Empower Your People with Meaningful Retail Business Transformation
The phrase ‘business transformation’ has been around for decades, and typically addresses the three pillars of people, process, and technology. However, often a greater focus is placed on the technology, with improved business processes and the impact on people both given second billing. Many technology vendors claim to understand the importance of addressing these two components, but too often, they are not given the proper attention, investment, and resources during system implementations.
In other cases, executives will introduce a pure process improvement initiative (not related to a technology implementation) but fall short in addressing the impact on their teams. Both scenarios, under the guise of ‘retail business transformation’ often result in a precipitous dip in productivity, temporary low employee morale, precarious levels of trust in leadership, and worst: not achieving the desired ROI or efficiencies in the expected timeframe (if ever).
Forward-thinking company leaders understand that few projects are simply technical installations or process improvement initiatives. They prioritize the fact that people are at the center of nearly all retail business transformation projects. Actively addressing how a company’s team members are affected is the most important success factor in transformation. While affected resources will assuredly be members of the internal stakeholder team, retail business transformations often also affect customers, vendors, and other business partners.
It is with this people-first mindset that we approach transformation. But depending on the project’s scope, particularly system implementations, we layer in other key elements to drive meaningful change. In this post, we take a deep dive into Parker Avery’s unique and tailored approach to retail business transformation.
Build the Future Operating Model
The basis for most retail transformations in which Parker Avery has been involved is to improve a client’s business processes, leading to efficiency and capability gains. We are often brought in to help clients identify desired future-state capabilities and outline a pragmatic roadmap of prioritized initiatives to move them toward their ideal future operating model.
In building future ways of working, we collaborate with business stakeholders to address their pain points and capability gaps and build a comprehensive set of ‘to-be’ business processes. Working closely with the client team, we begin with a focus on non-system steps to achieve a business goal and determine which role(s) complete the process. This assessment becomes the foundation for creating a more comprehensive RACI chart, which addresses roles and responsibilities to support a given business process. Our business process improvement efforts not only define the steps needed to achieve a business goal, but they often include definitions of key meetings that occur along the journey. Defining meeting objectives, attendees, roles, meeting frequency and cadence, and the desired outcomes provides stakeholders with a working guide on making these key milestone meetings successful and helps them advance through their future business processes.
Defining meeting objectives, attendees, roles, meeting frequency and cadence, and the desired outcomes provides stakeholders with a working guide on making these key milestone meetings successful and helps our clients advance through their future business processes.
As part of change management, addressed below, the Parker Avery team ‘rides along’ with clients to ensure the new ways of working in key meetings and related business processes are being adhered to. This allows stakeholders to try the new approaches and meeting templates with reinforcement from client super users and members of the Parker Avery team.
Ensure Attainable Outcomes and Deliver Quick Wins
Another element of our business process improvement approach is to use our team’s deep industry experience to build pragmatic and attainable future business processes. In other words, while we do not put limits on what our clients aspire to achieve, we do have a bias for action and ensuring that the future way of working is attainable within the timeline set by senior management. Also, depending on the importance of one business area over another, the advancement of improved ways of working is prioritized to deliver the most value without increasing complexity in areas of less impact. The timeline for achieving these new capabilities is built into a deployment roadmap that Parker Avery and our client stakeholders jointly develop for review and approval with senior management.
Also, during process improvement activities as part of a system transformation, there are often process-only improvements that can be implemented before the solution is available. These quick wins are surfaced, vetted by people who will perform the work, and implemented before system deployment. This approach to quick wins supplies early and meaningful value to our clients.
A few recent examples of process improvement breakthroughs Parker Avery have enabled for our clients include:
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Address People Impacts
Once the operating model and the roadmap are defined, we work closely with our client partners to determine the people impact of these improvements. This could include new organizational roles and structures. We find that changes to several roles are almost always needed because of new ways of working—driven by redesigned business processes with or without new technology. Changing roles must always be handled with extreme care to ensure the impacted people are fully aware, engaged, and ready to embrace the transformation.
Parker Avery’s approach to retail business transformation incorporates our change management methodology and addresses communications, organizational design, training, and sustainment.
- Communications
Communications entail coordinating with the client’s internal comms team to ensure affected stakeholders and the broader organization are aware of the change, its intended positive impact, and the reason for the change. Answering “what’s in it for me” is critical to ensure stakeholders remain engaged. The rationale for the change must be communicated and reinforced through the arc of the transformation activities. We seek evangelists to carry the communications deep within the organization guided by messaging that we collaboratively create with our clients.
Organizational Design
The organization design may entail defining new roles and their reporting responsibilities within the revised organization structure. Whether the role is new or pre-existing, we map key business processes to each role and create a RACI chart for all involved and informed roles. As part of our end-user training pillar, described next, we will train by role those responsibilities that have been added or changed and how they will be performed (often in a new enabling system).
- Training
Training is a combination of general and role-specific training. The latter focuses on those in affected roles to ensure they know how to perform their duties; both those that are automated and those that remain manual. Our ‘day in the life’ lens ensures resources know how to excel at performing their assigned duties and provides supporting documentation and reference guides to serve as aids as team members progress through the learning curve.
Sustainment
The last pillar of Parker Avery’s change management approach to delivering a successful retail business transformation is sustainment. We work with our clients to not just get them across the finish line when a new process and/or system is implemented, but we work tirelessly to ensure the new way of working is adopted by their people and the improvement is sustained. These activities include hypercare support and ‘ride alongs’ where super users embed themselves with newly trained resources to monitor their adherence to the new ways of working. We ensure super users offer input and advice to the team until the activities become ingrained and well-adopted by the organization.
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Advocate for the Client
The technical component of some transformations is where highly skilled systems integrators (SI) and/or application experts are deployed to configure the system(s) to address the company’s future business processes. During transformations that involve system implementations, Parker Avery works as an advocate for our client’s business stakeholders. In this capacity, we ensure the future solution design defined by the SI meets the needs of our mutual client. We also ensure the SI does not take shortcuts by using an expedient and previous system configuration set. While we are believers in supporting an out-of-the-box, no-customization solution, the configuration that worked for a prior client often does not address the unique needs of the current client situation. We also typically serve in process-leadership roles during the system’s implementation.
We not only confirm the product was built right, but we make sure the SI or software vendor built (or configured) the right product for the client.
In addition to the solution design work described above, we typically define the functional test scenarios, ensure the system testing team’s results meet the expectations set out in these scenarios, and lead the user acceptance testing activities. Our goal in leading these testing activities is to make sure the new system not only works correctly but meets the requirements of the business. Said differently, we not only confirm the product was built right, but we make sure the SI or software vendor built (or configured) the right product for the client.
Lead Data Conversion and Cutover
Another key role is that of data conversion and cutover leadership. In partnership with our client’s technical and PMO resources, Parker Avery often orchestrates the system cutover activities, which result in the system’s production enablement. This role typically begins immediately at the onset of the implementation phase because of the time needed to ensure data requirements are well-defined and data cleansing activities are sufficiently planned.
We work closely with our client’s business and technical teams to understand their existing data environment and determine data requirements needed to support future business processes in a new solution. This focused attention to data is critical in determining the cleanliness of the data and the identification of gaps that may prevent the realization of a new system’s capabilities and value. Based on the findings, a detailed plan to source, extract, cleanse, validate, and load the data is created and executed as a mock cutover activity to reduce risk, correct any issues, and limit end-user downtime before the official production load of data and cutover to the new system.
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At the end of the day, our commitment is to drive meaningful change for our clients by placing people at the forefront of any retail business transformation. We believe that a holistic approach, addressing the interplay of people, diving deep into future-state processes, and ensuring technology is implemented to support and sustain new ways of operating, is key to achieving lasting success.
Contributors
The Parker Avery Group is a leading retail and consumer goods consulting firm that specializes in transforming organizations and optimizing operational execution through the development of competitive strategies, business process design, deep analytics expertise, change management leadership, and implementation of solutions that enable key capabilities.
