The Company

Company operating in the telecommunications market with employees in 23 European countries.

 

 

The Challenge
Our Approach
The Benefits

The Challenge

The IT department provides support to each country through a mix of centralized and local services, using an internal team and external services providers. The internal IT team has 15 members with its majority being with the company for more than 10 years.
Upon the arrival of a new CEO, the attention on internal effectiveness and efficiency was strengthened and all functions were requested to identify opportunities to improve their services, from a cost and quality perspective.
The IT Director would like to take this opportunity and engage the team in innovative ways of working and at the same time improve their ability to work in cross-functional teams, which was a major gap within the team and also in the entire company.

Our Approach

1 Measure the gap from present and future team profile

Our first step was to assess the team dynamics of work, the current level of effectiveness of their collaboration with other departments, Innovation and change drive, and identify the areas that needed focus and development. The assessment (online tool and interviews) demonstrated several areas of opportunity:

  • IT internal customers perception of the promptness, quality and effectiveness of the IT services and their ability to anticipate and address changing requirements could be improved;
  • Cross-functional and cross-country collaboration needed to be optimized;
  • Resistance to change and low level of innovation were preventing the team to keep on improving;
  • Team’s ability to higher performance levels could be enhanced.

2 Introduce Design Thinking methodology and mindset

Into the process reviews in order to reduce project time, taking an iterative approach, testing mock processes and MVPs (minimum viable process) with internal customers;
To improve the team’s customer focus and ability to identify the pain points their internal customers’ experience, meet and anticipate their needs and solve problems from their perspective;
Incorporating new ideas, customers feedback and best practices into the team dynamics and performance management practices.

3 Development agenda

Action Learning on Customer Centric skills, customer centric problem solving, T-shaped skills (skills that enable and enhance cross-functional collaboration) to enable team to deal with and break internal silos. Workshops on Experimentation, iteration and continuous learning.

4 Introduction of knowledge sharing mechanisms

To speed up skills development and collaboration among teams

5 Introduction real-time internal customer feedback and Net Promoting Score for the IT team

The Benefits

+ Increased engaging internal customer

The IT team was able to complete its processes review way ahead of schedule and received several positive feedbacks about the initiative of engaging internal customers to build a better experience for them when interacting with IT.

+ Increased promptness and availability of the team

The initiative triggered a better perception on the IT services quality, promptness and availability of the team, as demonstrated in the following NPS surveys.

+ Activate change agent modeling how to better collaborate and serve internal customers.

The company as a whole, still has silos and cross-functional teams still struggle to be effective however the IT team has now more tools and knowledge on how to address the roadblocks created by a silos mindset and are acting as change agent modeling how to better collaborate and serve internal customers.

+ Company Role-Model for effective cross-functional team

The It team members have been called to manage cross-functional teams, demonstrating they are recognized as being a role model for cross-functional effectiveness.

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