How Nimble Are You? Given Today’s Fast Pace of Change, Taking Time to Examine the Why of Your Business Has Never been More Critical

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This article uses the story of a failing, but ultimately successful, $180 million offshore outsourcing project to demonstrate how a rigid organization can reap great benefits from a more "nimble" mentality.

Strategic Partnership – The Missing Link
A retail company and a technology service provider recently underwent a turbulent 18-month process to implement a transformational Human Resources (HR) outsourcing initiative. Each side was deeply entrenched in its own view. At its worst, the relationship suffered a contract-threatening standoff that was triggered by consistently sub-standard service levels that resulted in significant monthly financial penalties for the service provider. The relationship was headed towards attorney interventions.

How could this $180 million project be saved? The answer lay in creating a strategic partnership that after only six weeks from the start of the parties’ work achieved 100% service levels – a swift turnaround and a success story in nimbleness.

Separate Agendas Thwart Nimbleness
Significant turnover is all too common during outsourcing engagements, similar to the dynamic in downsizing companies. Employees must regroup when they see colleagues let go and replaced by an outsourced firm halfway around the world. Resentment builds up, creating a greater desire for things to stay the same and sometimes an even greater resistance to change. Outsourcing and downsizing scenarios share this typical pattern.

Our job was to strategically align the Project Management Office (PMO) leadership and purposefully connect the offshore call center operations leads and governance team, all to provide a process for repairing an extremely ineffective relationship. We immediately noticed that both sides had begun the implementation work without first sorting through issues ranging from decision-making and context-setting for individuals new to the project, to the unattended-to emotional strains of having co-workers laid off.

When teams are able to clarify their purpose and the impact of the work, they can begin defining the essence of the work only they can do together. This helps teams strike a balance between critical results and key development needs. The process is something of a see-saw and never perfect, making flexibility and pliability absolutely critical.

Over the course our six-month engagement, we held a series of meetings to guide the parties through the systemic challenges and issues plaguing the business relationship and operational functions. Through our structured five-step process, we worked with various stakeholder constituencies, in order to determine the impact on the customer, the company, and the employees:

1. Define Critical Need (ROI)
2. Stakeholder Clarity
3. Development Game Plan
4. Focus on Right Work
5. Evaluate Results

By shifting the focus to the end state, always thinking with the end user in mind, the teams began to weigh the importance of issues. For example, the end user could be an employee picking up the phone to inquire if their paycheck would arrive in time for a mortgage closing. The team member responding to such a call was guided by the thought, "Will this issue make a difference to our end user?" This nimbleness in thinking quickly allowed major changes to occur.

Nimble Tips + Lessons Learned

• Being nimble requires far greater understanding of the whole system, the ability to handle complexity and the skill to capture the essence of a situation with simplicity -- all while building and maintaining high trust levels.
  
• Use the "back of the napkin" test to distill the central take-aways for teams. If you can explain the core issues, opportunities or actions on the back of a napkin, you will be far ahead of the pack.
  
• Continually re-examine the impact of the work and results. Most teams meet weekly or bi–weekly, focusing on the day-to-day. Increase your nimbleness by scheduling monthly half-day meetings that focus only on the strategic work that only your team can do.
  
• Deal with brutal facts head on, thinking through with your team the implications of those facts and then defining the most critical work.

For most companies, the outsourcing experience ranges from positive (client achieves ROI goals) to negative (client terminates contract). Being flexible allows you to incorporate a strategic partnership approach into a holistic strategy. It’s proven critical to implement a strategic partnership process to prevent client / service provider misalignments, temper unrealistic expectations, and clarify assumptions.

Many leaders underestimate the relationships component of projects characterized by an "us versus them" mentality. This limits the business benefits and returns that a true strategic partnership will encourage throughout an outsourcing engagement. As with any critical initiative, leaders and their teams must be nimble and understand issues beyond the bottom line results.

About the Author:
Laura Stone brings a wealth of strategic consulting and leadership development experience in both start-up and mature business environments as CEO and a senior consultant at Stone + Company. They provide a transformative strategic planning process for clients in the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, retail, insurance, high-tech, and consumer product industries. For more information, visit www.stoneandcompany.com.

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