09 June – 12:00 – had to cut things a bit short due to unforeseen circumstances
09 June – 09:00 – had a great breakfast chat with one of the Pega cloud team members around security and deployment improvements that seem likely to spill over to benefit the enterprise given core product support added by necessity. As cloud adoption picks up I’m sure the team will raise more visibility to points that impact the initial experience and continue to drive improvements affecting all of us.
09 June – 07:30 – apparently people had a real good time last night – breakfast is pretty sparse an hour and a half before sessions start. Or maybe I’m just too much of an early riser. 
08 June – 23:00 – the customer appreciation event at universal was fantastic – a lot of happy faces and a lot of walking.
08 June – 15:30 – After lunch I took a brief break to catch up on a few things and returned for the Ask Pega session. Pega generally gives great commentary on product direction at this session, but a few attendees had technical support questions they really wanted answered.
08 June – 12 :00 – having attended Pegaworld since 2004, many of the breakouts appear to touch on points covered in the past with the exception of PegaExpress and Internet of Things. I opted for the Pega Express breakout, regretting a bit they were scheduled at the same time. Pega Express represents an interesting first for Pega and does a credible job of exposing enough workflow and data entry to introduce people to a few fundamental concepts around process, user experience and monitoring. The session ran short on time but I left thinking that real business applications beyond the most simple would still need trained teams to get integration and more complex inheritence concepts implemented at a minimum. Having said that, it’s a nice peak into the future on the kinds of changes we might expect moving forward.
08 June – 11:00 – After the break, Kerim demonstrated new features and tighter integration across omnichannel. The apple watch interface with access to health metrics was incorporated to good effect and Kerim’s video montage got a few chuckles – good demo.
08 June – 10:00 – Maine was able to implement changes across state agencies to significantly reduce case processing times using Pega cloud – illustrating growing cofidence in security, stability and scalability of external clouds. Amazon followed with a presentation on AWS to highlight the benefits of scale in terms of cost and scalability, maintaining over 1800 security standards.
08 June – 09:30 – cigna followed Alans address with a presentation illustrating how CRM / Pega can be used to transform an industry, putting clients in a position to drive their own engagemen. They are introducing more proactive engagement to improve health and drive down health care costs for their members and themselves.
08 June – 08:30 – Alan kept consistent with past keynotes highlighting Pega’s positioning in the space as a fully integrated single stack solution. The product positioning is skewing towards simplification in both building and running solutions with increased emphasis on cloud deployments. Pega express was announced, providing a more simplified means of engaging with prospective users as pega moves down market to address 5 times as many prospects as they currently address today.
07 June – 15:30 – It’s great to be back again this year – the Rosen Shingle Creek is arguably one of the best venues for PegaWorld and never disappoints. We’re looking forward to an interesting two days and hope to get a better pulse from the attendees on Pega 7 sdoption.
]]>A correctly implemented process integrates the management of contracted / expected service levels into the project execution and raises visibility to work at risk early enough to address the risk before it becomes an operational issue. When we define our processes with awareness of our SLAs we can identify potential issues before introducing them into the operations and can focus the process on meeting our measurable commitments.
As we define processes, coarse SLAs can be identified and decomposed to identify more targeted SLAs that in turn drive qualification of the feasibility of a proposed solution to meet those commitments. This can then be verified through simulation to further identify how other resources and groups are impacted by any shortfall to inform prioritization in addressing any gaps to maximize overall resource utilization and reduce idle time. Additionally, these efforts can identify cross training opportunities where workers in the affected downstream groups might be brought online to address any shortfalls in SLA adherence.
Early introduction of SLA requirements in the solution creation process also introduces opportunities to define a test strategy that includes simulation and verification of the process as being capable of driving execution of work to meet the majority of those SLAs. Such tools and discipline that are used during testing can then be leveraged by line managers to monitor production performance and identify further opportunities to improve.
So why do we not see inclusion of SLA management as a primary focal area more often? It’s difficult. Commodity based staffing focuses more on provisioning groups of individual performers who can meet staffing points defined in contracts governing the solution builds. Creating solutions that focus on SLA adherence introduce contract related risks if the SLAs are not met. But not addressing SLAs early can squander opportunities to seize market share through improvements in customer experience. Every program has a unique risk profile, so consider if the benefit is worth the risk.
]]>If you’ve worked in any outsourced projects, you’re familiar with the sales pitch that positioned this as a source of great potential value, but your experience may have seen this ‘potential’ as untapped in execution. Capabilities may not have been delivered, quality may have missed expectations, timelines may have slipped, and the product may have been perceived as ‘odd’ by your user community. These gaps wouldn’t exist given adequate focus and the correct governance structure, however it does require a certain amount of rigor that the typical work force finds too constraining to execute effectively. There are three fundamental focus areas that are crucial to address for successful execution of a program when outsourcing work from an organization.
Cultural Alignment
Work culture can vary significantly from company to company, but offshore cultures have their own value systems. Multi-cultural teams have an added dimension of risk in governance and delivery – there may be a slight disconnect or the difference could be sufficiently profound as to be very difficult to cross. Some cultural values emphasize influence over others more than building depth of expertise and craftsmanship valued in other cultures. This can lead to churn and result in overly long hours to address revolving teams, productivity degradation and skills gap remediation.
Cultural difference are also known to effect the content and approach of communication. Team members can find this a bit frustrating as they find each other too circumspect or too direct – there may also be a tendency to avoid communication, but more on that follows.
Effective Communications
Effective communications include more than the simple mechanics of speech and general intelligibility. We generally require communication of both accomplishments and failures in order to recover from a failure effectively. In some cultures, communication of a failure is avoided as failure is historically treated quite harshly. To this end, communications requires sufficient structure so as to draw out the complete status and must be focused on each subject in turn to ensure all topics of discussion are addressed and failures are acknowledged early when recovery is possible.
Even when cultural alignment challenges affecting communications are addressed, success is not assured as there are challenges related to general communications involving accents and potential idiomatic disconnects. Such challenges can be addressed given sufficient time, patience, and the willingness of the team to work through the frustration of stating something several times. This directly impacts communication of intent and establishing a common understanding of the business need – especially when overlapped working time does not exist and teams keenly feel the time pressure of closing the discussions so they can get some sleep or spend time with their families during the non-business hours over which these discussions occur.
Governance And Accountability
Global initiatives can take on a life of their own when all parties are not accountable for or in agreement on business results. Offshore delivery management often focuses on margin management and team utilization without the benefit of direct client accountability. Matrix management models often leave the offshore managers accountable only to the offshore executives who have operational objectives to manage margin while onshore executives manage client satisfaction.
The typical offshore management and delivery model can consequently yield results that are less than thrilling for business stakeholders, with decisions taken out of business context but within contractual context to optimize offshore delivery margin and not business results. In the US, we call it “the tail wagging the dog”… many offshore providers call it “business as usual”. This may seem a bit harsh from either perspective, but when the relationships are fragmented they tend to take a backseat to enforcement of the literal terms defined in the contract and drive decreased agility in the solution delivery relationship.
Mitigation of this risk requires the success criteria of any global initiative be clearly defined to a level where key metrics are stated and are measurable to facilitate timely acceptance. Often times we are faced with the task, subsequently finding that those expectations were not defined in the requirement or the delivery contract. With software, the product might be too slow, it might only allow integration to one specific system, the usability might be poor, or any of a number of ‘softer’ requirements may be missed due to lack of clear documentation of the product requirement at the outset.
Mitigating Risk – Charting a Path to Success
With these risk factors in mind, an organization can choose to eliminate or mitigate the risks. Effective mitigation could include training, adjustments to operating hours, introduction of flex time, supplemental staffing, delivery process changes, or any of a number of activities tailored to the identified risk.
Skills gaps should be identified early and mitigated through training or expectations should be adjusted to fit the team level of experience and expertise. Alternatively, the gap could be mitigated with another team that lends higher expertise and greater stability to collaboratively address the gap while making progress on delivery.
Elimination of the risks often involves optimizing cultural alignment and ensuring clear communication when questions arise in real-time. This can be fairly complex in execution and generally involves a fair amount of travel in both directions to open up the communication channels.
The level of commitment clearly plays a key role in extracting value from a global delivery model. In the short run the cost of mitigating cultural alignment challenges can drive your costs higher, but longer term relationships have a better chance of recouping some of that investment.
The best cultural alignment is much more easily achieved by working with teams that live and breath within your culture. In many cases, you’ll also find that in US based operations your team does not ‘age out’ of their roles and the instance of churn tends to be much lower providing greater continuity and lower ramp up costs. Even when considering long term relationships and committing to an offshore model – a US based organization familiar with the model can yield certain advantages in supplementing more senior level positions in the total team and enabling communication as an interested third party.
For shorter, less well defined engagements it would appear that better results would be achieved by teaming with native providers for better cultural alignment and real time communication during a normal work day. For longer engagements, the expected skills and communication gaps in steady state operations would impact those decisions more significantly – however other factors can make the decision more complex. We’ll explore this further in Accelerating Delivery – Seizing Market Control.
]]>We leveraged a hybrid model quite successfully to deliver business improvements to a large global enterprise, ultimately reducing annual operational costs by roughly $100M and contributing to six successive annual awards of the JD Power customer service award in their industry. We initially intended to deliver the solution with a waterfall approach over 12 months as a subcontract to a major services firm, however the program unsurprisingly threw us a few curve-balls during early functional demonstrations around the third month. The situation got progressively worse over the next 2 months with components provided by the prime vendor failing and/or being delivered late and timelines slipping out on the project plan. The program appeared to be in jeopardy despite some very promising progress.
Thanks to the waterfall approach, we had a strong systems design for the solution, however the shifting timeline put the delivery of business benefit in doubt and threatened program funding. Realizing this, we pushed out many automation features dependent on integration success and proposed refocusing effort on improving two fundamental problem areas in the core operational processes that were impacting service delivery to customers:
- Early and more visible identification of non-compliant work assignments that violated regulatory guidelines
- Automating first solution generation to reduce decision time from 8 hours to 1-3 minutes.
We were able to deliver these capabilities by the close of the 6th month and had a test system available and running in parallel to the existing operation in production.
The impact on the operation was astounding – the first major operational disruption was resolved more quickly and completely on the trial system than in the existing operational process, resulting in a net operational savings for the one day recovery equivalent to the full price associated to our subcontract. The system paid for itself fully during the production trial which ended immediately with a live rollout to all users.
In the end, full program delivery slipped out by 6 months. Holistic program management was crucial and renegotiation of delivery and payment terms represented an opportunity for all parties to rectify incorrect initial expectations. The change in focus on continuous improvement created a net positive gain in enterprise cash flow that created leverage for our program sponsors to reinvest. Due to our focus on achieving business results and creating flexibility around technical deliverables, our client allowed us to begin invoicing the license support revenue at the 12th month regardless of incomplete delivery in recognition of the benefits accrued through the continuous delivery program that exceeded their initial commitments to senior executives.
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The US Armed Forces is one of the largest employers in our country, instilling the values of team work, integrity, and accountability in each and every service member. Every member has maximized their understanding of these values by the time they separate from service because their very lives quite literally depend on that understanding.
For example, as a 21 year old commissioned officer straight out of college, I assumed the responsibility of leading a platoon of 54 soldiers in securing a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. In this same role, I took on other responsibilities to oversee logistics, supply, and training operations for over 270 soldiers, and oversaw fleet maintenance operations for a fleet of 72 vehicles with additional oversight and responsibility for a $5 million budget – all by the age of 24.
The skills translate exceptionally well to the civilian sector. Shortly after I left the military, I led my team in an operations overhaul in the mid 90’s at Continental Airlines to win multiple consecutive JD Powers awards for customer satisfaction resulting from significant improvements our initiatives had on on-time performance. This had a big impact on the bottom line as well – the airline recaptured hundred of millions in operating costs as a result of this initiative.
This level of experience is not atypical of a military officer. This experience and profile also proved very valuable in running Business Process Management programs over the past decade as it brings additional perspective to the team regarding operational impact of business processes. This experience and capability can guide teams in driving improvements to operational processes as impact is identified, allowing for more agile governance of these initiatives and driving measurable improvements to operations that more than justify the investments in those teams.
