Gaining a competitive advantage has moved beyond simply adopting the latest organizational trends, processes, and tools. Now, businesses have to look at the way people interact and how the evolution of the customers' role is going to influence and inform a new working model.
What is a working model?
What needs to be changed to make it successful?
How has Dassault Systèmes 3DEXCITE changed it?
Changing working model: what and how
Different elements make up a working model. In the spirit of brevity, I’ve listed the major ones below:
- Organization: it brings people together with values, objectives, responsibilities, skills.
- Processes: they support the organization in the daily business by defining a series of activities to achieve a particular result.
- Methods: they are procedures to perform a specific activity systematically.
- Tools: they are instruments helping the organization to apply a precise method – to effectively accomplish an activity.
The Organization structure: a dilemma
As human beings seeking a change, we look to evolve, to grow, or to respond to uncharted situations. The same goes for organizations implementing change: they systematically adjust their organizations and reporting lines following their mission, vision, and new challenges to respond to demands promptly.
Sometimes this change uncovers a dilemma: favoring “management control” or unleashing the talents through delegation? Depending on the company culture, pros and cons can surface on both sides. But, let’s pose the question, can a company reach the mission to serve its ecosystem better by solving this dilemma?
The Processes: improvements as ordinary duty
In the second half of the 20th century, population wealth increased significantly and had an impact on how companies were ideating, producing, and distributing products. The new degree of demand generated a need for organizational innovations and process designed to respond better and faster in this new landscape.
Can well-defined processes, even the ones that bring a continuous improvement culture along, be the success factor for a company?
The Methods and the Tools: efficiency, efficiency, efficiency
Once process evolution consumes its deadweight effect and, through a noble objective, introduces new effort and costs - a new challenge arises: how to operate efficiently and seamlessly. Methods and tools are two sides of the same coin and have progressively come closer together. From the late 90s until today, we have witnessed a continuous injection of new methods and tools that support companies to be better at what they do.
Methods and tools play an important role in supporting any company when it comes to efficiency, especially in an age of constantly changing priorities and increasing interruptions. Can the velocity provided by these toolkits, be a catalyst for change?
It is important to acknowledge that in each industry, a company has higher chances for success when there is an equilibrium between organization, processes, methods, and tools. I call it ‘Operational Elegance’.
The framework, the dream and the evolution
“You don't have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.” - Michael Dell.
A dream is the propeller to achieve any mission and corporate vision represents a framework. When we think about how a company can become successful, the dream is the what. The framework is a combination of every element described here so far, and it plays an important role in moving a company forward. It is the how.
These two elements have a connection: an organization with a proper framework that inspires valuable interactions, becomes a catalyzer for the dream virality.
Do you remember the unanswered questions above? You won’t get prepacked answers because they can strongly vary based on the industry sector, but they all have a need in common: a framework that pushes the company dream by looking at two evolutionary aspects.
The evolution of the people interactions
Humans are social by definition which means that interactions and connections are a fundamental part of their experience in an organization. Why is this relevant? Work has always been done with and between people but in the business and global world where we live today (e.g. multicultural environments, interdisciplinary teams and projects, different time zones…), these interactions are playing a bigger role. For this reason, working effectively with other people is a cornerstone expertise that we cannot deny.
Furthermore, when it comes to getting people together to optimize work and perform at their best, we’ve found that some have a greater impact: leaders. Everyone can be a leader and it is not identified based on the amount of direct reports she or he has, but rather on the ability to unleash interactions, reveal the dream, and inspire others.
The evolution of the customer role
The customer is not a mere consumer of your product anymore. A customer has experience, has knowledge, has expectations and gives input that a company should understand as early as possible to provide the right product for the right user. If you are eager to learn more about the customer role, this article is definitely worth a read: A perspective on the Next Industrial Revolution, by Fabien Bartel.
‘The customer at the heart of everything’ is not a fancy slogan but a true approach. It combines mindset, methodology and company culture with the aim to bring the customer to the forefront of the product journey. It sets a new path to accompany and influence the customer journey.
No matter what type of organization you are building, if you instill the customer’ implications before taking an action, you can activate a key game changer with a direct impact on the customer lifetime value.
These two aspects have to be in the agenda of every company that undergo a transformation. These two aspects alone can have a strong impact on the business.
Changing working model: a concrete example @3DEXCITE
At 3DEXCITE we develop 3D technologies that transform the consumers’ experiences.
It is a vital part of our DNA to place the customer at the heart of everything we do.
Are we there already? Not yet. We employ the tedious task to perform self-reflections to understand what we need to change to be a better company, for our people and for our customers.
The challenges
a) Interaction
This is a natural countermeasure against silos that can cause miscommunications, loss of effectivity and demotivation.
b) Focus
If people are struggling with too many tasks in parallel, continuously switching priorities, and focus - they underperform.
c) Leadership
If we have great people who are innate catalyzers, why not empower them?
The measures
a) Interdisciplinary teams to unleash interactions
We strongly believe that teams who work closely with their customers build better products. We also believe that professionals leveraging and combining skills and ideas get products-to-market faster.
With this mantra, we have given more importance to:
- people interoperability and sharing, over ‘boxes and reporting lines’
- customer centricity and team ideas rather than individuals’ ideas
We have therefore setup interdisciplinary teams combining business and technical people to work together on leading customers, to drive early and continuous delivery.
b) Industry-oriented grouping to set focus
Our objective is to create diverse, skilled teams to focus on specific areas. Whilst setting focus is a complex problem, there is no good or bad choice, but should rather encompass a capitalization of different opportunities. We have decided to drive the focus through market types:
At first glance, these three groups may appear as three distinctive clubs that could lead to new silos. We have worked to ensure transparent and smooth communications among them: each team has a captain (chosen based on leadership) that shows direction, enables actions and unleashes interactions.
c) The SCOUT initiative to boost the leadership
What about the measures undertaken to address leadership challenges? We are running a very broad and long-term initiative that aims to strengthen our leadership by focusing on our experiences as team and as individuals.
This part will be covered by a dedicated article: “Scout: leading by dialogue”.
The mindset
Favoring interactions, setting focus and enabling leaders while very important, isn’t everything needed to excel and foster the change every company wants. The organization must live it every day and implement a set of ‘change rules’ that will feed the mindset. To make it viral, the company culture has to embrace these rules by living them daily at any organization level.
- GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER
- OBSERVE, ACTIVELY LISTEN AND LEARN
- CHALLENGE YOUR OWN STATUS QUO (MONTHLY, DAILY, HOURLY)
- LIVE AS A TEAM (BE OPEN & HONEST - GOOD OR BAD)
- WHAT WE DO PROFESSIONALLY IS DEFINED BY WHO WE ARE PERSONALLY
- TEAM PERFORMANCE IS MADE OF INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTIONS
- KEEP IT SIMPLE - REPEAT, REPEAT, REPEAT
- IT’S A BALANCING ACT BETWEEN INFORMATION & EMOTION
- MANAGE & OWN THE CHANGE
- BE MEMORABLE
Finale and next steps
We are a learning organization dedicated to a continuous ‘improvement culture’ to challenge the status quo, live the change and adapt to new challenges and opportunities to get better at what we do.
Therefore, there is actually no finale but several lessons.
Things to Improve
Lesson 1: Living the change ‘as an attitude’ is not for granted
People need time, support and guidance to embrace the change and make it a solid part of their working environment. Reacting to change as an opportunity rather than a challenge, is the first obstacle. Make sure to talk with your people and to promote thoughtful reasoning.
Lesson 2: Overhead by many interactions within and cross interdisciplinary teams
The ‘interdisciplinary teams’ approach brings along a sort of natural overhead (e.g. alignment between interdisciplinary teams) that needs to be carefully controlled. You have to limit the amount of interactions to the most meaningful ones, ensuring there are no redundancies.
Lesson 3: The grouping variable is not set-in-stone
We selected the market types as our grouping variable. It is important to remain flexible with the grouping model and consider revising it when it does not produce the desired outcome (customer centricity), or when new challenges arise.
Things to Enforce
Lesson 4: New enabled interactions can create new benefits
The interdisciplinary team concept brings people together that wouldn’t often interact otherwise. This approach enables new interactions that generate unexpected value.
Lesson 5: Market understanding is a continuous duty
Using the market as our grouping variable helps the teams set the focus: they broaden their market understanding, identify key challenges and opportunities within the pre-defined areas.
Lesson 6: Customer at the heart of everything
Teams consider and discuss value for customers, provide guidance on actions, priority and time. Customers’ challenges are topic drivers driven to feed our roadmap with a plan that provides our clients with short and long-term benefits.
To conclude, let me be predictable: there is no perfect working model that can fit into every organization. Each business needs to look at its own challenges, set the right focus and empower its people to accomplish the company mission. As easy as it may sound, there is no magic behind this: it’s just about the people.
I hope by reading the article a dialogue on how to challenge your status quo will spark.
Alessandro
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This article is part of a series by the Dassault Systèmes 3DEXCITE Strategy Department. Get involved in the conversation - like, share, comment!
