A tribute to my InDigital colleagues at JLR

Dear JLR InDigital Colleagues,

In my final few days at Jaguar Land Rover I have been thinking quite a lot about what we have all achieved over the last four years. Reminiscing about how far we have come makes me realise what an amazing group of people you are and how lucky I have been to be part of this incredible InDigital team. Many of you have started your careers here. A number of you joined with more experience. But I would be surprised if any of you had thought at the time when you arrived how much you would learn, how much you would achieve, and how strong a relationship you would build with the people around you.

You have done so much more than anyone dreamed possible at the start. Even on a purely financial basis, while the initial “unrealistic stretch” target was ￡1 million per person per year, you have achieved over twice that consistently, four years in a row, in a difficult environment where the company was literally fighting for its life. In fact, I can count a number of occasions when this team was critical to the company’s future, including persuading the board to cut production in 2018 and helping manage the response to Covid. How many teams can have had such an impact at such an early stage in their corporate life?

Much more than that, you have shown the business a new way of doing things. We adopted Agile before it was even heard of in Engineering, and now 3000 engineers are following your lead. We worked cross functionally, across silos with just one aim in mind; to create value for the company when some of our colleagues were still thinking about how to defend ancient fortresses. You showed that what matters is the quality of work not the seniority of the worker, and you broke down barriers of diversity not just through gender and ethnicity but also age and neurodiversity (yep, some of you are nerds). And you placed front-and-centre your responsibility not just to your colleagues at head office, but to the prosperity of the whole Jaguar Land Rover community across a quarter of a million people in the West Midlands and beyond.

And you have done this by championing the power of ideas: relentlessly wrestling with business problems and data; not being satisfied with the same old cliches and excuses; finding new ways to think about problems and new ways to find solutions. This has been hard. Coming up with the ideas isn't enough; you need to have patience and conviction to convert a population whose very status is founded in the old way of doing things. But some of the results have been extraordinarily satisfying, even beyond the half billion pounds of EBIT contribution you have made (no other similar team on Planet Earth has done anything like this to my knowledge). Boston Consulting Group say that VDM is unique in the automotive industry. The forecasting work was presented at Cambridge and impressed the attendees from Google, who are considered to be world-class in that kind of thing. Intelligent Automation is recognised as best in class. Tableau reference JLR as the way to do data democratisation. And the graph Supply Chain work is ahead of anything that our competitors are doing.

And as a result of this you are now part of a pretty amazing team. A lot of really strong new people have joined us, and it looks like the really tough phase of our development is done. You have a real opportunity to learn from a very talent group and they have a similar chance to learn from you. I wish you every success in solving problems together.

So what advice can I leave you with?

Success in what we do (digital, automation, analytics), like in so much of life, is about the struggle to reconcile doubt and action. Doubt is the cornerstone of understanding. If anything much was certain you wouldn't need analysis. Doubt is the signature of an educated mind. It's the tool that we use to make progress, to re-evaluate what we thought we knew and to think differently. And yet despite doubt we must be women and men of action. To be otherwise would render our work irrelevant, just another interesting but inconsequential insight. What we do must have impact even if we cannot be certain of the outcome.

How can we achieve this? I guess this has been our journey over the last four years, and that journey is still far from complete. Nevertheless here are two parting thoughts:

Continue to think deeply about the world around you. Don't accept expertise and experience uncritically. Don't adopt easy ideas or jargon that makes sense on the face of it but has no depth. Wrestle. Never give up. Make sure you are just as demanding with your own ideas as you are with other people’s. Seek clarity and speak clearly. If you can explain yourself in a few short words you have probably got to the nub of the problem.

Be accountable for ensuring that your work has impact. Take ownership and find a way. If you know what you're saying is right, and thousands of people’s livelihoods depend upon a change being made, you have to find a way. If you could say anything about our team, it has been that somehow we have found a way to made a difference. And that's not bad.

So it has kind of gone full circle. The first thing I brought to the team not long after I arrived was the “Productivity Graph”, which shows that velocity and quality depend upon clarity, and that clarity in turn depends upon simplicity, challenge and ownership. My parting thoughts are not so different. Maybe that's profound or maybe I'm just a one trick pony.

It has been an absolute pleasure working with you. Have a great Christmas and I look forward to hearing of all your successes in the future.?

Kind regards,

Harry.