European Agency Achieves CSAT Score of 4.5/5 with Orangescrum at Its Core

The Orangescrum team received an interesting use case from a major European agency (who are now our customers – yay!) a few quarters ago.  They are a big organization with a complex hierarchy and a range of strategic & functional operational teams. They have been a victim of

• Silo work approaches
• Teams choosing their own tools
• IT has no control over the data privacy spread across these tools
• Aren’t confident of accurate billing
• Executive Management is unable to see actual statuses of their initiatives

See one of the actual emails from a lengthy conversation below –

Consider the following example:

My Board takes a number of decisions, based on the materials on its agenda. The decisions distill to tasks, which have a responsible person and deadline.

Sometimes the tasks are complex and require the collaboration of several people. Usually, tasks are assigned to Departments, which have to organize the operational work and deliver.

The point is how to organize the process in such a way, that:

• The Board knows at any moment what is the status of all tasks, irrespective of domains, including a breakdown by due dates, assignees, etc;
• The respective Department (Head) can break down the Board task into small pragmatic tasks and assign them to single persons for delivery
• If needed various departments to be able to collaborate for the execution of the said task
• The Department Heads and the participants to see and work only what is assigned to their department or their domain/task/project and not the full portfolio of the bank.
• Reasonable system of notifications – not overly noisy. Preferably with options to configure what to notify on. The senior management certainly should not be notified on the status change of each task somewhere in the bank.

In brief, this is a concrete case we resolve now. Hope I made it clear enough.

Would appreciate your suggestions whether such workflow can be done via OrangeScrum?

The above email was just the tip of the iceberg. And, when your prospective customer is willing to spend time on writing a lengthy email each above 220 words to be precise, trust me they seriously need help!

It was a good opportunity for us to rise and shine and show them there are lot of simple and efficient way of doing things! (Yeah, if you don’t know what’s in store for you…read on!)

After exchanging quite a few emails with the Director of Operations, I requested we connect over a call to hear him share his concerns and what he wanted to achieve and identify what he thought his challenges were.

This was a pretty straight forward stuff one would imagine. 45 minutes into the call and I had 3 new participants join in. 2 were Department heads with around 200 or more members under their belt and the 3^rd was their IT Manager.

We continued further detailing and jotting down the issues each of them had and their wish list/presumed resolution for each of the identified items.

By the second half of the 3rd hour when we thought we are all in agreement, the 3 of them now felt the need to have 1 other and a significant contributor to the meeting, guess who – the man with the credit card!

I was like yes, let’s do it. I have spent 3 hours with them now and yes, I would like to have their decision or as close as possible to them putting their money where their heart is!

Well, we spent the next hour or so apprising “The Boss” of the vision, the plan going forward, probable success ratio, tentative cost and timelines to realization.

Exhilarating experience! 5 stakeholders with different views, issues, and expectations!

By the end of the call, the most important takeaway for me was making sure your stakeholders “talk” to each other. Nobody’s fault, but in this case, all the contributors were well aware of what could “fix” things and most importantly who will have to play which part…

The sad thing, their business processes weren’t very conducive to inter-department collaboration and hence these enlightened gentlemen were rightfully fixing things within their control (silos!).

Great! But their underlying problem was not being able to meet their number one organization goal – to move their CSAT from 3-3.2 to 4.5.

The Relief!

Being a responsible service provider and partner, we at Orangescrum now started to put together a vision of how their refurbished business flow would look like.

We helped them shape their processes (not exactly part of our “listed offerings”, but always happy to go that extra bit), run them internally with all relevant stakeholders to obtain buy-in and commitment.

Note: – we were nowhere close to looking into the tool yet. It was all about “the customer”, their problem, what they actually need and not what “we” wanted!

All discussions were centered on

• their current processes
• what would be the future processes
• are they ok to make the shift
• how much of it was supported COTS by Orangescrum
• and does Orangescrum allow room for tailored processes

A 3 phased approach was finally agreed upon with certain pre-conditions and visible results –facts and figures.

The Gain!

Skipping the usual deal closing and commercial aspects, I would like to focus on the key take-ways for both of us.

• You win, when you help your customer win – This is not a marketing pitch. A 100% truth. Did Orangescrum have it all that they needed?NO! Were there other options that had them all? To some extent, yes, but none stood out either. Whatever one may think – they chose us!

And for the only fact that, the entire approach was always that of a team member, consultant, and partner. We were transparent all through the discussions w.r.t to our limitations as well as expertise. We showed them but we had done in the past and what we can for them!

They are one of our largest customers and that of a few others too

• Offer ‘true’ solutions, not what your product or service can offer – When you truly understand your customers’ needs you will be able to envision growth avenues for your product. In this case, we knew, we are a collaborative platform with intuitive time tracking, resource management, budget & expense management, agile task management, issues & ticket management with extensive reporting All of which account more all major operational challenges. But they did need some representation, visibility, and time-boxed tweaks to help our customer get the most out of Orangescrum. The point is – we were willing to take that chance and did not attempt to fit around a keg in a square hole!
• Not all service providers are after your money “ONLY” – in the end, it was like self-realization for my client that not all service providers are engrossed within themselves. They had not experienced vendor partnerships beyond a transaction level. I mean, their teams would go out and just buy what they thought met their needs without much vendor intervention. They always thought they knew what was best for them! So seeking expert advice when you are sending top dollars is always advisable. Spending authority doesn’t make you an expert on everything.

All’s well that ends well!

Things did end the way they were envisioned but not exactly within the desired time frame. Let us say we did not fall too far from the trees, but just about right to be very easily picked and enjoyed.

Things did go wary, above budget – a little, yes, delivered on time – almost, but did it achieve what we all had set forth – Absolutely!

If I am allowed to be further open, was it an enjoyable journey – NO! But yeah, connecting the dots looking backward as our beloved Mr. Steve Jobs had prescribed – It was pretty damn worthy!

If given a chance our team would love to do it again and with further precision of course!