People, Process, Data & Technology- building a foundation for long term success as a team

4 Pillars stand out for me in building the foundation to ensure long term success for any organization: People, Process, Data & Technology.

For retailers, think of them as the four legs of the chair that you are pulling out asking your customer to sit in as customer and associate experience are critical drivers of success as a business.

People should always come first. Try to get as many perspectives as possible from many different people on the processes, data and systems being used to deliver day to day for the customer and meet the needs of other parts of the organization. Understanding and making an impact starts with learning.

Some questions to consider about the people impact across all four pillars:

• What works well?
• What could be better?
• Where are pain points?
• Where are opportunities?
• What is the team already really exceptional at doing?
• What are partners in other parts of the business great at?
• Does everyone know what “good” is?
• What is being measured to track towards goals?
• What are they benchmarking against as "good" and/or "best in class"? ?

I’ve had the opportunity across multiple functions in retail to work with great leaders, been a part of building strong teams, and have played a leadership role in organizational & process design work.

Whether the broader impacts of what you do today are currently clearly understood by you, your team and even the stakeholders who are dependent on that work or not, I can assure you that EVERYONE at all levels of an organization can have an impact on customer and associate experience.

Stepping back and looking at things from a “Day 1” perspective can be valuable from time to time.

• How would you explain what you do (and why) to a new team member?
• If you were coming into the role that you hold today with fresh eyes, what would you prioritize?
• What would other teams say about the value you bring to the organization as their partners?

And two more question to consider taken from my process improvement days:

• Would the CUSTOMER value what you do and see the value you bring?
• If YOU owned the company, what would you do the same or different for this team?

If you can explain to a customer in clear simple terms how your team makes an impact, and they would be willing to pay for it, then you have a clear value story.

If you think like YOU own the business, you are thinking about the long term. As we all generally want to be working well past the current fiscal quarter it is good for everyone in a business to think to think this way.

When I used to do process improvement projects, I liked to ask what people would do differently if their name was on the front of the building. Not surprisingly the people who do the work every day and are closest to the customer had lots of great ideas.

Listening to learn, then looking for ways to apply what you have learned, is a great way to add value in any role. ?

Understanding CURRENT STATE to build a foundation for long term success as a team

4 Pillars stand out for me in building the foundation to ensure long term success for any organization: People, Process, Data & Technology.

For all four areas there will be quite a bit of overlap to observe as these 4 pillars combine & interact when you first look to understand where the company, team, or location that you are a part of is today, and then look to partner with others to build upon that starting point.

As a high-level approach, I’d suggest breaking this down into 4 phases:

1.????? Current State/ Initial Diagnostic

2.????? Initial Action

3.????? Process & People

4.????? Future state systems & processes

First, we will focus on understanding the current state of the business/team.

Current State/Initial Diagnostic

No one knows everything. There is almost always a reason why something is done the way it is being done currently. Keeping these two things in mind and always being willing to learn is a big part of laying a foundation for success in any organization. Connect with the people involved in the process you are trying to better understand. Ask “why” then listen.

Whether in large organizations with lots of people involved doing parts of a large process with handoffs across teams, or in a smaller company or team where one person is juggling multiple tasks, it isn’t always easy to carve out the time to look at what you are currently doing and whether it is STILL the right thing to do or the right way to do it.

There is an inertia to most projects, reports, meetings, or activities that can carry them along unquestioned as “how we do it” even when the original (often very good) external reason that drove WHY that activity was started in the first place may have since gone away.

You will want to understand both a big picture perspective and down into some key details. This includes how leaders think something is working, what the “doers” of the organization experience day to day, and what the customer side perspective looks like. ?

• What is thought to be adding value?
• Is it STILL/REALLY adding value for the business and/or the customer?
• What can we STOP doing to focus more time on things that make an impact?

I’ve been responsible for analytics team in retail operations, shrink & asset protection and merchandising across several roles. In each of those roles I turned OFF a lot of reports.

New ones were added too, but understanding what people NEED and what they use for making decisions will help reduce the noise and save teams time that may currently still be invested in churning out time consuming “Inform” reports that are no longer needed in the same way or do not drive action.

Similarly, I’ve found in each function really good useful reporting that was not being broadly used and with training and awareness was then highly appreciated by the end users and decision makers. ?How do you know which is which?

Part of your initial diagnosis of the current state should be a lot of conversations and observation. Defining the problem and walking the process are good first steps.

When I did process improvement work and reporting was involved, we would follow the report down through the process across the people and teams that touched it. For this you follow the "piece of paper" not the individual people.

The PEOPLE in any process are usually quite busy but there might be opportunities for the "piece of paper" as it travels along between people and teams through the process.

See who created it and how. See how it is distributed. See who it goes too. See when and whether they open it. See what they use it for. Ask questions across the entire flow of the report. See what is documented and identify steps where what is happening when you trace all the way through the process is different than what people THINK is happening.

Sounds time consuming? Your business has LOTS of reports? Prioritize for impact. The 80/20 rule is something commonly observed across most environments. 20% (or less) of the reporting being generated is likely most used or most impactful. 20% of processes may consume 80% of time spent by the team.

Look at what reports are most broadly distributed. Look at what processes involve the most people or functional handoffs. Talk to key people who are involved at different stages of the process (and know the details way better than you do) and ask their opinions. Focus on what bubbles to the top then move on to the perceived next most impactful process, report, or activity.

Look for where there ISN’T clarity or agreement. If the producer of a report thinks it is business critical and the users receiving it think it is just a “nice to have” there is likely an opportunity worth digging into further.

If there isn’t clear documentation or a clearly defined process you may want to dig a bit deeper as well to create clarity starting with the most key processes or where you perceive risk.

At the end of your Current State Initial Diagnostic, you want to have a broad understanding of how things work (or don’t work) today, potential gaps, who is involved doing what and what the perception is from different participants and stakeholders across the process. ?

When looking to understand current state you want to capture how the four pillars of People, Process, Data & Technology are currently being used and an initial sense of where there are key opportunities to improve, enhance and develop across those four pillars.

Using the Pricing function as an example a checklist for this CURRENT STATE phase might look like:

• Review existing base & promotional pricing strategy, benchmarking vs competitors, customer perception, walk current key processes both in store and with support teams, shelf edge messaging, ad review process & grading of promotional performance, end to end ad planning process, category roles & period review process, private label role & price strategy, understand mass vs. personalized offer capabilities and both store & support bandwidth for execution. Holistic look at how price levers tie into overall strategy, assortment, marketing, and other customer facing activity.
• Determine strengths & gaps of current team through presentations and discovery, identify what processes are clearly documented and what information might only be known by one or a few individuals. Create a repository collecting copies of existing training materials, process documentation, pricing strategy and key reference and call out prioritized info needs.
• Identify what tech & expertise is available than can be leveraged near term from other parts of the business, identify key stakeholders, potential partners, and decision rights.

People, Process, Data & Technology- But I want to DO something! Initial Action?

Waiting is hard. How many of you open at least one Christmas or Birthday present early?

When you start in a new role or are part of a new team or organization the natural feeling is that you want to show what you can do to contribute to the team. Sometimes you NEED to act quickly on some topics and activities that are time sensitive or create a risk to the business or customers.

Preparation is key whenever possible to help maximize the positive impact when you do act. That is one reason why it is important to first understand the current state as much as possible across people, process, data & technology. (see previous post about understanding current state here)

Now it is time for you to begin to put your knowledge and what you have learned from your teammates and other key stakeholders to use.

What to prioritize for Initial Action?

• Quick Wins
• “Test and Learn” iterative activities
• Kicking off addressing key competitive gaps and impactful priority areas

Quick Wins help build trust and relationships while immediately helping the team and the business. This could include leveraging an outside perspective to start or stop things that save time or drive value. It includes “no regrets” decisions and clear opportunities that are simple to execute against with minimal research or analysis required to get consensus or buy in.

Stopping the creation of a report that is time consuming to create and no longer needed is one example of this. Shifting funding to stop or reduce spend on promotional activity on items that isn’t driving a sales lift or resonating with customers to invest that money to reduce the price point and increase unit sales on items customers care about more is another example. In both cases these are low lifts and decisions that are typically relatively easily to reverse if a positive effect isn’t seen.

“Test and Learn” is also often a low-risk way to begin quickly making an impact. Where quick wins focus on the obvious pain points and clear simple solutions, this set of actions is iterative and involving trying some different things that may or may not work but that will create better visibility for problems and solutions either way.

Pilot tests and trying different things in different stores or geographies then measuring and comparing the impacts so the most beneficial ones can then be more broadly deployed are examples of this.

When I was helping lead developing an asset protection shrink reduction program for high-risk stores, we tested both individual solutions and several “packages” of actions to take in comparable stores to test the impact and overlap of different ideas for reducing theft and loss. This iteration then resulted in a stronger comprehensive plan of action to go live everywhere.

Addressing Key Competitive Gaps & starting work on impactful priority areas may be a mix of quick wins, test & learn and getting things in motion to go after larger opportunities with more complexity where greater lead times are required.

What you and your team are investing time in early on and asking for help and input from stakeholders and partners across the business naturally should be areas considered priorities.

This could certainly include going after fast impact against those priorities, but you also need to consider where you need to get work started soon because of longer lead times with a big Return on Investment (ROI) or impact that could take a bit longer to see.

?The urgency created by “burning platforms” and faster ROIs drives a short-term focus at many organizations. The immediate need is clearer, so it is easier to get buy in. Be sure to consider both ease of implementation AND impact to the business in balancing prioritization for what to do first.

Ideally your Initial Action will have a mix of short term and longer-term impacts where the immediate wins build credibility and trust. Justin Patton, CSP , author, executive coach & speaker talks about the concept of “emotional deposits” in building a relationship in business. Trust is critical to long term success. Your Initial Action and the “emotional deposits” made in kicking work off can build the relationships and foundation for bigger wins down the road.

Using the Pricing function as an example a checklist for this INITIAL ACTION phase might look like:

• Leverage existing analytic & third-party tools to determine and go after “quick wins” such as opportunities to shift funding from less impactful/nonproductive promotions to drive incremental units & margin at current price investment level. Review existing reports, divide into actionable and inform, then determine/implement initial critical KPI review cadence.
• Begin “test and learn” iterative price and promo tests with a defined success measurement plan for scaling up successful pilots to drive incremental units, dollars & margin.
• Identify any key item competitive gaps and “insult pricing” to prioritize & address while also leveraging targeted marketing offers to help drive customer perception as a key activity with lead time for impacting. Prioritize initial focus categories, look at JBP opportunities, SPAC & other ways to bring innovative offers in to begin to differentiate vs. competitors.

People & Process: The WHO and HOW of getting things done

Delivering results starts with you, the people you are working with and the ways the work is getting done. Continuous Improvement and broader transformation work can help the team in delivering more effectively, simplifying work and understanding how to add value in critical ways but any such transformation has to begin with the key assumption that the work still needs get done well now while looking to the future.

The who and how of delivering value is key to sustaining results. Buy in, an understanding of what needs to be done and why by both the “doers” and other key stakeholders will help build the trust, partnerships, and enthusiasm to succeed together.

Change is tough especially when YOU are the one being asked to do something different. Even if in the longer term that change will make things better when in the moment and outside the comfort of routines while building mental “muscle memory” for a new process it can be tough not to revert back to old routines even if know they were not ideal.

I’m a big fan of the ADKAR methodology for the people side of change. Developed by Prosci , ADKAR stands for: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability & Reinforcement. Too often at too many companies the first critical parts of this acronym (Awareness & Desire) do not get the attention they (and your team) deserve. Explaining why change is needed & how it benefits the team, the business & the customers goes a long way towards engaging everyone as part of making things better together.

After building your understanding of the Current State and kicking off work to deliver some early wins through Initial Action you likely now how a good sense of actual and perceived opportunities to make things better for your team, your partners, and your customers.

Three ways to begin to deliver People & Process related evolution before getting into data & system related dependencies that might involve longer lead times and greater capital expense are:

• Process Simplification
• People Development
• Ways of Working

Process Simplification

Drill in from the current state pain points your team, business partners & customers have shared and implement a first wave of improvements to simplify, stop non-value add work and maximize the amount of time focusing on most important deliverables that require minimal or no changes to existing systems and that use currently available data sources.

When I was mentoring someone through a Lean project to save time for store managers, we initially captured a list of everything corporate was assigning them to do on a weekly basis. We put a dollar value on the time invested in these activities using an average hourly wage for quantifying the effort needed for each assigned task. Framing the question as “Is it worth spending $X to do this?” leads to much better clarity on the value of time being spent that could be used for other customer facing purposes than just “Would you like X to be done?”.

People Development

Identify key competencies & begin to address any gaps through robust associate development, recruitment, third party resources, and organizational ways of working.

When I have led teams, I’ve frequently looked to save on other P&L lines so that I could invest more into associate development. There are great classes, conferences and other learning opportunities worthy of investing in for professional development. Professional development doesn’t have to be expensive though. I love to read. Reading a book or article can give you ideas by leveraging the experience of others. I’ve arranged “lunch and learns” in a few different roles where we brought in people from different parts of the business to share what they are working on.

The most important thing for effective people development is providing the opportunity and the expectation to use what they have learned. I had the opportunity to give a main stage keynote at a Category Management Association conference a few years ago where I got to speak about a topic that I am passionate about: “Leading by Developing People in an accelerating omnichannel world".

I highlighted three themes for associate development that I believe are broadly impactful across many roles & career stages:

• Delegation that Develops
• Storytelling with Data
• Change Management & Collaboration

Ways of Working

Place a heavy focus on implementing and enhancing strong ways of working, aligned goals and creating visibility with data that drives action while using manual processes & current state tech stack to lay groundwork for evolving and modernizing capabilities. Define issues, measure impacts, implement improvements, have a robust change management plan, and iterate.

This likely requires collaboration across teams. When I was helping to lead designing interim commercial ways of working coming out of a merger, we captured the most critical processes that needed a manual workaround, documented these processes using hands on experts who touched them every day then used those materials to create clarity so there would be clear ownership, thus preventing time from being wasted by multiple people or teams doing the same things. ??

If there is a clear understanding created within the team and upstream and downstream within the organization of what the most important deliverables are then quite a bit can be accomplished by focusing on People & Process together even before bringing in the additional levers of enhancing systems & data capabilities.

Future State systems & processes: Using technology and data for sustained success

Major business changes today often require bigger lifts than people and process alone can deliver for maximizing business value. Pairing people/process with data & technology isn’t always as fast of a solution (although advances in this space such as Generative AI & cloud-based infrastructure are changing that) but when well thought out technology investments are possible, they can be game changing.

Evolving data & technology capabilities is a journey. Data definitions, data quality, data delivery, there is a lot that goes on “under the hood” to enable your team, business partners and customers to TRUST the data. Trust is essential for creating value from data & technology investments. You could spend millions of dollars on technology and still not get the full benefits without addressing the people side and how it integrates or changes your processes and ways of working (hopefully for the better).

As technology can be expensive creating clear business cases is crucial to prioritize and sequence spend. I’ve been a part of many IT Roadmap and budgeting discussions, as well as having coached data & technology providers from a retailer perspective as a consultant.

Every company’s prioritization process is a bit different in the specifics, but common broad themes are evident from what I have seen across industries and organizations. I suggest that you should align your messaging to answer these questions:

• How & when will investing in this data/technology will deliver value to the business?
• What is the downside/risk of not doing this right now and what are any key dependencies?
• Is this data/tech investment critical to delivering an existing company priority or goal?

Prioritization, buy in and building clear Awareness & Desire for a data/technology implementation often needs to be an ongoing process as new stakeholders are identified, and different areas impacted.

Often a process solution AND/OR a system solution is possible with different positives and negatives to each. This is why when designing for the future it is important to look across all four pillars: People, Process, Data & Technology to maximize both the business benefits and successful adoption.

Below is an example using the Pricing function of how to bring these pillars together for getting value from data & technology:

• Determine and prioritize business requirements for improving systems to maximize price & promo effectiveness. Ensure looking at processes & systems together so not automating an existing process that may be inefficient to maximize business benefits of leveraging new tools. Look for the right balance of integrated toolset vs best in class for specific modules.
• Begin RFP based on identified prioritized needs and select right fit tools for future state needs.
• Create a robust implementation plan with clear timeline & right resources to put modernized systems, tools & analytics in place with a comprehensive change management plan to ensure adoption and effective leveraging by people of the new tech enabled capabilities, so that investment in pricing tools drives top line and bottom-line sustained business value.?

Placing a focus on developing people into leaders, simplifying & streamlining efficient processes, maximizing the effectiveness of data in making decisions and leveraging technology to automate repetitive work and enable a laser focus on critical drivers of business success and customer satisfaction can have a huge impact in any team, company or industry.

Always be as ready to learn as to lead and remember that every person and situation has something to teach you. I like to call my thought process around this topic: “Leadership through continuous learning”.

Below is a final one pager example summarizing the four phases of this approach to leveraging People, Process, Data & Technology using a pricing example. A similar framework can be applied to any function, problem or team.