Dominating waterfall and ownership distributed across silos

[mstakh.i.mom.i]

Structures so far were designed to efficiency and performance in a stable environment. eprimo was successfully running a classic setup. Product management developed products, marketing drafted concepts to sell these products, sales had to orchestrate and run their channels, operations delivering the service. And IT as an internal service partner delivering at minimal cost. In one part of the company smart concepts were drafted, in the other part delivery on these concepts reigned the rules. Target Setting, Budget allocation and Steering was managed inside and across these functional silos in a hierarchical governance. Then our customers went increasingly digital, the environment turned dynamic and the lack of flexibility in the setup became visible. Namely time to market was too long and the effort to manage this complexity too high.
Worst of all – frictions in the customer journeys made evident that the holistic view of the customer experience had gone lost across silos.

2.) insufficient capabilities and resources in leveraging digital at scale
As experienced in the previous lighthouses the lack of tech savvy skills freight forwarders brokers email lists became obvious. At the time most digital capabilities were sourced from agencies. For instance, relevant core skills like data analytics or digital marketing were looked for externally, and even in some cases small tasks like publishing a product update had to be contracted. This was not only expensive but at the same time time-consuming and ineffective. In contrast other existing skills e.g. pure management roles seemed to be less relevant.

3.) missing optimal match between targets and ressources
Scarcity of resources or better abundance of initiatives has been one of the biggest painpoints we were facing. And the dilemma is well known – too many initiatives for the existing resources. In a retrospective we identified that resources were not matched with the most promising targets for two reasons – unbalanced prioritization and missing synchronization between the different work streams and delivery teams. The prioritizations for resource allocation were taken on request whenever necessary and on different criteria in the respective silos. Or just first come, first serve. Or run over change. Another challenge regarding availability of resources became obvious. Whenever a new initiative was triggered somewhere it absorbed e.g. the available IT resources for the time the project was running, regardless of its value delivered. So a new initiative had to queue up. The different functional silos had their own sprint cadence relevant pinpoint turned out to be the different deployment speeds. Managing Bottlenecks e.g. fast track etc. was ineffective and time-consuming. And we identified the impact of so-called zombie initiatives – pilots which already were inactive but still embedded, consuming resources in operations and IT. Due to increasingly more change requests in shorter time periods an adaption of the existing framework became obvious.