Singapore
Maintaining cross-business collaboration through a digital transformation
Innovation transformation
Problem to be solved:
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How can we build a product-led organisation that has a strong intertwining product and business team?
Solution:
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Our team worked with our client’s transformation office for 6 months to build a new organisation structure and design an implementation roadmap for their technology and operations function
Results:
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We created a new two-in-a-box structure that facilitates collaboration between the technology and business team across 11 “services” within the bank.
Digital transformation continues to be the second biggest priority for CEOs, and yet there are still many questions about the organisational structure required to support digital transformation. Some critics go so far as to suggest that the biggest limiting factor for digital transformation is not the technology anymore, it’s the people.
We were approached by the Technology & Operations office of one of the region’s most digital banks. Although they had made some fantastic progress in their digital transformation, they needed support in developing an organisational structure that would ensure effective communication between the technology team and operations team.
Our classic consultation approach follows the problem solving loop. It mainly consists of three key stages which we applied in the context of this bank.
STAGE ONE- DEFINING THE PROBLEM
The process starts by identifying the actual problem. Although the problem may seem to be a miscommunication between the two functions, it’s not always clear why this problem exists. Perhaps there is no process? Perhaps there is a process, but the culture does not support it? We start by interviewing the affected teams to understand what they believe the root of the problem actually is. We follow this up by observing the current practices, creating a user journey map, and understanding where the pain points actually are.
As we worked closely with the bank's digital transformation team, we discovered a few key pain points which needed to be revised. There actually was a long list of them, however, upon further discussion, they decided on six main ones to focus on. we then were ready to begin ideation for potential solutions
STAGE TWO- IDEATING ALTERNATIVE PRACTICES
The second stage of the problem solving loop is ideating alternative practices. Depending on the problem, there are many ways that you can come up with alternative practices. You could take processes that have been successfully implemented in other parts of the organisation. You could build a solution from scratch. Ensuring effective collaboration between T&O required several process changes and cross-business coordination measures. We led the team through a series of excercises and got them to present which solution they felt best addressed the actual problem at hand. The end result was the two-in-ab-box structure which we now could test.
STAGE THREE- EXPERIMENTATION & IMPLEMENTATION
The third stage of the problem solving loop is experimentation. We started by testing our two-in-a-box structure with a single service. We captured user feedback from the pilot and continued to iterate on the structure. Once we fixed the bugs in the structure, we ended up rolling out the structure to 11 services within the bank.
Simple hand-drawn two-in-a-box model from the bank's transformation team
STAGE FOUR- SHARING STORIES
Finally, we recorded key metrics such as productivity, reduction in rework and backlogs. We shared these results with the rest of the organisation in a town hall meeting, distributing a simple reference guide for any team that was facing a similar challenge.
Digital transformation has already become one of the biggest differentiators in the industry. The banks who are able to effectively balance employees, customers and digital will be the ones who thrive in the future.
