The Importance of Launch and Love

Key Takeaways

• People inherently are hesitant to change. Unclear communication around the ‘why’ and limited leadership support can lead to significant operational cost post launch.

  
  

• Take the time to understand the underlying issue(s) through various techniques before recommending solutions.

  
  

• Empower those team members closest to the work to help drive your transformation.

Companies are continuously launching new products, platforms, policies and processes to stay relevant within the market place and ensure their employees are primed for success.

However, given the fast paced nature businesses are operating in, the majority of companies launch the new ‘thing’ and move onto the next one. Time is not taken to focus on optimizing what was recently implemented, unless directed by leadership.

When the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) delivery is sub-optimal, there is innate opportunity cost, unless tackled head on.

Unclear ‘what’s in it for me’ benefits decreases motivation

One employee facing only launch that fit this description was our Real Time Marketing (RTM) program’s project tracking platform transition from Smartsheets to Adobe Workfront.

The RTM program was tapped by the Transformation Office to be early adopters of Adobe Workfront, a new program management tracking tool. However, the change was not well received. Many felt that our hand was forced into this transition because our Smartsheets licenses were not getting renewed.

Adobe Workfront provided many great benefits for our program, including:

• Improved visibility into all testing efforts at the program level, as opposed to each testing team tracking their individual efforts separately in Smartsheets.

  
  

• Being the single source-of-truth of task completion for all team members.

  
  

• Customizable dashboard and reporting views for RTM leadership to remain informed on their teams’ performance (ex: tests completed, revenue generated, etc.).

Unfortunately, these benefits were overshadowed by the ‘required transition’ and we also had no tangible playbook as a reference on how to utilize the platform effectively. Assigned team leads did their best to provide MVP requirements, but platform utilization was low post launch.

With the leadership team also not leveraging Adobe Workfront, our testing teams chose to not input key data points into the platform and continued tracking their projects in other platforms, like Google Sheets.

Take 2

Once RTM leadership secured the Adobe Workfront contract, they wanted a re-do. In turn, funding and consultants were secured to help our program enhance our ‘instance’ within the platform.

I was tapped to drive the next round of enhancements over the next 90 days with two clear objectives:

1. Increase data input rates

2. Improve teams’ satisfactions with the platform

To achieve those two goals, I leveraged several Six Sigma Green Belt tools to understand the true issues behind these low utilization rates:

Root Cause Analysis.

I held multiple program level feedback sessions (~30 people) and deployed several techniques, like the “5 whys,” to identify the inefficiencies. In those conversations, we uncovered various gaps, including: UX navigation, access and content

Data Collection.

I had consultants pull usage reports to understand our biggest areas of opportunities. This led to the removal of several dozen data fields and the implementation of new ones.

Process Mapping.

I outlined how teams executed their tests on a day-to-day basis and realized that the platform was restricting select members from inputting their tasks.

Moreover, I needed ‘experts,’ those individuals interacting with the platform on a daily basis to have their voices heard during this transformation. I assigned ‘leads’ from each team in the consultant-led discovery and design sessions to make our limited time together as effective as possible. These experts also drove the 1-n enhancement priority list to improve utilization rates quicker.

Lastly, I partnered with the platform’s go-to-market communications team for each enhancement so all testing teams understood the inherent benefit and tasks required of them for post implementation success.

The outcome

Within the assigned 90 day timespan (technically 75 since the consultants were pulled off our portfolio 2 weeks early), we implemented 13 enhancements, which drove an 80% increase in data entry from the previous quarter.

In addition, our Workfront portfolio became the ‘gold standard.’ My Associate Vice President requested that his other organizations begin transitioning to Workfront from Smartsheets due to the intricate level of detail we achieved through these enhancements.

By taking the time to pause and reflect, we were able to identify and quickly fix operational pain points that our testing teams were experiencing. If we simply moved onto other priorities, our teams would have continued spending unnecessary energy maintaining multiple sources of truth to make up for Adobe Workfront’s initial shortcomings.

About the Author:

Kate Lisofsky is an Execution Partner at Goalster, a former collegiate athlete, and a former Verizon operations leader who consistently transformed ambiguity into scalable workflows. She joined Goalster to help other organizations navigate change, execute and win at scale. 

If you’re ready to turn strategy into action, especially in complex, cross-functional environments, book time here to talk through your organization’s goals.     

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