how they can combine all the solution, all the innovative thing from the company and sell to our customers.   Jimmy Auw: I think we believe if we have someone dedicated to really spend time meeting our customers, understand their requirement by analyzing the industry trend, they could definitely understand more. And by doing so, we expect things to definitely helping us to understand better and sell more solution to our customers. Of course, the result itself, we have a very strong year on improvement on the revenue that really set things that the company has done the absolutely right direction now, that's I think what we are trying to do.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.   Jimmy Auw: I talk with a lot of peers in the industry, they also share similar challenges. It's not easy to change the mindset not only of the leaders but the team itself. Once you’re very used to selling something physical, maybe hardware, devices. Then you need to sell something that is not yet there, even maybe you need to operate a solution architect, how they can make a solution for the customers can be very customized from customer A customer B. But it might be a bit challenging at the very beginning. You are really right, that is definitely not easy.   Sarah Nicastro: There's a couple things I want to talk about, first of all that mindset shift. Lenovo is there, right? And I want to go back to that, but what do you think it is that gives organizations that lightbulb moment to see this potential and want to undergo the transformation versus just staying very set in their ways?   Jimmy Auw: Okay, I think there could be lots of starting point. First, maybe something is always like a retention, maybe you want to hire new people, so new people start to explore the ideas, represent the leadership, and leadership started picking up the opportunity. It could be also the leadership itself, maybe they start to change the rest of the company. They know maybe selling boxes is going to be very challenging in the future because everyone could sell similar products, just different colors, different maybe physical appearance but whatever is the same CPU, same memory, same hard drive.   Jimmy Auw: That doesn't make a difference except the brand itself and the logo and maybe some color thinking. So there could be a lot of starting points. But I really think that there could be somewhere that a company need to start. Of course, the starting point could be very different, it depends on the company itself. But once the trigger is there and if you started maybe from the team, from the employee or from some new hire that tried to propose the idea and it start to be picked up by the rest of the team member, then I think that could start getting bigger and bigger.   Jimmy Auw: But of course, you always need support from the people around you, assuming that you're starting from somewhere inside the company. And then make sure that it can be amplified once the team or the people could show some result, then people will say, "Oh, somehow it's working, maybe in the past we never thought someone could do it" But once the team start to show the result... Sometime I heard in some company the leadership itself might not be supporting because maybe some of them are quite traditional, it is okay, I'm just selling boxes, I don't really care about that.   Jimmy Auw: But maybe once this has being presented and being amplified and the people have to see oh, amazing, right, we never thought we could do things like this, that may be the start to become bigger and bigger then the company will start to pick up. I believe they could a lot of starting point but the key thing is definitely the company, the executive, the leaders must support that. Otherwise, you can easily say, it's not our bread and butter, so we're not going to be doing that. So that will be a big challenge.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, you're absolutely right that whether the catalyst for the change happens from the top down or from the bottom up, you have to have that executive support. And I think that's because this isn't a transformation that can happen in a vacuum or in a department, it's something that you have to have that company wide alignment on or you're just not going to make the progress you need to make. You could have someone that really spearheads the effort and articulates the business case and is very passionate about it that brings it to leadership but ultimately, they have to be supportive of that effort, that makes sense.   Sarah Nicastro: The other thing I wanted to go back to is the group you mentioned, remind me the name again, the services group, what was the first part?   Jimmy Auw: SSG, Solution and Services Group.   Sarah Nicastro: Solution and Services Group, yeah. I see more and more of that, of companies introducing a dedicated team, group, function to really take the lead on this. And I think it's you know Madhu from Abbott, who is in the group that we're a part of, she was on the podcast and we had a whole conversation around what's the best organizational structure for service transformation. And you can argue different ways, but I think that particularly for very large companies and particularly for companies that have that really deep rich history and product, I think the idea of this dedicated team to really get it off the ground is a very smart one.   Sarah Nicastro: Because the folks that are in roles still have to focus on the day to day, so until you get this new go to market in place and until you start to make traction with the customers and the teams, there's still a business to be run and expecting someone to do both of those things is really hard. So I think this idea of, no I'm not saying it's an easy job, when you have a new function like that in the business and of, course you're going to have people that are resistant to the ideas, I'm sure it's not a walk in the park.   Sarah Nicastro: But I think that from Lenovo's perspective, being strategic about creating that group to really drive this, I think you will get better progress that way than if you tried to do it in the existing structure.   Jimmy Auw: Yeah.   Sarah Nicastro: What do you think about that?   Jimmy Auw: Yeah, I completely agree with that. Definitely that is the right thing to do. And I think you are also quite familiar when we typically think or see sales person and services person, they tend to be very different. The salespeople are very outspoken, they easygoing so they can easily catch up and mingle with people. But services, they tend to be more introvert, maybe not more, maybe it's just my assumption but it's two different type of people. But now we need to sell services, so you need someone that can come with both style. You need to be outspoken, you need to meet people, but at the same time you need to understand how to sell the services.   Jimmy Auw: So definitely, there could be a challenge but I think it's a matter of how you find the right people, how you continuously giving the right training, right education and combine with a good success story. People will get the confidence, maybe in the past the services tend to be very introvert but now they've meet a lot of people now, they start to see some engagement so they can be more proactive. Same as a salesperson, they learn about services, they understand, hmm this is also quite interesting, but they can easily talk about services, settle the customers, always bring the conversation about services when they meet the customers.   Jimmy Auw: We also took quite some time in this few years to start this collaboration but luckily, because we also have a great team inside, so those transformation was not the difficult part, for sure.   Sarah Nicastro: Mn-hmm(affirmative)   Jimmy Auw: So I understand. I mean, if you're not getting the right person and the team itself may be not so flexible, you will see some, like you said earlier, some resistance, some people saying it's not my cup of tea, I don't know how to sell services. So if they don't really learn and have intention to improve, that will be challenge.   Sarah Nicastro: Going back to the first point we made, a lot of it is just mindset. And I think that people's mindsets can change when they understand new insights. We talked at the beginning about the fact that just historically, service is an afterthought to sales, it just hasn't been their job to sell service, it's been their job to sell hardware. And so if you have this team that can help them understand no, no, no, here is why you should care, here is how this can help you sell more, here's why this is the future of the business, maybe not 100% but a good amount of those people may very well be excited about that and get on board and get behind it.   Sarah Nicastro: And it is interesting, the conversation around the need that exists not just at Lenovo, in every company that's on this journey to upscale and rescale talent. And then also, what new positions, new roles, new skill sets, do you need to bring into the business related to this change? It's a really interesting conversation.   Jimmy Auw: I agree.   Sarah Nicastro: One of the other things we talked about before, Jimmy is the idea that if you want to focus on growing service revenue, you have to be careful not to cannibalize your own ability to do that by over servicing. So let's talk a little bit about what you mean by that.   Jimmy Auw: Yeah, I think when you start to make clear products, you need to really understand what will be your customers, that's when you design a product. But when you design a solution services, you need to understand what your customers need. It could be in the past you were giving everything for free, actually not for free because there's no sense of free lunch, we know that. So there's always be the cost being factoring inside your products. It could be some customers, they don't need all the basic features that you already incorporate inside the pricing. So I think by doing more upsell, we can really customize the solution to our customers.   Jimmy Auw: It's not about always getting more money from customers but it also can let go some of the solution that they don't need. Of course we keep upselling, the sales will not be letting go business with the upsell, but it's more like we are selling the right thing to them instead of okay we give this package for you at a single price, but then the customer will say I don't need these things but I need this things, but they are still paying the same amount but they're getting what they need.   Jimmy Auw: By doing so we need to make sure that we are not cannibalizing our own because maybe some customer will be thinking in the past these things is always for free, but actually the customer maybe they just don't know what we have inside the costs, maybe they're just paying up front, they thought it's all free, whatever they ask is for free, but we need to make sure that we give what they need and those things that we are selling is cannibalizing our own basic operation or the service function that we are selling to them.   Sarah Nicastro: Mn-hmm (affirmative).   Jimmy Auw: Maybe in some country definitely customer expecting very high level means that everything must be free because that is the standard. So once we downgrade some of it customer will feel oh, why you are downgrading my services? I think it's not about downgrading but it could be we have more detail on what you can buy or what you can decide not to buy. Maybe if you have a big country with different cities, in the past maybe give some single price for every city. But now if they realize I have more machines in a certain location, can you give me better pricing for that? Maybe you can give me other pricing for the remote location, something like that. Good customer service.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. This becomes a big challenge when you look at organizations that are trying to move toward more advanced services, more service contracts offering more outcomes based service because as you begin that journey, it's almost like when you're introducing some of the functionality that enables you to do that, it seems there's a period of time where you're not quite ready to charge for it. You're getting your bearings, and then all of a sudden you want to introduce these new offerings and your customers are saying, "Hey, wait a minute why are you charging me for this now?" It does take some thought to think about what are the best? Is it tiered offerings? Or is it completely customized customer to customer? or what that looks like.   Sarah Nicastro: But this is an area of frustration for a lot of folks. I think this idea around we've made these improvements. When you think about things like Internet of Things and remote monitoring and remote resolution and people put these technologies in place to allow that functionality, and then get a little bit stuck on how they monetize that functionality. And another maybe topic of conversation is you can't look at this idea of incrementally improving functionality and then trying to just incrementally charge more along the way.   Sarah Nicastro: The way I look at that is you're on your own agenda, you're adding functionality and just trying to incrementally increase the revenue you're making simply because you have an objective to grow your service revenue. And that is the objective but the companies that are having more success doing that are stepping back from those incremental changes or those internal metrics and they're really going back to what are the customer pain points and what do we do to solve those? And then looking at whether it's custom offerings or more standard offerings but tied back to the customer needs. Does that make sense?   Jimmy Auw: Yes, I think the first thing is always right. I mean, every company wants to sell, want to gain more revenue, more profit, but we should not always use that as a starting point. Of course, first is you need to understand what is the customer pain point, what they need. Maybe now when we are talking about everything remote, first is security, the rest maybe is example. When you're talking about your remote working, you need to bolster your security.   Jimmy Auw: That could be one pain point that customer may think, now I know everyone's working from home, they're computer may be accessed by anyone so how do I ensure safety is not compromised? And so when we start with that we can see okay, maybe we have some solution, some VPN, some other application that can help you, that could be the starting point how the team will start thinking about the solution.   Jimmy Auw: Of course, it's always chargeable but something that not always about we want to get every single penny from customers. Of course, again, nothing is free but we need to start from when customer is thinking, what's in it for me, I'm paying this okay, what will I get? Okay, maybe they will think it's expensive or it's not expensive, but the values could be different. Maybe if you're talking about security to small business, they might think I don't need that.   Jimmy Auw: But when we talk to the medium sized company, it's everything about security. So again, I cannot be more transparent than this. Everyone will definitely be happy with more revenue but I don't think that should be the starting point, because when you talk about services it's about trust. You're not just trying to get money from the customers but how you can become a good advisor for the customer, every time they have some problem will come to you.   Jimmy Auw: And you're not always about the money or charging them or something, give them solution, some feedback, some idea, we can always try first if they fit the requirement. So I think that could be avoided when you can work the relationship better where they have more things to learn or to understand, they can always come to our team, okay. I trust you because it's not about the money but how you can help me running my business better. I think this will be the right starting point when we engage the customers.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. When done well, it's really a mutually beneficial value proposition. I mean, the companies that are doing this well, they are increasing revenue but they're doing it by helping their customers. And when you can figure out that right alignment, I mean, it really, really is cool to see how it comes together.   Sarah Nicastro: On the flip side, I've talked to people that say, "Well, I'm just really frustrated, because we invested in IoT, and nobody wants to buy it." And it's like, well, no, they don't want to buy it, because why would they care about IoT? They might not even know what IoT is.   Sarah Nicastro: So what value is it providing to them? And I think that goes back to one of the points we touched on earlier, which is the criticality of really talented sales individuals having these conversations to be able to dig in and identify those customer need and look at how you align value and create a go to market. You might need new people doing that than but just the people that are used to selling just the boxes. It's an interesting thing, it's like what comes first, the chicken or the egg?   Jimmy Auw: I mean, this thing is like an art. Leadership, managerial things, is always an art, there's no single way to get the job done. I'm not a believer that by reading book or by copying someone's style that always drive the same result because there's always a difference in the company culture, in the people who are managing, their maturity, the job scope. So you might need to be more flexible. Of course, like you said, developing the team. And then next to it is how to retain them, once you have develop them, they're doing good, okay, maybe other company be, okay, I want to copy the same, I just hired those guys.   Jimmy Auw: I think that could be a great short cut. But again, how we as leaders need to retain those people to make sure people feel comfortable working with us, they keep innovating, want to contributes to the company, that will be an honor, at least for myself. And there's no single answer how to do that. You need to be more flexible, maybe with employee, A employee B, you might need to have a different style, but that's something you can avoid, but it's always challenging people are moving out, they feel okay, I've done enough in this company, I want to explore something more.   Jimmy Auw: So there's something that the company likely again, will not let off. We have this culture, we allow people to move between organization, between functions. We prefer them to stay in the company in many very different role rather than they move out because we trust Lenovo and we really consider people, employee as something that is really important.   Sarah Nicastro: Mn-hmm(affirmative).   Jimmy Auw: Yeah, that's something I think, very interesting to share because there's no single answer for such problem.   Sarah Nicastro: Right. Another thing we talked about is this idea of needing to create greater appeal for new talent. We talked a little bit earlier about the fact that the service role is really changing, it can't just be that more introverted show up, fix something, and I'm on my way type persona, it needs to be a different type of experience. And there's also, I think some perceptions around service and field service and what that means, and are those appealing career paths? And things like that.   Sarah Nicastro: What are your thoughts around, as both the skill sets needed evolve and mature and then also a lot of existing talent ages out of the workforce, what's your thoughts on how we make service and this industry appealing for new folks?   Jimmy Auw: Okay, interesting question. Maybe it's just me, but if I recall back during the young age, services might not be something in the top of the mind for a student in the university. Maybe they want to become a doctor an engineer, a pilot, scientists, all of them think about these services. The people who work in the hospitality industry, they're not really like the majority of the people, and I'm not saying they are not successful in the other industry but some of them are really thinking about, hey, I want to do these things.   Jimmy Auw: Especially when you see in some countries, I believe, people working as an engineer on the ground might not have the higher rank, and maybe be different in Europe or US from an Asian country. So people working on the ground as a field engineer might not be something that's quite prestigious for some people. I mean, that's not totally right but also not totally wrong, it's about what will be the main interest, right? People always have their own aspiration.   Jimmy Auw: So of course, by seeing the changing in trend, I think we need to start really seeing who is the right candidate? Some companies start to look for a trainee right from the university, they try to educate him since the service industry you can meet a lot of people, you can selling being solution and the bigger picture of the services. So it's not about you do a break and fix, you come to the customer side, fix the machine, you're being paid for the labor, I think the scope will not be small thing anymore. But of course, some people still think, okay, I becoming an engineer, I need to go to the customer side, we'll break and fix, go back, meet another customer.   Jimmy Auw: So the scope maybe, I don't know, I feel this will in the most of people mindset, right? And then we start looking to university, we give some in the job training to some interested students, so we try to give them a bigger view of what services, not about you fixing a machine anymore but how you can sell solution, how you can learn new technology earlier than anyone in this industry, And how you can contribute more to the company.   Sarah Nicastro: Mn-hmm (affirmative).   Jimmy Auw: Maybe we start with some education to the university student, trying to get some good talent, they can do the on the job training, once they graduate, they can stop being shortlisted prior to starting a career in a corporate life. And the same time, I think we also need to look for some knowledge sharing from the experienced people in a webinar, at a event to share what actually the service industry insight, what about again doing a small thing, there's something called after sales, it can be a starting point for someone to make a new business or new or a new product.   Sarah Nicastro: And also, what do they like about it? And how has it provided for them? And what has their career path been? Things like that. You could even do an ad campaign out of that, that you use for recruiting. I think those are some good points and a couple others that you mentioned earlier. One is flexibility, so just thinking about not only how you're flexible with employees but as the role changes, as the industry changes, what words are you using in your job descriptions? And what picture are you painting with what that looks like? And what parts are you playing up that might appeal to some of the folks that haven't thought about service as a career or don't even know that it's an option.   Sarah Nicastro: And I think the other thing, like you said, within Lenovo you'd rather them stay and move to different positions within the company, I think, more and more starting a role with some idea of growth potential, and what that career trajectory could look like is really important to folks. So thinking ahead about how you articulate from the beginning that there is a lot of opportunity within the company for them is another really smart point.   Jimmy Auw: Yes.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So, here's another area I want to make sure we talk about because this is a tough one. This whole conversation is centered around this idea of service becoming a profit center and all of the potential that that exists there. But to do that, you have to innovate, you have to transform, and that requires investment. And so this is where it can get tricky because you can have these leaders that say, "Okay, great, there's a big opportunity here, go make it happen." And then you say good, well, we just need to do X, And then it's like, whoa, whoa. How do you strike that balance between not continually looking service as an opportunity to cut costs and looking at obviously managing costs, but making some intelligent investments in the ability to evolve and grow.   Jimmy Auw: Okay, so again, the question will have a myriad of answer.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.   Jimmy Auw: Because, again, it's more in and out rather than the single answer. But I will say, of course, at very beginning it's not easy to convince the leadership, the executives to support your investment. But luckily, we understand that we have shown that good traction, good result. So at the end of the day, when the company got confidence in the team, it will not be that difficult to gain investment. And of course, they trust it's going to be giving a good return. I will say there will be no single answer for that, but in general, it's more on how the team could innovate this? Something usually they got from meeting more customers, understanding the industry trend so they can start with something.   Jimmy Auw: And of course, when it comes to certain investment level, it may require more approval level, but normally when the thing is getting bigger, then people will always see return of investment, this will be the nature of the investment. But I will say it's not really a single answer to that, you're right is very tricky but it's more on the scope of the business itself and just about if you are investing a certain the amount the scope will be certain size, then you need to convince more people in the supportive level to support your project.   Jimmy Auw: But in general is always when you start with something and you could show really clear benefit for the company and it is allowing industry trends, normally, it won't be a big issue for the leaders to give a green light to the project itself but it's not easy to share how we can get them convinced but it just naturally flows. The bigger size of the innovation might definitely require bigger different investment and even approval level, but it's just naturally flowing like that. Maybe some level they just give a go ahead because it’s a small investment but when you're going bigger and bigger, you just need to talk with more people, convince more people.   Jimmy Auw: It takes months, sometimes years to get started, because sometimes we need regulatory approval, legal approval, country approval. So just about the size, the scope and the coverage, that just might be the nature of the green light of the project itself.   Sarah Nicastro: Mn-hmm (affirmative).   Jimmy Auw: I think that's something not easy to explain to be honest.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, some of the points that I took from there, one would be look for industry context. If you can show examples of how others are benefiting from similar investments, that type of research and information is helpful. The second thing is where you're able, start small and build momentum. So if there are certain areas that are either small or you are very confident in, start there so that you can show those successes because once you get that initial success, then going back and saying, "Okay, I did this, now you can trust me to do this next bigger thing." You're going to have better success that way.   Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense, and I think the third point is just, if it is something bigger that could require months, years... I did a podcast a few weeks ago with a gentleman from Schneider Electric Australia and the one thing he said is he just had to be tenacious, he just had to not accept no and continue to push because he was very confident in the opportunity and he just needed to win over enough minds to be able to move forward. He said, "It might have been easier for me to just give up, but I just wasn't going to." So that's the other thing, if it's something you're passionate about, just keep on it.   Sarah Nicastro: All right, last question for today Jimmy, two parts, what's the biggest lesson you would say you've learned as a service leader? And then part two is what are you most excited about looking to the future?   Jimmy Auw: Okay, let me start with the first one, the biggest lesson. I'm a believer in people, I think find the right people, you can connect and align with them, this will be very important. I'm not saying you need to have all the same people around you, that's not the idea but the key thing is you need to have the right people around you. They could always be the one challenging you, finding your blind spot, that should be fine. I'm not expecting people to say yes to all of my instructions, so I need to find the right people in the organization and a make sure they have the right mindset and right attitude.   Jimmy Auw: I mean, if you're working with people all having their own thinking, and that's okay but in terms of strategy, vision, aspiration, they should be carrying a similar agreement before we can move on. But as a team, they can be aggressive, they can be conservative, that's fine. People always say yes, that's also not good.   Sarah Nicastro: So you're not looking for the same people, you're looking for good people, but what would you characterize as the common traits?   Jimmy Auw: Okay, it's more on they need to be a fit for the role that I'm looking for.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay.   Jimmy Auw: Maybe as a sales they have to be a bit outspoken, but when you're looking for technical, they have to be very detailed in how to give a solution. And maybe if you need someone to become your right hand, he or she needs to be proactive, challenging you giving you some insight, this is what I say is the right people. Same style, because again if you have all people the same style then you always go to the same angle so that is definitely not something, at least for my personal view, I'm not doing things like that.   Jimmy Auw: I prefer to find the right people and the right roles so they can contribute to the company with their own style, but they will carry the same mindset, same attitude, in terms of how we agree on the goal and the future then we can move forward together as a team, they can contribute themselves inside the bigger ship as a company.   Jimmy Auw: The third, my view is you need to have the right strategy, this is very important because if people are thinking with their own and they don't have something they need to carry together, it will become things and also structure. So I really think as a leader you need to have the right strategy coming top down from the company, but the manager or the leader can cascade down a bit based on the organization itself. And the fourth one, again you need to have a control point. If anyone said central strategy, right people strategy everything you need to make sure you have the right control point.   Jimmy Auw: So make sure that whatever we agree, whatever we decide earlier, we need to make sure we execute. Otherwise, it's just okay, people are happy do but no one knows what they're doing. Maybe they can do at the end of the day, but if they're not doing constantly the things will move, from my own view can be a bit slower. So checkpoint for me again, is very important. It's not about not trusting the team, but to give them the sense of ownership, it's your responsibility you get paid, so I want to see your delivery. And last but not least, we can look back once we complete the whole cycle.   Sarah Nicastro: Mn-hmm(affirmative)   Jimmy Auw: We have understand, okay, we did great this year, but what we overlook? Maybe opportunities, some low line that we can learn for future to make our own strategy? Or maybe they are good story we can share. Again, as leader, I also have my own leaders, my other manager, so I also can share to him or to her, this is the key learning point from my region last year. So either he or she could copy or quote, share to the other bigger picture for a bigger region for the overall company or maybe there are some feedback that he or she will give to me.   Jimmy Auw: "Okay, Jimmy, I think you did something but you can try this area." Maybe he or she share from the other region, full end to end things that biggest learn for me and I will try my best to keep doing that because I believe that could be something can make a great success as leaders manager and as for the company itself.   Sarah Nicastro: Good. Okay, and what are you most excited about?   Jimmy Auw: I’m excited about new challenges. I mean, sometime when you see new technology, new idea, new opportunity, that makes me excited because I feel challenged, I like to set the challenge. Not about proving myself I could do but it's for my own pleasure. I like to accept a challenge and I also like to see how it can help to grow my team. So the success sometime is not about me doing the challenge, but how I can bring my whole team to get and accept the challenge together. Everyone could grow, and when I see they are growing, some of them even moving with the company. But they are doing even better.   Sarah Nicastro: Mn-hmm (affirmative).   Jimmy Auw: That makes me happy because I feel as a manager I've done my job, not about achieving the goal but also to help growing my team, make them even better. So I think that's the part of the excitement of my role and my own career things.   Sarah Nicastro: That's why you're the right person for the job Jimmy, because you're excited about those challenges and you want to see that progress. I mean, that's what it takes. I think everything we've talked about today requires people that are not fans of complacency and you're ready to take on those new challenges and work through problems and fail and learn and grow. I mean, that's what this is all about. So that makes sense. Well, thank you Jimmy so much for coming on and sharing your perspective. I appreciate it.   Jimmy Auw: Thank you. Appreciate your evening time.   Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. You can find more content by checking us out at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn, as well as Twitter @TheFutureOfFS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS, you can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening. </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-12 col-lg-3"> <div class="form-wrapper"> <h2 class="form-tittle">Stay Connected</h2> <iframe src="https://info.ifs.com/GM-CP-CU-2012-12-FoFS-Newsletter_IFrame.html">

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Real-World Advice From a Change Champion

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Sarah talks with Scott Lowes, Construction Supervisor at FortisBC, about his love for technology, his excitement in seeing it permeate field service, and his advice as a change champion for how to make technology palatable, how to foster adoption versus just compliance, and the joy of the “aha” moment when it takes hold.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to The Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we are going to be getting some real world advice from a change champion. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Scott Lowes, who is a construction supervisor at FortisBC. Scott, welcome to the podcast.

Scott Lowes: Hey Sarah. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here. Before we dive in to our content for the day, tell our listeners a bit about yourself and your role at FortisBC.

Scott Lowes: Yeah. High level, I'm somebody that is always on the move but I'm always doing something, whether it's tinkering on stuff around my house, figuring out a way to brew better coffee, all that stuff. I'm always doing something in my personal life and then at work, I've been with FortisBC for about 14 years now, just over that. And throughout that time, I've had every job that we've gotten the field really. I've been through our construction department, putting in gas mains and services, then moving into our field customer service department, dealing with our customers forward, facing that way and then also working down at our liquefied natural gas plant. Pretty technical job there. And then most recently I have now made a change into our project management office as a construction supervisor. That's me in a nutshell.

Sarah Nicastro: And in case anyone isn't familiar with Fortis, give the overview of the organization.

Scott Lowes: Yeah. FortisBC is a natural gas and electrical utility in the province of British Columbia in Canada. We supply natural gas and electricity and I've been on the natural gas side of the industry. We operate and maintain our below ground gas utility and we provide all of the service for that. And so dealing with our customers that have gas meters on their houses and all that pertains to that. So there's a whole lot in there.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So you love a good project at home and at work. You like to stay busy.

Scott Lowes: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm assuming you like to be just learning new things. It's what it sounds like.

Scott Lowes: Yeah. If I'm not learning a better way to do something in my personal life, it's like learning something new at work, right? A lot of people do Netflix and chill, I do like research and chill. It's usually like, my wife is watching Netflix, I'm watching or I'm like researching how to build concrete forms or do some something random around the house.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm laughing because this is very much parallel my home life. My husband spends a ton of time watching the most random things on YouTube, I'm like, what are you watching? "I'm watching how you..." Okay. Who cares? But he loves it.

Scott Lowes: There are those people that care. It makes it really good at parties and gatherings because when people are like, "I'm in like an aerospace..." I'm like, well, I've done carbon fiber repairing and they kind of give you this like, "what? Who are you?" But yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: And it's all come in handy. I mean, there's a lot of home projects and things like that that he's tackled that are far out of his comfort level that he literally just YouTubed and followed along and learned how to do it himself so it works.

Scott Lowes: Yeah. It's handy that way. But my disclaimer is don't do any gas work unless you're a ticketed gas fitter.

Sarah Nicastro: That's really good advice.

Scott Lowes: No. But yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: We did draw the line at gas. Actually, last summer we put in a pool in our backyard and he did all of the electrical himself. Which he was pretty comfortable with but we had someone come in and run the gas line and all of that stuff.

Scott Lowes: That's a good call.

Sarah Nicastro: We have to draw the line somewhere, right?

Scott Lowes: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Scott and I were introduced by a part of the IFS team which is Clevest and we were introduced to related to FortisBC's use of remote service technology. That's how we got in touch with one another. But as I was talking to Scott, I realized there was a lot more about our conversation that stood out and I felt like if we were to do a podcast talking only about the remote service topic might be leaving some good content on the table. Before we talk a bit about how you've leveraged remote service at FortisBC, I want to talk about some of those other things. The first thing that stood out to me Scott is your passion for technology, which was very clear. Tell us a little bit about why you love tech and why you're so passionate about it to use in Field Service.

Scott Lowes: Yeah. Passion with technology started once... Okay. If we go way back, it's probably I think when my parents had I think it was our first computers, either at 286 or 386. The power switch was like the size of my head type thing. It's just like a giant toggle, the lights dim when you turn the thing on but then it powers up and it's all text-based DOS right? That was my first introduction to computers. Fast forward a few years, I'm learning a lot more about computers but I'm breaking them all the time. It was like a non-stop, revolving door of having like my dad's tech support guy in the house fixing the computers because Scott broke the computer again. And now I'm the tech support guy for my parents for their computers so it's come full circle but it was probably a painful for that period.

Scott Lowes: But yeah. In terms of technology, I've been around it for a while, I've seen it, used it, always trying to be early adopter, right? Like, okay. Something new is showing up. I want to have the newest, latest, greatest. Or if I can't have the newest iPhone I'll leverage the older iPhone to extend that lifespan right?

Sarah Nicastro: Mhhmm

Scott Lowes: Everything from back in the day when jail breaking iPhones was a thing so you could get all the little tweaks and stuff. I nerd out on that stuff and so that's where the technology for me, my passion for it I guess came. And then I guess in terms of where I think the use with Field Service stuff, it's probably one of the one... If you think of technology, everybody's using technology except the guys that are swinging the wrenches. The field techs aren't using technology to the same extent that the rest of the globe is.

Scott Lowes: If you think of like okay. We've got such high horsepower in terms of technology and stuff that's out there, why not utilize it in a field that isn't really utilizing it yet? Or to its fullest potential right? Because there's lots of cases where it could just make their job or, and make my old job a lot easier and just... Yeah. It's pretty neat to see what's out there in the marketplace right now and where we're going. I'm excited for that part too.

Sarah Nicastro: You are the epitome of the young guy in Field Service that loves technology right? When we talk to different service leaders on the podcast, one of the topics that comes up is the challenge of managing a multi-generational workforce right? And so there's folks like you on one end of the spectrum that are, technology's awesome. I love it. I want to use all the newest, latest, greatest things and then as you well know based on some of your team members, there's people that want nothing to do with that right?

Scott Lowes: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: It is challenging for organizations to strike the right balance and I think that when we spoke initially, one of the things that I thought would be interesting to share on this episode is, you very much are a change champion within FortisBC for greater adoption of technology in the field and you have a lot of firsthand experience introducing these things to some of the people that are a little bit more resistant or less excited about the tools right? One of the things you said to me that I'm hoping you can talk a little bit about is, when you introduce a new tool to one of the people that's less passionate about technology or really against the idea of it, I guess on a continuum, you mentioned you love when you can see an aha moment, where it just clicks and that resistance fades away a little bit. What do you think it is that prompts that aha moment?

Scott Lowes: I think it's the magic really. Because I've grown up with technology, I don't want to say the magic is lost but I'm expecting a groundbreaking thing and it's not like this huge thing. But the aha moment for me that I've seen, we just did finished up a pilot using some VR headsets for training and so a guy, I think he said to like retire in November right? He's on the complete opposite end of the spectrum as myself. We've got a great working relationship and I was like hey. I want you to try this out and put on this VR headset. And I'm able to walk him through all the controls because he doesn't know how to use the hand controls and all that stuff.

Scott Lowes: And he's like, "I just want to see it." He puts the thing on and his mind is blown. He's like freaking out. And so for him, he's like, "wow. This is crazy." And then next thing you know, he takes it off and he's going around the office, "hey. Go see Scott and you got to go try this thing. It's really cool." And so his little aha moment was the barrier was broken because he didn't have to learn how to use the controls of a VR headset or try to navigate into the software, he just got to get plunked into this virtual world and he's looking around and his mind is blown. Those aha moments I think it would come in all of our different texts, when there is no barriers to entry right?

Scott Lowes: When it's not like, I got to figure out how to use Windows 10 just to use a software, if we can remove that, that's when I think the most success has happened and yeah. It's that interface. Having that smooth interface so once somebody can use it, it's not cumbersome I guess. And that's like I've seen have happened where it's just... they can use the software and it works. That's probably one of the bigger things.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, user interface is obviously super important but what you just said also made me think of, and I've talked to companies that have done this as part of their change management strategy. Prior to actual rollout of a new solution, having more of a low pressure, even making it fun, introductory phase to the technology, where it's that ability to casually familiarize yourself with it and looking for different ways to maybe make that bad idea even fun for people that aren't as excited about that new thing. But having a period prior to roll out where you're going to be driving toward a very specific outcome but more of like a familiarization period where that barrier to entry is low because there isn't an expectation of immediate outcome. Does that make sense?

Scott Lowes: Yeah. And I think you hit the nail on the head there, where it's like having it fun is key because for me, I can get over if it's not fun or not because I've been around it for so long and I know the leverage that's there, I can get on board with a little bit of pain to get there. But to get the mass of really who we're wanting to push this technology towards, is the mass workforce and to get it there, it's got to be fun. It's got to be engaging and it's got to be a way that these individuals are going to say, hey. Man. I really want to use that. That's a really cool piece of software. That's a really cool piece of technology. I'm like, that makes my job easy or that's a really cool whatever it is, but if it's not fun, why would anybody like to use that boring thing over what they've been doing for the last decade or two decades or four decades. If it's not fun and engaging, they're never going to use the technology or the tool or whatever it is right?

Sarah Nicastro: One of the other words that you used in our initial conversation that I really liked is that, really for change to be successful, the technology that's being introduced needs to be palatable. What would your advice for listeners be on, how do you make the introduction of a new technology palatable?

Scott Lowes: That? Man. That is the magic question. And that is like the key. And I think the way it becomes palatable is having somebody that is not only passionate but willing to educate and willing to go through the tech support aspect. I remember I broke my arm so I couldn't work in the field and they said, "hey. You're good with technology, can you go sit on the tech support desk?" And said yeah. Sure. And we're rolling out a new software. This is probably 10 years ago now. And one of the guy comes on the phone and he starts griping. He's like, "computers are the damnation of the world. I don't have a computer at home so why do I need to use one at work? I just want to throw this thing off the bridge." And that just really stuck out to me.

Scott Lowes: And I was like okay. Everybody's feeling that at some point that it's not going to work. Having somebody that is aware of that as well, isn't just somebody that's going to say hey. This is a new technology we're using, you got to use it or you're done. That's not an option when you're rolling out technology especially when you've got an already effective workforce and you want to see them become more effective, the way you do it is, you've got to really have somebody that is passionate about the technology that's willing to be that change champion then says hey. You know what? I'm going to go through the hard stuff. I'm going to figure this out. But then also, they're going to see or foresee those roadblocks and those speed bumps that are going to come along and help the people through that and say hey. This is what we can do or just being available as somebody to just go through that so they're not stuck struggling, right?

Scott Lowes: Because the way that you can take any technology rollout and make it just fall flat on its face is you come up with this great idea and you say, hey. We're going to release this technology to the guys or to the girls or to whoever and you're just going to release this technology and then there's no support. And there's nobody that is... Another term I've used is the tech expert, right? Because you got to have somebody that knows just that much more than everyone else that they're always getting the call, they can say hey. Scott. How do I do this? How do I do that? You've got to have that person that you've identified that says okay. I'm going to learn this technology and all the nuances and I'm not going to learn it from a book, I'm going to learn it by using it and finding out the problems and the success with it and then they become really your technical expert on that software or technology.

Scott Lowes: When they understand it and they love it then they can make it palatable just through, "how would you teach your grandma how to use this." In some aspects right? You don't care about the gigabytes that this thing has or all that stuff. You just want to know how to turn the thing on, how to work it, how to make it work for you and make your life easier not make it more complicated. Having that change champion or somebody, your technical expert identified with anything, with software or tech or hardware to then make it palatable for those individuals to actually use right?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think that's a good point. I also think going back to what you said previous to that, no company is going to deploy a new technology just because it's cool or fun right? There's obviously a objective that's being worked towards and value that that needs to be achieved but the idea of leading a little bit with fun and trying to think about how to make it fun, to at least get people engaged enough to hear what that value to them might look like right? And to warm them up to talking about, here's how this fits, here's how this ultimately can help you be more effective at your job so that they warm up to even entertaining that discussion right? In the early phases, I think the idea of considering okay. How can we take some of the pressure off? How can we make this process fun? How can we get people engaged? And then get into to the heavier outcomes of the project makes sense as well.

Scott Lowes: I definitely agree. And so with that, we just wrapped up our pilot for this VR software and we were using it for training. Right? Or that was the intent. But how I pitched it, I said. Okay. The people I want to actually have use this technology, they're not the people that are going to look at the, does it meet our requirements for the training and all the nuance. I'm like, I want the people that are going to try it on this VR headset and they're going to get so excited and so jazzed on this that now all of a sudden they don't care if it meets the requirements, that's for later on in the project but they're like wow. This is exciting. I tried it. Scott showed it to me, I'm blown away. I want to see that thing go.

Scott Lowes: And then now all of a sudden, you have people that have bought in throughout the organization that can help push it through those roadblocks and those speed bumps that you're going to get when you say, well, it doesn't have XYZ or it doesn't meet our requirements here or there. That early stage of having it fun and exciting and just something new and cool to try, you've got to get to that first before it can go through the nitty because sometimes that nitty gritty takes a week, sometimes it might take three years to get through whatever it is in your deployment. To have somebody or a group of people that are passionate to push you through that phase to get you to the deployment, yeah. I think that's key for sure.

Sarah Nicastro: It just made me think of a point when you were saying that, taking a step back and thinking about where you want to put the pressure of the project right? Ultimately like I said, whenever a new technology as it's being introduced it's being introduced to drive a certain outcome right? And there's a business case, and there's a desired state that you're changing from and to but at the end of the day that frontline worker who you need to ultimately accept and adopt that technology, the overarching outcome of that entire project is not their responsibility, their responsibility is to leverage the new tool and to do that, it needs to be useful to them, it needs to have a good user interface et cetera. But maybe it's not a good idea to put even implied pressure of the entire project on their shoulders. Do you know what I mean?

Sarah Nicastro: I'm just thinking about a conversation I had recently with a leader within an organization that has taken a really big hit in business since COVID. And he was talking about the fact that their frontline workforce is so disheartened because the company is struggling but his point was the company's struggles aren't that worker's responsibility, they're still doing a really good job, they're hitting all of their milestones and their performance is above average and above expectation and so how do we as an organization separate the overall situation and outcome from individual performance right? I'm just thinking, when you think about managing change related to technology adoption within an organization, looking at the project outcome versus the individual contribution and making sure that you're either rewarding or coaching individuals based on their individual adoption and use and engagement versus maybe some of the complexity of the overall project. Just a thought.

Scott Lowes: Yeah. No. It does. And I think that where it gets tricky is, sometimes we come up with this project or we have this idea and we just want to see it implemented but we forget about the people that have to use it. And so when the software that we rolled out at Fortis was used, I was still in the tech role and I was the guy that had to use it. And I wanted to see it rolled out in a way that... It wasn't like, you've got to use this no ifs, ands or buts. It was like, here's the tool in your toolbox that is valuable and I'm going to show you how cool it is and how valuable it is. And the people that were willing to use it, they got to see the benefit from it.

Scott Lowes: And it's that snowball effect, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott Lowes: Because you got to think if you've been doing your job for 20, 30 and 35 years and some young kid comes in and says hey. We want you to use this software, you're going to get clocked right? It's that figuring out, okay. We got to get the snowball moving down the hill and once it's going, it's picking up steam but we also got to be careful that anybody that is at the bottom of the mountain, that we're not going to just mow them over either right? We got to get them on board rather than just say, this technology is coming whether you like it or not, get on board or get out right? You can't say, get off the bus, because if everybody hops off the bus because they don't want to use the software guess what? You got no workforce right?

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Scott Lowes: It's that really tricky balance of saying okay. How do we get people to come on the bus? And maybe you don't get on the first bus, maybe you're on the second or the third. And when I think about how technology would be best deployed to a workforce like Fortis is for instance, is it's not all at once because you've got to get these people onboard that are then going to get the others on board right? And it's like with the iPhone, you get a bunch of people that started with the iPhone 3G or, and then it's like, wow. Look at this cool thing. And they show their so somebody is like, okay. Well, you can play a fun game. But now everybody's got a smartphone in their pocket because the momentum is there.

Scott Lowes: The same thing is when we're starting especially in Field Service where historically we've never used technology to the level that we can use it now. To just say hey. You got to use this or you're done, it's not fair because everybody also has that for whatever reason a differing length of time they're going to take to get used to utilizing a new software or be willing to. There's multiple buses, don't just think it's one bus and everybody's got to get on because if you think about it that way, you'll be on the bus and you'll be thinking everything's all great and then you'll look behind you and you'll realize that nobody else is on the bus with you right?

Sarah Nicastro: And I always say the goal needs to be commitment not compliance right? You're not going to get the outcome you want if you're just driving compliance, it needs to be actually them seeing the value and being more bought into its purpose and its use.

Scott Lowes: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Scott, talk to me a little bit about how FortisBC has leveraged remote service to navigate the pandemic.

Scott Lowes: Yeah. This is where I guess all this came about. Early days pandemic, just so everybody understands, our job as technicians at Fortis basically, we've got to change out our gas meters at customers' houses, which then means we'd have to shut off the gas then we have to enter the customer's house and return on all the equipment that would have been shut down. But pandemic hits, nobody wants anyone in their house for obvious reasons. Now, we're still trying to maintain this work because it's regulatory requirement and all this sort of thing. We had guys that were... They would get the customer to open windows, they're hollering through doors, trying to walk customers through how to relight a hot water tank. Even heard stories where guys were just okay. Do you have FaceTime?

Scott Lowes: Yeah. I got FaceTime. And so they just FaceTime and they do exactly what this software that we've started using, they started using that. What it was, essentially the software we're using, it allows us to have a video and audio feed much like FaceTime but we can pause the video, we can draw little circles on it or point to stuff and turn on and off the customer's flashlight. All this kind of neat stuff. I always called at FaceTime on steroids anytime I was training on the software. And so we rolled this out early days pandemic and said okay. Let's get this thing going and we're still rolling it out as we're getting more and more guys using the software. Again, it's that like, that you can't just have everybody on the bus in the first kick of the cat.

Scott Lowes: And yeah. We rolled this out and we're still going through that as we progress and we're still dealing with pandemic fears, obviously ongoing. I don't foresee this tool as I've always called it, this tool in our toolbox ever going away, I think through further iterations, there may be a different particular softwares that we use or we leverage but I think the premise is just... The thing that was probably the most exciting about it was the fact that I go up to a customer's house and say hey. I've got this cool software that allows me to just send you a text message, you click the link and then we get an audio video feed and I could walk you through relighting their fireplace or their hot water tank and they said, "really?" And I said, yeah. It's easy. And when you pitch it that way and the customers do it and then at the end of the call I'm like, how was that?

Scott Lowes: And they're like, "that was actually really easy. I really enjoyed that. That was pleasant." Obviously there were the ones where the customers were more frustrated because the technology wasn't working but again, that's just getting through those roadblocks and those speed bumps but the coolest thing for me was the fact that our technicians could use it and our customers were able to use it. And it just not just that customer service level just up another, right? Because now those customers that say, "I don't want anybody in my house but I'm willing to have you walk me through it." That for me, it was a big aha moment in that regard, that wow. Our customers can do it and our techs can do it. Is it going to work every time? No. And that's okay. But it works. And yeah. It was a pretty exciting as the software has been rolling out and we're going through it.

Sarah Nicastro: So it was put in place initially because people didn't want folks in their home due to COVID, as that continues to normalize and becomes less of a concern over time, how do you expect it will be leveraged?

Scott Lowes: Yeah. That's where I get into dreamer mode a little bit but I think it's definitely still a tool in the technician's toolbox but I think as the technology gets more refined, as stuff like that happens and whether it's for us changing our gas meters or any of anyone else in field service, I definitely think it's this really... We're right at this tipping point of saying, wow. All of a sudden, we don't have to send a technician every time because when a customer calls in and I know this isn't gas related world, customer calls in and says, my hot water tanks not working, well now, before I even roll out to that job site, I can flash up this video assist software and I can say okay. Well, it actually looks like...

Scott Lowes: Do you mind if I just walk you through trying to relight the pilot light, walk the customer through relating in the pilot light and guess what? You spent 15 minutes on a phone with some technical expert to walk the customer through that without having to roll a truck, without having to dispatch a technician onto those sites, when you think about that, it's like okay. How do you scale that up in every tech?

Scott Lowes: And I foresee a future where you've got a technical expert, whether it's some central organization, they've got a technical expert in multiple fields that now all of a sudden a customer call them, they've got a concern about electrical or a gas or whatever it may be, they can now call the technician, that technician can walk them through a very preliminary high level troubleshooting, get a good picture of the trouble shooting that needs to happen.

Scott Lowes: And then now when you dispatch a technician, you're making one visit rather than two or three. There's no parts that need to be grabbed, the technician going in knows that he's going to be working on this model of appliance or whatever it is and it really reduces not only a carbon footprint again, with driving back and forth to customer's houses and here and there and everywhere but also it's just quick, it's easy. The customers get immediate answers to their questions and I think that if we think of just how do we do customer service better, everybody wants to be able to be connected with somebody right now. Look at what COVID has done now. Now you can meet with your-

Sarah Nicastro: Instant gratification.

Scott Lowes: Yeah. It's instant gratification. But at the same time too it's like, if the technology is there, why aren't we using it? It's no different than if you need to go see your doctor now, you can set up a video chat with your doctor and yeah. Sure. He might not be able to diagnose everything but it's like hey. I've got this or that. He can get you through... or he or she can get you through whatever it is. When I think of the future of where this field service and tech in that regard, man, it's massive and I think we're right on that tipping point of where we're going to go in. And COVID as much as it's been really tricky and really hard, I think it's allowed those technologies that we're just waiting in the wings that there was one person using or a couple of people using have now really been elevated to another level where people are like, wow. Okay. This is actually really cool. We can use this.

Sarah Nicastro: You said that you see the future of field service as less field and more tech. Are there any other major I guess, technology trends or aspects of what you think this will all look like in say five years’ time?

Scott Lowes: It's hard to say, right? Technology, it's so bleeding edge but as we tried this pilot for the VR, you've got VR software then you got mixed reality and augmented reality, all these sorts of things, as these just become so easy for the technology that we're using to actually execute. I think really the sky's the limit. It's going to be exciting but the flip side with that is we got to remember that we have a huge working force that may not love technology or may not want to use it.

Scott Lowes: It's being aware of that in any future deployment to say okay. These are the people that if we can sell it and if we can make it fun and if we can engage these people, they become the change champions and they become the ones that now all of a sudden are utilizing it even more than they would have in the past. I think that's probably the biggest key, is just being in control of the change. Because that's the biggest thing where you're going to see the biggest hurdles is, with anything, rolling out change is hard but if you can do it well and efficiently and get the right people on board then yeah. You're jamming.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. All right Scott. Well, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your experience and insights with us. I really appreciate it.

Scott Lowes: Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome. You can find more by visiting us at https://futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @TheFutureOfFS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS technology by visiting https://www.ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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Schneider Electric’s Journey To As-A-Service: Part 2

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Schneider Electric’s Journey To As-A-Service: Part 2

Howard Bowland, VP Field Services Australia at Schneider Electric and Scott Weller, Partner at Mossrake Continue the discussion with Sarah about the company’s journey to as-a-service in talking about operationally what was required to bring this vision to life, how important agility is, lessons learned, and what they feel the future holds.   Click on the link for more information on Schneider Electric’s innovative aaS offer EcoStruxure Outcomes: Secure Power as a Service - <a href="http://www.se.com/au/outcomes">www.se.com/au/outcomes</a>   This is part two of a two-part podcast. If you missed part one, be sure to listen to it <a href="https://futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com/2021/06/02/schneider-electrics-journey-to-as-a-service-part-1/">here</a>.   Sarah Nicastro: Can you tell us a little bit, Howard, about ... You just said the go to market is the biggest hurdle, right, so we've talked about that, but, even once you have that right, you're not home free, right? Let's talk a little bit about operationally what you needed to address to be able to bring the model to life.   Howard Bowland: Oh, okay. It's actually ... I say go to market is the most challenging item, and I know if I talked to my people building the operational side, they'd maybe have a difference point-of-view. The way I think about it a little bit is it's a little more well defined, the operational challenge. We've got a gap in our operational capability that we've got to fill. When you're talking about having to go to market, it's a little softer about exactly what's required and the skills, and how do you develop the people? How do you reach the right customer? It's a little less well defined. That's why I see the go to market as the bigger challenge. And you're talking about compensation or salespeople, and that's always complicated as well. Are you motivating the right behavior? It's one thing, as you pointed out, if everything was sold as a service, then that would be simple, but because we've got different offerings as well different business models.   Howard Bowland: On the operational side, what we're able to leverage is a lot of core building blocks of Schneider Electric service. The ability for field service, the organization itself, the digital connections into that infrastructure and the data lake that monitors that. We have connected service hubs around the globe that are able to roll a truck on the basis of some outage, for example. Putting together that ability to monitor the infrastructure and make sure it's running. We had to shift, also, the metering, the measuring, of what is the consumption that we're going to bill the customer for, so that required a bit of development and a bit discovery about who does what in Schneider. Some good building blocks, but then, as we try to connect, well, we need something different to fill in this piece, and it was quite a challenge navigating who is the person that can give approval to our person to get that piece of data?   Howard Bowland: There's quite a lot of navigating, finding the owners of different pieces of capability. I'm not saying connecting the capability was easy afterwards, but it was as significant piece to find, who owns what. We've got good service capability. We can make a call, go visit a customer, fix something, replace something, install something. All those basic capabilities are in place. It's about putting them in the right stack and connecting them now to a control tower that understands where everything is operating. A big shift for one of our first customers was getting thousands of alarms on new infrastructure that was running hot in places they didn't know, and so having us come and just simply take control of that and eliminate the alarms and identify the devices that are in danger of not working properly because they're environments were wrong was a really big, important improvement.   Howard Bowland: That capability to do that actually more or less exists. We've added that customer success management and a layer of advisory and evaluating pieces that. We've got some software or analytics developed with Mossrake to enable us to do metering, billing. Converting those readings into actual variable invoices for customers is itself a challenge, which we get done. So if I talk to my operations manager for this piece, she will say, "There's a lot of ... It won't really scale. We need a system-based solution," so we're ... Again, it's this agile method. 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.   Howard Bowland: 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. That's a bit of a summary.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, and I almost wonder if, going back to some of the common challenges I hear of others struggling with, I wonder if there is more of the: Let's build it, then we'll develop the go to market, right? It's a delicate balance in the sense of you can't go out there selling outcomes you can't deliver on, right, so you have to be sure of that, but I think it's also nice in terms of how it can snowball your success, right? If we get the go to market right, find the right people, have the right conversations, and give them a good experience however that needs to happen, right, then we're getting success, and we build on that success, and then we build out the backend of everything. Yeah, that makes sense.   Howard Bowland: That's, again, why you have to have this ... It's really useful to have this passionate group of explorers, adventurers who are willing to do the painful thing on the inside to make this a success. Then we can develop the ... We can take that pain away internally over a bit longer period of time. But also talked earlier about the idea that we need to start with that MVP, the minimum product that can be useful, because building something that's ... If it took too long to build something that was more material, it may be we wouldn't get there. But, ultimately, the opportunity of ... Shifting this business model to other parts of the technology set is quite a logical extension, yeah.   Sarah Nicastro: Howard, you've talked about agile a lot and how important it was here to have the success you've had. How is it possible, though? What would you say are the keys to doing this in an agile manner?   Howard Bowland: Okay, I think you have to have a core group of competents, I guess. For us, that was mainly Mossrake and maybe a little bit internally. You could do it internally, but you'd probably have to stand up a few people that knew what they were doing. Then, getting people to enlist on the vision, the journey, and be ... You could simply assign agile people in an agile way to the team and say, "Your job is X or Y," but we really were defining a lot as we went, and so that wasn't itself even perhaps quite possible. Having people that are really excited about what we're trying to achieve and are willing to give that discretionary effort ... I had people, yes, I'd assigned, carving out some of their time, and other people who were willing to do it on top of their main job and nobody's giving them a relief from their main job.   Howard Bowland: They wanted to do that. Their desire to want to contribute and be part of it was really, really important. I think good clarity around not defining too much to do, some knowledge that gives us confidence that we know, generally, the direction, but we're going to go a piece at a time, and having people who are highly enthusiastic and agile and are invigorated by the vision I think are key ingredients to that. Then celebrating a bit of success, we obviously were making progress as we went through. That always helps the next sprint, if you've achieved something.   Howard Bowland: One other point I wanted to make: wouldn't underestimate how important it is, and I've talked about this, the importance of not taking no as the answer. So many times, Scott will attest to this, went out and said, "Can we access to that data? Can we do this?" "No." You've got to find the person that can say yes and get support. You 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. It was some incident contacts that I'd personally made when I traveled that turned out to be people that were critical, and it was just a little bit of luck that I'd bumped into them, and a bit of tenacity, as Scott points out, to make sure you can continue to look for the way.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I'll tell you a funny story. My husband, one time, we were in the car, I don't know what made me ask this question. It's one of those questions a wife should never ask her husband, but I said, "Hey, babe, if you had to describe me in one word, what would it be?" Right? There's no right answer. You know that it's just ... It was a complete trap, but he said, "Tenacious."   Howard Bowland: I agree. Scott first coined this for me, I think, but tenacity, for me, is the balance between ... It's not stubbornness, which says, "I'm not going to shift from my position no matter what you say." It's actually about, "I've got a strong point-of-view about why this is my position, and I can be convinced when the facts bring that to bear," but getting through what can be a pretty challenging time, it's an important attribute, for sure, Sarah.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I always say I don't mind if the answer isn't what I want it to be as long as I feel like I've fully stated my case or have been heard, right? That's ... Okay, so on the agile topic, Scott, what would you add in terms of for folks looking to do this in an agile way? Any other keys to that that you would add to what Howard mentioned?   Scott Weller: I think the software industry has now embraced agile for so many years that it's not seen as a random walk. Even in this case, applied to a different kind of problem, 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. 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.   Scott Weller: And customers, just like you said you might want to come along as an adventurer next time Howard does this, there are customers who want to be part of that too. They're quite excited about being pilot customer number one or at least in a pilot program because they themselves are that kind of person, that kind of mindset. It is a bit of luck, finding the right people on your team, finding the right consulting partner, or finding the right first or second customer, but, really, those are the things that you can never count on. They do happen, but, really, having the strength of a great vision is so key to this, and then being willing to learn along the way. That, I would say, is the second secret to success.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's you know your objective. You just don't know every step you're going to take to get there, right?   Scott Weller: Right.   Sarah Nicastro: So I think, as a mindset, just in life, that concept prohibits so many people from moving in a direction, right? They want to see the whole map of not just where they're getting there, and then, if you don't have that, you just stay stuck, right? I think it makes sense to go about it that way, especially because, on these journeys, there's so much to learn, so the more up-front work you put into doing the way you think you need to do it, and then you start doing it and realize you weren't quite right, then you're out all of that time and effort, rather than, to some degree, learning as you go along.   Sarah Nicastro: That being said, I ... Sorry, Howard, we're you going to say something?   Howard Bowland: A little anecdote around enlisting people. I remember, as we're going through this process, here at Schneider, we have a very good intern and graduate program, so I was able to pick a few people. People, in fact, working in my organization wanted to be part of it. I was at a town hall. We have these town halls every quarter. Pre-COVID, of course, we're doing those face to face and had an audience of people. I was thanking people as we were making some progress on this journey, and I named a few people and thanked them. Even Ben, who's on the call here, was one of those.   Howard Bowland: Then, in the second row, there was this couple of interns there that I could see their faces drop because I hadn't mentioned their names, and they'd worked on the project a little bit. So this triggered in me, "Oh, yes, of course, there's also X and Y," and their faces lit up. It just triggered for me how excited they were about working on something innovative. They were interns and graduates that had just joined this company, and that kind of journey was really a big motivator for them.   Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Yeah. It's a good point, too, on acknowledging the progress and the hard work, right, especially, to your point, in the early phase of this when everyone's going above and beyond to chip into this new mission. You want to let know you appreciate that sacrifice and that extra time and all of those things.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay, we said this a little bit earlier, but this was done in a way within your region that it was almost like a pilot for Schneider Electric, right? It can be adopted by other regions, globally, et cetera. I think, though, I want to talk about that concept in the sense of why that approach may work better for other organizations than trying to do a global, wholesale shift.   Sarah Nicastro: Then I think it makes me think of the agile conversation in the sense of the criticality of documentation, right? I would think one of the things that makes the agile approach work is keeping such good track of: Here's what we did. Here's what we learned. We're going to incorporate this. Now here's what we did. Here's what we learned. Right, it's you're doing that for the purpose of being successful in your region, but you're also doing it with the intent of documenting this so that it's replicable across the business. Talk to me a little bit about the idea of doing this with it in mind that it can be done across Schneider, not just in a specific region.   Howard Bowland: I'll go first. Yeah, quite right. What was interesting ... First of all, I was able to secure some funding globally. As part of that, of course, I felt that it was important that this be repeatable and we document our journey, as well, as you say, to make ourselves successful. That with important to do. As we went on this journey as well, we, I'd say, strengthened our existing process documentation for just our regular bricks of service capability. We were able to leverage on some of that, but actually just discover that, in fact, that wasn't as probably robust as it should be as well, so able to add to that.   Howard Bowland: As part of this journey, 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, as well as what's in paper, it's actually in writing as well, which has been really useful to keep us on track and will be useful as other regions of Schneider, for example, might want to replicate what we're doing here.   Scott Weller: Yeah, as you say, one of the key deliverables from our work together, Howard, 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. 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. By the way, when we talk with them, we never characterize this as, "Okay, it's a slam dunk. Now that Howard's done this in Pacific zone, you can do this anywhere. It's just a couple of weeks, and you can go start selling."   Sarah Nicastro: Sure.   Scott Weller: It's quite involved, and every company is different. Schneider tends to be a lot more, I would say, operationally independent. Of course, they share systems and so on, but the regions and the countries tend to have a lot more autonomy than we see in other multinationals, so that just means that there's a bit more work to land something like this because the nuances, the difference in processes, the different tools and so on that have to be integrated to make this work is a little bit of a restart. Certainly not a true restart, but there are the nuances that have to be accommodated.   Sarah Nicastro: Scott, is this approach of starting in a region and almost using that as a pilot for a multinational, is that a common approach? Is it a suggested approach? You, as the person that does this with other businesses, what is your take on that as others are listening?   Scott Weller: Well, it's certainly the way we did it back at HP, and we do it. We've done it with Howard, and we're working on a couple of other clients as well. There is ... I would say the beauty of this is being able to do this in a microcosm, where if, God forbid, it were to fail for some reason, the risk to 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.   Scott Weller: Being able to de-risk it and particularly a lot of companies, when they think about moving to this model, they start thinking about, well, stakeholder perception. 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, is really the right approach.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Howard, what would you say is the biggest lesson you've learned in leading this transformation at Schneider?   Howard Bowland: Yeah, I think it's something we talked a bit about earlier. I think it's the change, the management of change. Don't underestimate how persistent you need to be, the importance of clarity in the vision on bringing people on that journey. Yes, there's particular challenges around the go-to-market or the sales process or quoting or operationally, but that management of change across the stakeholder group, across the people that you need to do something is really critical. Understanding ... It's not, as we know, it's not one-shot thing about explaining it one time or ... It's about making, particularly, when we're going through developing MVP, making smaller achievements over time, it's continuing to bring people on that journey of change and have a coherent program of work around that. That, for me, is the most critical thing to get right. It leads to identifying what I've said earlier about getting the right customers with the right sales conversation.   Howard Bowland: If I think about transferring this to, just to comment on that, another geography of Schneider, to me, actually, the operational capability is the most easily translatable. All the bricks that we've got here largely are elsewhere. In fact, I think you could almost run it out of a more central operation. We, for example, run here out of Sydney, and we have customer sites in New Zealand and all over Australia, or they could be in another country. Well, they are in another country, New Zealand, right? But the customer interface, the customer success management, the things that Scott talked about, about the advisory, the engagement with the customer, obviously the pre-sales and sales engagements are the really critical pieces that you've got to have localized.   Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Yeah, that makes sense, and I think part of that change management puzzle is the volunteers you had, right? As you have people from the business who are opting in and doing it because they think it's a great idea, a cool journey, a new challenge, whatever their personal reason is, then others see that, right, and then they see them excited about where you're going, and that builds. I think that those two things help each other out, right? You build some traction through the folks that are involved and engaged.   Howard Bowland: That's not to say that there aren't a few stakeholder groups or individuals which we haven't quite converted. What happens, of course, is you get the passive resistance or the undermining that you can't see. We talked about it earlier. If somebody is much more comfortable with positioning their traditional offer, they'll find every way they can to do that, even if the best thing for the customer and for us is actually a different engagement. Then the payoff for the company ... The payoff for the customer is clear, I think, although that's often more difficult to translate to them. The payoff, obviously, is that we know ... Instead of selling the customer some assets and getting 10 or 20% of that value in related services, you're talking about five- to 10-year engagement where the customer is probably going to pay 1.5 to 2X for that because they're getting the value out if it. Scott alluded to this a little bit, so at the beginning, it's a challenge, but the flywheel takes over as you scale, and it creates a lot of good things.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it goes back to the point that's been made a few times about just being persistent and tenacious, right? Some of this is just people need to see it in action, and it takes time to convert the people most resistant to the task underway. You just have to keep at it and not be easily deterred from the mission. Okay, last question that I want to ask both of you, is ... Scott, I'm going to start with you. What do you think the future of outcome-based service holds?   Scott Weller: Well, in many ways, we're at the beginning. When you can only point to a few of the bigger companies doing this, as I mentioned at the beginning, that are well known, when so many products that are part of our everyday lives on the business side, as well as the consumer side, are still transactionally bought, transactionally dispose of, we're not really focused on the value that they create in our lives. We're focused on, okay, how do I get this thing? How do I take care of it? Even our phones require us to pay attention to updates and so on, but I think the world is going to move to this model, and you see it in the strangest places sometimes. But I think every technology-product company is going to eventually move to a model like this. It's just a matter of time.   Sarah Nicastro: What's a strange example?   Scott Weller: Well, I'm still surprised that people are willing to let their car leave their driveway and let somebody borrow it for a few hours for a fee. To my mind, that's very strange, but that was the last one I saw. Apparently, that company is doing very well.   Sarah Nicastro: Interesting. Okay, yeah, it is very interesting to see how it pops up and where it pops up. I agree that it is really the early stages. I think the fact that this is a topic of conversation among so many organizations in service right now is indicative of where we're headed, but, to your point, there are a lot of people on the journey. There are not a lot of people that have really crossed a finish line yet, right? I think there's a lot of learnings and a lot of growth to come.   Scott Weller: Yeah, that's right. I think that one of the biggest inhibitors is a question of identity. If you've grown up in a company that's product ... We call it product first or product leaning, your whole identity is about we make cool stuff. That is, I think, probably the biggest challenge, the biggest, let's say, inhibitor to moving to a model like this, where you've got, really super-smart engineers now feeling like they're part of the supply chain. They're not the forefront of the model anymore.   Sarah Nicastro: Right.   Scott Weller: But I think, somehow, we have to come to grips with that because the human element of all this, both on, as I said, on the supplier and the customer side, have to be addressed. We can't pretend it's not there. In any case, yeah, as you say, it's the future.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it's interesting because it shifts from, "We make cool stuff," to, "We help people," right?   Scott Weller: Right.   Sarah Nicastro: Then, when you think about what that means in terms of all of these layers of change we've talked about today, but particularly in terms of skillset and those interpersonal skills and being able to interface with customers, being able to move upline in customer engagements, being able to nurture longstanding relationships. All of those things, it is interesting to see how you start to skew to those things becoming increasingly important, and then there was probably a whole other conversation of: How readily available are those skills compared to some of the traditional skills that we would be talking about having as a priority within either product manufacturers or even service organizations, right?   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it's a very interesting conversation. Okay, Howard, what do you think the future of outcome-based service holds?   Howard Bowland: As the demand grows, the focus on developing the technology will be focused around making it as-a-service capable already and less about color and shape and lights and customer user features. Making cool things that have got great features would be replaced by, well, it doesn't matter if it's a black brick in the corner if it's got all the attributes we need to make it scalable, for example, and accessible and so on. The product design and development that has good outcomes as its first thought would change the way they evolve. It would change the way you manufacture, potentially, and the costs of those things, the consumption of products, which is the second one, which I think is the sustainability push. While you're making products that perhaps are designed for as a service, they consume less on their input side because a lot of the smarts is maybe remote and so on, and you might have built them now to have a variable capacity that you didn't do before.   Howard Bowland: You also move to, "Actually, you don't have to worry about the life cycle, Mr. Customer." You're no longer over-provisioning it. You're going to get what you need just when you need it, and we're going to take care of it when the time is right, so cradle to cradle. We're certainly seeing, here in this zone, the very strong shift towards ... It's not just revenue growth, cost reduction, risk reduction, it's sustainability as well. I think it's going to help deliver on that sustainability promise for customer. That would be the two things.   Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely, good. Well, thank you, Howard and Scott, for being here with me and sharing the story. It's very interesting story, would love to have you back maybe in six months or so and hear what else you've learned because you guys are on that agile path, and you've learned a lot so far and are having great success, but I know you'll continue looking for those learnings and incorporating them into what you're doing. Thank you for being here and sharing, really appreciate it.   Scott Weller: Thank you.   Howard Bowland: Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.   Sarah Nicastro: You can learn more by visiting us at FutureofFieldService.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @TheFutureofFS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more by visiting IFS.com. As always, thank you for listening. </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-12 col-lg-3"> <div class="form-wrapper"> <h2 class="form-tittle">Stay Connected</h2> <iframe src="https://info.ifs.com/GM-CP-CU-2012-12-FoFS-Newsletter_IFrame.html">

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