Governance, organization and agility transformation case study

Helen Westcott (Interviewer):
This module we've been discussing three key transformation areas, namely governance, organization, and agility. We now understand their value and importance, the approach to take with clients in these areas, and we have a really good understanding of Pega best practice that we want to help clients adopt. What we'd like to do now is bring the subject to life a little bit with some real-life use cases with our Business Excellence Director, Philip Mann. So, Philip, can I ask you to introduce yourself, please?

Philip Mann (Interviewee):
Yes, thanks, Helen. So, as she said, I'm Philip Mann. I'm a director here at Pega in the Business Excellence team. We're a global team focused on driving best practice in CDH from sales through delivery and all the way into adoption. I've worked with many of our global clients over the years, and much of the best practices that we have here come from that direct engagement with our clients and partners. It is worth noting that these best practices have grown and evolved over time to keep aligned with each new release of CDH and also using input from our clients. And as we get new clients, we get new learnings and new feedback. And I assume that this will continue to evolve as we go forwards into the future releases, but these core tenets should remain the same.

Helen Westcott:
Cool. Thank you, Philip. Now, so let's start with governance. Can you give an example from your experience of a client with a good governance structure already in place? And have we seen clients who didn't have anything like that set up? And how have you had to adopt the approach to transformation?

Philip Mann:
Yeah, good question. I mean, realistically, most of our clients have a governance process in place of some sort. I don't think we've ever come across one that has nothing that was just going crazy out there. But they have a governance process in place of some sort, whether they call it governance or not, but we're just using governance as the definition of that entire process of the structure. So oftentimes the governance processes that they have are separated by channel or direction, notably between inbound and outbound. You know, you often see all of the outbound processes and governed managed by maybe a different team. So, they'll be a different organization and they'll have a different organizational structure and a different governance structure to go along with that.

We worked with a large telco that had a simple but pretty well-defined intake and governance process. And for them, they pretty much took our best practice governance process and adapted it to them, but took a large portion of it and basically ended up being able to formalize and have a lot of slide ware and more refined processes. But we're still very much aligned with what they were doing at a more simple level. Another thing we often see is that our clients are currently using something like Confluence to support all of their business intake requests. So, before they had CDH, they'll be, you know, potentially dealing with lots of different tools and technologies. And even when they have CDH, there will be business requests and requirements that maybe come into this team or another team that don't use CDH. So that's probably their source of record or input for a lot of business processes, not just things related to next best actions. And that was the case here where with some minor changes to their intake process overall, they could not have a big impact on the business upstream, but capture all the information they needed. And then once those overall business processes were followed, that would kick off the CDH work.

So that would all be done in operations manager governance, our intake process, you know, the NBA execution forum, the execution team, all of that would be there, but they would still have some processes outside of CDH. And we see that quite often. But we've also seen another large European bank where they've got over like 100 business users who are logging into operations manager and capturing those business requests directly into operations manager and managing the governance right from the beginning into the CDH piece into operations manager. I'd say one thing that I found really useful with that client that I talked about initially was that before they went live, they carried out their first weekly governance meeting to capture the next set of actions before they went live. So, they kind of did a dry run of the entire team looking at the backlog of the intake requests that had come in, exploring them, documenting them, and planning them and thinking about what was going to go into the next release.

So, it really was like a good planning session before they went good dry run, but it also kind of got them excited for that first initial release. I would just finish off quickly and say that the key thing to remember then is that a client's probably already got some intake and governance process for creating campaigns today in one or more channels, right? So, our best practices are based on these years of experience of working with their clients. We're not sort of creating them in a vacuum and they're not. And we're also not reinventing the wheel here, right? We're really just trying to take standard good business practices for governance and process flow, put them through the lens of CDH and work with our clients to sort of build a structure that works for them based on these best practices.

Helen Westcott:
That's really great. Thank you. Awesome. So, moving on to your organization, can you talk through some of your experiences in organizations where they're already going through their own wider organizational transformation process and how we managed to fit in transformation in terms of Pega CDH specifically?

Philip Mann:
Yeah, I can think of a client, but honestly, it could be a number of clients. This client had sort of pretty deep organizational structure. So, it wasn't flat, it was pretty deep and there were lots of silos in place across business units, across channels, and then against the tools potentially even inside of those channels. But when we got there and began the conversations with them, there was already a transformation going on outside of the CDH implementation.

So, they were in an organizational an entire across the entire organization. They were looking to reorganize themselves and they'd already read that already defined before the CDH initiative begun. They already started looking to work in squads with tribes and chapters in that Spotify model. So, part of the conversation there was what is your target? What are the, what's the overall guidance? What, what do you need to map to as an organization? And then obviously we'll look and see what ours fits. And obviously they did, they fitted quite well. I think you'll see, as you've seen from the organizational architecture, it said very much with that NBA execution team and then the NBA content teams which could scale in stripes and chapters if you want. But in this instance, our role was to understand their vision that plans and find the best way of making sure that we could utilize the resources they had that lined up with our organizational structure and our agility process and the governance right to make sure that we we weren't pushing them in a direction that organizationally they didn't want to go. But at the same time, we weren't going too far away from how we would expect CDH organization to be to be worked.

So, we do want to stay true to some of our principles such as that capabilities team and then the content teams. And then those content teams in this sort of example were scaled out to look at some of the different lines of business. They had some content teams that focused on a particular line of business and they had other content teams that could be shared across multiple lines of business on the size and the focus of them. And then the other thing to think about there is we also worked with, they had external consultants that were there supporting that corporate initiative on the transformation. So again, we worked with them to sort of bring forward a lot of our best practices and frankly, I think it was a good the content we had showed that we had an opinion and that we could go in and sort of say like we've thought about this thing and we're using pretty standard business processes here. How can we line up with what you've got?

Helen Westcott:
OK, that's really great. Great. Another quick question on this topic then. So, when defining the CDH hands-on teams, how do you practically help clients find the people in their organization to fill the roles?

Philip Mann:
Yes. So, for the same client actually like we said with governance, the clients obviously already delivering communications, you know, and if we think outbound sort of campaigns today, right, so and there existed they're executing those with existing teams who have some skills that may overlap. So, the key part I think really is to map their roles and skills of their existing individuals into those of our best practice organization structure. We've got some content that can support you thinking about what those roles are and where they may come from. Say for example, if you're using certain campaign tools, you might have an idea of what they are.

So, this was a client who'd been using an old version of CDH pre-NBA designer, but they're using another outbound tool for all of their outbound e-mail communications. So, we looked at the current team structures and processes. We mapped the processes and the people to ours and we really try to help them figure out where they had people that aligned and could be retrained using sort of the enablement from a Pega Academy and others where they had a gap where clearly. So, an example might be you could have a campaign manager who might be the team lead, for example, let's say, or some kind of someone who's building the actual campaigns in the tour could potentially be the NBA specialist. But what they wouldn't have would be an LDA.

So, an experienced and lead decisioning architect would be a gap that they'd probably want to fill with Pega or a partner and have some idea of how to through maybe co-production at the beginning and then afterwards scale up and fill that gap with their own LDA over time. And then one of the challenges was that the inbound and the inbound teams were actually siloed as well. So, they had, like I said, those were siloed, but then there was also some silos between the teams that were looking after the call center and the teams that were looking after the websites. And then even some of the e-mail, there was one little sort of set of e-mail that was used with a completely different team.

So we had to the whole piece was trying to understand, really keep asking and asking until you get to the point where you fully understand the full gamut of the tools they've got, the tools and the teams and these little pockets that maybe even some of the other people in the team didn't know existed using some other tool.

Helen Westcott:
OK. And then if I just look at my notes of what anything I want to talk about here. So the one thing then to think about the other bit I wanted to bring to was for the outbound specifically, we're probably asking our clients, we're looking for our clients. Most of them aren't probably thinking in that one to one.

I mean they probably are thinking that they're thinking in a one to one way, but still maybe campaign centric or product centric. And when you, when we talk about next best actions being Omni channel and available all times, there is there's clearly a mindset shift that needs to happen. And there's also going to be an organizational change that needs to happen as well. As we think about I'm building an action that exists across multiple channels rather than lots of different campaigns or promoting the same action. So, and again, we've got lots of content, lots of enablement for that. And you know, that's something that our professional services and our partners will help with at any point.

Helen Westcott:
OK, lovely. So, we have talked about overall governance and the people who would do the work, but agility as you said, you know covers the end-to-end process of running your business with CDH. Can you share maybe two topics that you think are critical to not just to a successful implementation but to setting the client up for a long-term success?

Philip Mann:
Yes, OK. So when we talk about agility, that is another big broad topic and that one's probably the one that moves closer to the actual product, right. The other two, the governance and the organization where it's theory and we can, we can map it to the products a little bit, we can look through the lens and CDH. But with the agility piece, we're definitely talking about product and features. This is how do I use CDH in an agile sort of in this overall sort of business operations life cycle, right. So the first thing for me then is getting used to working in the business operations environment using operations manager and just generally managing business releases under change control via revision management.

So that means making sure that this is ready for that first business release ideally even before you go live. So you can really set that muscle memory and hone that process right from the very beginning and get used to using change control in operations manager and revision management to manage those changes in that business operations environment. It's not really restrictive per se, but it is different than what we've seen. Let me think of it this way. So if we've got, we've got for net new clients who've never used CDH before this, we'll just explain this is how it works, this is how it is and here's all the tools. And I think that usually works totally fine. They may have some questions, we'll tweak things, but that process is there. But what we've seen, it can be more of a challenge with existing CDH customers or maybe Pega platform customers that are used to working in dev studio and building things like they're building applications rather than making business changes to that, that are sort of fed into the application which is managed in dev, right.

So, and I think with those clients, it's really understanding why we work this way, how we've set up the business operations management for business change to let them do it. But it requires change control and really working with them, making sure the environment's set up and correct for them to just seamlessly just start using it. But then us to work through their use cases to really make sure that they're comfortable, there's no gaps and that they can get on with everything they do today. But working in that higher business operations environment and not having to worry about rule sets and branches and depth changes and all of those merges, that's all just part of the business change life cycle. And then the second thing then is again tying back to these features and also that business operations environment is getting the value, the extra value that's there inherently from that business operations environment that you wouldn't see working in dev like we used to years ago. So notably those strategy optimization features, all of the things that use specifically that production data that was sampling back into the business operations environment.

So examples of that in my mind would be being able to do simulations on a sample of your population before you go live to understand the impact of your changes. So we're not just using dummy data. We can use sample data. All of their interactions will come in. We'll have all of the real production adaptive models will exist in that business operations environment. So that's pretty powerful, being able to understand the performance of CDH in production. So again, I don't have to go logging into production this time to try and see my clicks, my click rates, how my actions doing, how my campaigns perform, my outbound campaign runs performing. If I want to look at my adaptive models again, all of that data will be in the business operations, the business operations environment sampled in. So I can have this again, this my business operations, places where I can go in. And actually I understand, like said, another one would be impact analyzer. I can understand how with those control groups and the experiments, how my framework is actually working, how healthy is the framework and the settings that I've got. And then finally, the last one I bring up would be things like value Finder.

So I've said I can do simulations before I go live. I can do some analysis and reporting on the performance of what's live in production, and then I can use things like value Finder and simulations to find new opportunities to come and say, OK, how can I make these things better? And all of these things, you could technically do them. We've always been able to do them, but now we've got the tooling and the features to do it. And it's that business. These are the things for me just getting ready for business change from day one and jumping in and making the most of all the extra features we're making. Those will be the two for me.

Helen Westcott:
Great. That's awesome. And then that note just to say thank you, Philip. That was really, really great. And we appreciate you joining us and thank you all for listening today.

Philip Mann:
Yeah. Thank you very much.