Forgotten Art of Stakeholder Management for Service Design
Summary: International Organisations forget to ask the Sales organisations do they have the will, capacity, competency, capability and time to sell a new offering. Often, the ask, is left until it is too late in the service design cycle and it becomes a whoops moment. This activity needs shifting left, in other words earlier in the offering lifecycle. The key is to identify, work with and validate with all stakeholders where feasible and possible.
Introduction: Customers, especially Business to Business (B2B) are getting savvier and see through gimmicks or product features. Most leaders in business are concerned about obtaining long-term purchasing decisions which creates value, some enlightened leaders look for the win-win and invest in co-creating value for all stakeholders. Large international firms can be very fragmented businesses (federated) with Divisions, Product line, National Operating Companies called NOCs, Regional Operating Companies (ROC), Regions (APAC, EMEA etc) with diverse and chaotic operating models built on history and internal empires. Who is responsible for what, can and will change on a regular basis, sometimes faster than yearly. Where an Enterprise Architecture does not exist from a global perspective nuance on nuances and work arounds are often needed. Often resulting in duplication and lack of repeatability and a lack of standards. Management are often stating expressions such as
In more progressive international organisations. Delivery is based on minimum viable product and discussion about walking to running skeletons ensue.
?Many large organisations are loosely federated resulting in siloes (left hand and right hand not knowing what they are doing).??This results in a lack of shared direction of travel with a so what of duplication of effort (multiple applications doing similar things, multiple same offerings being developed) or even time to business from inception elongating past the useful life of a product.
I have seen organisations within the same firm have competing offerings set up by different business areas, in a form of co-competition and the sales team deciding what to offer based on what the internal sales price or target is rather than what is best for the Customer. Worse still is when all the work in portfolio, design and set up is wasted if direct or indirect sales teams do not take the offering on board and sell it. Rationale for not willing to sell can be as simple as commission structure is not in place for an offering.
The path to turning an idea into an offer needs to consider the different journeys from different perspectives. We often hear about different journeys from different perspectives and they will be prioritised by organisations. One of the Journeys often missed or brought in too late is the Sales and Go to Market Journey. (Calling this the sales journey for simplicity) Often the Sales Journey are brought in at a point where Offering development team are too far down the road.
For me one of the main differences between Waterfall and Agile is validation with Stakeholders and the ability to change (called pivot). It is the same with Journeys and experience. These are the typical journeys an organisation maps but without Sales and Marketing the business model will be very limited.
A typical high-level journey for validating with internal Go to Market and sales teams is an Internal Sales Stakeholder Analysis. Without clearly validating the viewpoints and agreeing /aligning strategy success will be harder to quantify. A simple process for Validation and getting an understanding of where to focus on the easier organisations and where additional work will be required to bring organisations on side and who will never entertain the notion can be seen below
Identifying Stakeholders: Organisations are becoming more complex and are moving from Stakeholder charts to Organisation maps. An organisation map includes the Eco-system, Customers, Suppliers/Partners who have an interest and as well as the flow of information. It highlights the fluidity of organisation structures.
One of the core concerns when discussing with Internal Stakeholders is to understand their power of decision making and who creates and align strategic direction. It is often incorrect to assume that a chain of command is in Unison in terms of strategic direction. A simple example do not assume the Sales director and a team lead have had discussions or are in agreement for strategic direction of travel. In a recent example I came across, a small team spent 6 months building the idea around security and segmentation focussing on the education sector. There were numerous validation sessions with Sales Team leads. The project came to complete halt when a sales director suggested they were changing direction and the additional effort to set up a new offering was against the planned Strategy not properly communicated. If you do not identify the right stakeholders, it makes failing fast difficult. Failing fast here means the ability to change direction when needed.?
?Create Survey: The organisation may have invested an enormous amount of time and value in deciding that an idea is good. To repeat my mantra from before. Often the forgotten or delayed journey is the Sales Journey. Many firms want to roll out offerings to 50-100-150 countries around the world. Large firms often take 18 months plus to build an offering with countless meetings, milestones and analysis. Appetite to risk is likely to be very different in the USA to Japan culturally. So, the internal survey needs to be clear and identify the sale channels appetite for the proposed offering.?
A small firm may find it is almost impossible to fathom that Service Designers do not know who is response for the Go to market strategy at a country, region, global, divisional, business unit level. Whilst I am not suggesting that the Internal Sales and Marketing Survey is the primary basis for decision making, as part of the system design thinking a boarder approach to stakeholder engagement and validation is required
Solicit : This is a step that on reflection can be combined with create survey. However, an overviewed step is the Survey Fatigue. Many firms have voice of the customer, voice of the employee, voice of xxxx. I have seen these surveys with over 100 questions, very wordy, badly designed and results ignored. Obtaining executive time is precious and responses will likely not be forthcoming in a timely manner, unless buy in is available . The buy in requires a clear understanding what you’re really trying to achieve and ask those questions. Just sending a survey out without getting buy in first and engagement is unlikely to get a meaningful response. A senior executive sponsor is often needed to open the doors
A simple test when thinking about the questions is to imagine the results and ask yourself can you or whoever is accountable make decisions based on the answers or will other information be required and is that available. If the answer is no then may be the questions are wrong and need modifying to cover. Large organisations often have a level of formal stage gates. Investigate if those stage gates will be answered positively by the survey and what volume/format will the data be required in.
Plot: Obtain the results and putting them onto a simple grid helps to identify next steps and if the offering has early potential. This is an art of grouping and obtaining turning data, into information to get knowledge and hopefully wisdom (DIKW) model. Example of Grouping grids based on responses are
1 Engagement Mapping – can response be obtained and grouped. The results can be very political so need to be communicated with care. Highlighting a business unit is awkward or just say no, now ask the question, needs to be handled with great care.
2 Usage Mapping – what is the xxx-unit attitude towards the product offering.
?Clarify: Once the results are mapped clarify the journey path to move to the top left-hand corner especially of a usage mapping grid. In this case Loyalists. Once the results are available cross reference against the business case. For example, if your top 3 internal sales teams are not willing or enabled to sell the product offering can the business case be actualised or does it need to be revisited.
It is often worthwhile thinking how to get the buy in from the business units that are hostile or evade and avoid. The area of danger is where another business unit has a competing offer that either wants to expand into other units or alternatively block your offering from their business unit.
Often this confusion arises from lack of shared Enterprise Architecture and alignment of strategies.
?Report: The purpose of the report is to demonstrate progress, ask for support or approval to continual utilising objectivity over subjectivity. Large International firms can be rife with decisions made by preferences rather than commercial criteria. Often understanding the organisational context will result in how and what will be reported. Understanding of Michael Jarett's Weeds, Rocks, High-ground and Woods from HBR article is a casing point for describing strategies in political organisations. Whilst most management in organisations will deny they are political, or sometimes political, a more positive perspective to view many of these interactions as the difference is the difference between intuition and validation. Sometimes the politics comes from the strategies and showing delivery of a diverse strategy directions and utilising scare shared resources.
?Prioritise: As part of the considerations the prioritisation and rollout can then ensue and with the Sales and Marketing teams on board more likely to succeed.
If you have any comments I would love to hear your views. Please give your feedback and if you like or want to share the article do so.
?Written by Jason Douglas in process of setting up Help You IT Limited
Linkedin : Jason Douglas | LinkedIn
Telephone +44 (0) 7496002461
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Technology Hub manager
2 年Hi Jason, good article. Only what I can propose to break it into smaller chunks and make it easier to read/understand for us not natives. I honestly admit I did not probably got everything from it, but still I hope I was able follow your thoughts and get inspired :) thanks for it
Enterprise IT Management Consultant - Supplier Relationship Managment | Transition Management | Exit Management | IT Operations
2 年Gels quite nicely with my transformation article, albeit looking at the enterprise from a slightly different angle, the issues are the same. Thanks, Jason.