We would love to hear from you on your experience and thoughts on returning to work:

With the further easing of restrictions in Victoria the speculation and conversation that started with the directive to work from home has shifted to questions about how will we know when it’s time to return to the office and importantly what will a return to the office look like?

 have made remote work a permanent thing whilst 

 and Cloud Guru are among the companies extending remote working well into mid 2021.  US reports suggest that almost half (48%) of employees indicate that they would prefer to work from home after the pandemic and also that the move to remote working had resulted in them having a more positive view of their organisation.  Similarly 

 indicated that nearly 9 our of 10 want to maintain working from home as an option after COVID. 

Locally, some companies are further cashing in on the remote working situation by reducing their physical office footprint including  NAB who are discussing remote plans with their employees for well into the new year and who are also rumoured to be “mothballing” one or more of their older Melbourne office buildings. 

 has even claimed productivity benefits because remote employees work 1.4 more days every month than those who work in an office and “on those workdays, they spent more time getting things done”.  The suggestion being that the combination of savings in commute time may contribute to the former and office-based non-work related conversation (particularly with management) contribute to the latter. 

It hasn’t all been beer and skittles – there has been a widely reported increase in cybercrime simultaneous with the move to remote working under COVID-19 with reports that “

”.  The stampede from the office has increased the vulnerability of some businesses as employees use the tools at hand in a relatively less protected network, hardware and software environments. 

The benefits and demands associated with the move to remote working have also been unevenly distributed.  Parents with school age children have faced a difficult period.  Single parents and those who rely on extended family have been some of the hardest hit. In many cases 

 raising the question – what does this mean for mothers and equality?  And also – what does it mean for stress levels ? 

In addition, there has been a slowly increasing awareness of the more vulnerable members of  society who use 

 that lies at the heart of many of these cases by extending support to 

 managing challenges associated with domestic abuse, providing dedicated support to 

 and even shutting down some of the misuse of the financial system for perpetrating such abuse. Beyond questions of what responsibility organisations have for supporting people facing these difficult and sometimes deadly situations are concerns about what the implications are for these people if remote working is the norm or indeed is expected. If people want to work in the office but are encouraged not to, will they be forced to declare a home situation that they feel uncomfortable or embarrassed about? 

As we look forward and prepare for a COVID Normal work environment, there is going to be quite a range of factors for organisations to consider. 

Whilst many principles for how to be efficient and effective remain similar between on site and remote work we can also expect there to be some changes too.  Performance and management techniques based around command and control or focused on “line of sight” micro-managing are likely to be ineffective in an on-going remote working environment forcing those managers for whom this is a default working style to shift instead to managing to an outcome. 

What also is the future for open plan environments under a social distancing scenario.  Small meeting spaces have been part of the reconfiguration of many office buildings recently in an effort to provide for the various types of collaborative activity and increase building occupant density.  Are these physical collaborative workspaces now feasible places to return to work in? 

Some organisations are considering more creative approaches – for instance two team or green team/blue team approaches where one team is in the office for a week whilst the other works remotely followed by a switchover.  This aims to minimise both the risk of infection and the impact of any infection by simultaneously minimising the likely infection impact to only half of any team. 

However, there are social and political challenges and tensions from this approach too – what do you do if your manager is in one team and you are in the other such that you rarely see each other face-to-face? 

Some may even recall that before the pandemic 

 to promote better collaboration and integration between teams. 

One thing that has stood out is those businesses that have seized the opportunity and demonstrated business agility by pivoting to each new situation.  Some, like Bunnings have identified new customer demands and ramped up an existing digital offering, leveraging it for better value whilst other organisations like food retailers have taken advantage of allied digital offerings like Deliveroo and Uber eats.  Whilst there is an acceptance that people will return to many of the activities they previously enjoyed (like eating out with family and friends) there is also a 

.  Consumer expectations have been raised around availability of products and services online and frictionless digital-meets-logistics.  Now more than ever digital is no longer optional. 

Certainly this pandemic and its implications were predicted by virtually zero economists 12 months ago and in a context where rules and restrictions change with minimal advance warning the move to technologies that facilitate collaboration and increase transparency has been unavoidable.  However, most organisations have done the minimum they need to remain functional.  

As we start to plan for some kind of return to work scenario, now is the time to start thinking about what the future work environment will look like and most importantly, make sure your business is ready..  

We believe the following must be high on the agenda when planning your return to the office: 

If you have any questions about the above – ask us how we can help. 

Returning to the Office

If you are a small to medium size business using Power BI, Microsoft has announced a change to licensing that will be of interest, especially for businesses that want to leverage advanced analytic capability.

Power BI has several licences each giving different capability and rights. Power BI Pro is by far the most popular choice across Small to Medium organisations not only because of its capability but also because its per user licence allows organisations to manage number of licences and therefore cost. Power BI Premium is a more capable offering but until now has been licenced on a Per Capacity basis where that capacity is shared across the organisation. The typical price point entry into Premium has been a minimum of approx. $5,000 USD per month.

Microsoft have announced a new User based Licence for the Premium Product. This will enable individual users to access the Power BI Premium offers with all of the capability of Power Bi Pro and in addition access paginated reports, integration with AI, some of the more advanced extract>transform>load capabilities and some other advanced analytics.

This is great news for organisations who want to access the capability of Premium, but don’t want the price tag.

Microsoft have clarified some of the finer points of the license features online. See below a comparison of the feature comparison between the Per User and Per Capacity offers:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/answering-your-questions-around-the-new-power-bi-premium-per-user-license/

However, there are a few limitations to the proposed license model. One of these is who can see what. Again Microsoft have clarified this online as well:

Microsoft intend to release this for public preview in November and will release pricing for Premium per user at around the same time.

If you have questions about what this means for or organisation, please feel free to contact us.

Power BI Changes

In today’s uncertain business environment, created by a pandemic that has touched every corner of the globe, the ability to understand financial and operational performance in real-time is critical.

Organisation that are “insight driven” will be best placed to grow when normal economic conditions emerge. An insight driven organisation will stand a far greater chance of maintaining their cashflow, keeping touch with customer base and keep a close eye on the operational metrics that will make the most significant contribution to their performance.

Some insight driven organisations will even take the offensive and grow market share, confident in their ability to scale while delivering on customer experience.

A shift towards an being “insight driven” organisation has been gaining momentum. Leaders are effectively using insights to capture value by moving from an industry view of profitability and strategy to one that is specific to their organisation and market position. They fine tune operations to optimize for the current environment and execute tactics to pull ahead of their competitors.

Companies trying to emulate the success of insight driven organisations quite often fall into several traps. Many organisations have democratised data and reporting, utilising the latest visualisation tools that have lowered the technical barrier to enable self-service analytics and visualisation, but to what end? Many analysts now spend hours performing data wrangling tasks to derive countless insights but fail to capture the value these opportunities represent.

The data visualisation explosion has highlighted a number of organisational challenges including data literacy, quality and governance. One must also question the value of constant “data wrangling”. An increasing amount of organisational time is now spent on once off data wrangling activities as the number of analysts proliferate. There is certainly a lot of value that can be attained from these visualisation tools. Thankfully, vendors are quickly addressing the gaps that will enable the appropriate governance to manage and repeat these processes.

Are we guilty of falling in love with the latest shiny toy? Too often the answer is yes! In this case it can distract us from allocating precious analytics resources and skills to the business levers that will return the most value. Business alignment is always key. That’s why we have KPIs, to focus us on the “Key” levers that drive business performance so that we understand how much to pull them, in what direction and when.

When considering any form of data related transformation or change, we tend to focus on:

As operational cost is scrutinised like never before, spending on data capability is unlikely to avoid the spotlight. Hard actionable insights that are aligned to business priorities and can be easily implemented are what is needed right now. Demonstrating your ability to do this, rather than investing in the latest shiny toy, will help build long lasting business relationships that will embed an insight driven approach to business performance.

An insight driven organisation

We are excited to announce Microsoft gold partner status. Thanks to our Business Agility and Data + Technology teams for all their efforts (and study) during these challenging times.

We are excited to continue to build on a strong history of delivery across Microsoft’s Power Platform, Project Solutions, Dynamics and Azure Dev Ops to deliver good old-fashioned business change.

Microsoft gold partner status

There is little point arguing the rapid rate of change of project management practices in recent years. Delivery approaches have evolved at light speed, bespoke delivery models, new systems and software are emerging at pace.

Over recent years we have seen all sorts of changes in the project management space, from small changes around the edges to wholesale change in an organisations delivery approach. Some organisations have moved to “new ways of working” that use less “projecty” structures to deliver work while others have new delivery models with different ceremonies to collaborate and inform stakeholders. Some have introduced new systems and software, while others still have introduced digital dashboards.

Despite these modernisations and changes, one particular stalwart of the old world seems to be unshakable, status reporting.  This is typically a one-page report style summary of project progress and KPIs, communicating a snapshot of the state of the project.

In many cases it is produced manually by the project manager, consuming several valuable hours a week to pull data from multiple source systems. Often they are pulled together because they have to be, and often they are either not read or fail to share, or communicate, the information that is really important for delivering project success.

We believe the real value in this process is not the report itself but the discipline in taking the time to review, reflect and consider the state of the project and determine what action needs to be taken.  As Churchill once said “

Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential. “

Overtime Status reports have tended to be designed to support communication and governance in a time when command and control structures were strong and there was a need to push information up and down “the line”.  Our observation is that status reports have become a “thing that is done”, often left unread, rarely used to aid decision making and in many cases an untrusted perspective presented by a Project Manager in a hurry to meet a reporting deadline. In many cases the separation of the manually produced report from the “data” has allowed and potentially encouraged an industry of “spin” and wordsmithing. Project Managers are often “encouraged” by their stakeholders or by their own volition engage in “editorialising” the situation. We have all see the “watermelon” project that looks green on the outside but is not green below the surface.

For information to be valuable it must be trustworthy and it must offer a clear position on the progress, performance and challenges for the intended investment. Will this investment deliver? Are we on track? Do we need to make an intervention to improve progress or remove blockages? What is happening to the risk profile of this investment? What is happening in the cost-benefit equation and is the return still there? Simply reporting project progress against, milestones and forecast cost at completion is no longer good enough. So what is the alternative?

Contemporary Project Management and Work Management Systems such as Project Online, Azure Dev Ops, Jira and others are specifically designed to help the project team do their job more effectively and as a bi-product contain all the project information required to understand the progress and status of the project. These systems hold a plan or target and can show progress towards that target, whether it is code completed, documented approved, risk profile reduction or other measures.   Dashboard and reports that source and present data from the system without interference is arguably the most trustworthy approach to informing performance and status.

While understanding status and concerns via a dashboard or automated report is great, as humans we still need the chance to interact with others, see for ourselves and ask questions. Historically, a lot of interaction has happened around the “status report” or the latest PowerPoint pack produced for “stakeholders”. Why do we do this rather than focus our energy in demonstrating progress? We should seek to see it, not hear about it. We should use showcases to demonstrate progress, show the development of a document, share design mock-ups, show prototypes, working software, marketing material and so on.

One of the benefits of the virtual word we are working in today is that showcases are available to everyone online via your preferred videoconferencing platform.

We are all time poor, trying to do more with less and focus on valuable use of time. So let’s leverage what we have, let’s use real data from systems people are already using. Let’s showcase real things to demonstrate progress and use our time to focus on addressing issues, challenges and things that need to change in order to optimise success. Rather than manually producing relatively meaningless reports, let’s use that time to reflect, review and course-correct using disciple and thought.

Can we please stop manual project reporting

For an organisation to be able to deliver transformational change, thorough careful consideration and preparation are needed in the design of the change program itself. Simply picking a delivery methodology and a technology platform is not enough. A successful and truly transformative change program needs as much consideration into the 

 it is often overlooked or neglected with leaders simple stating “we will be using agile” or creating an org chart and assuming everyone will just work it out.

In this article, I describe three important steps I have learned are critical in establishing a high performing digital transformation program. The intent is not to undervalue other important activities such as technology decisions, make a theological stance on methodology or take away from other important and foundational change management activities; it is intended simply to highlight that these things alone are not enough.

Your transformation program will likely start up at pace with lots of new people who have never worked together before, from different backgrounds and with different skill sets.

People will be seconded from within the business who will likely be experts in their domain but will not have experience in managing large change programs. You will also likely have an environment with multiple vendors, suppliers and teams, each with best intentions but early on will often spending more time “grabbing land” and “chest-beating” than getting on with the job.

People Design looks to address how to align and organise the people in the program team and the broader organisation to deliver the right focus, organisational priorities, leadership, outcome, behaviours, role clarity and support for performance. It specifically looks to accelerate the program through the forming, storming and norming stages that, while unavoidable, can be managed.

Some key considerations in the people design:

We work in the information age and much of what we do in digital change programs is about managing information technology solutions. The information created by a transformation program itself, however, is just as critical to design for as the solution the change will ultimately deliver.

As the team comes together, clarify on where to get information, how information is created, why it exists and how it is used to facilitate the delivery of the program is important for efficient and effective communication and alignment on purpose.

While the days of heavyweight bureaucratic methodologies are behind us, what has also been left behind is a common language of the information required to enable change. A definition of user stories and a kanban is most certainly not enough to help a team navigate the ocean of information and decisions that need to be understood in a large scale organisational change delivering change beyond just technology.

Out of the gate, it is important to define the interaction design as being far more than choosing agile vs waterfall. The interaction design defines how work and information flow between people, how stakeholders will stay informed and engaged, how decisions get made and how progress is tracked.

The interaction design will help clarify how you will empower teams to work together to implement truly transformational change.

A common theme in digital transformation is to simply re-platform the core technology systems. This aligns with the thinking that digital transformation is all about the technology. It’s not, you can read more in an interesting HBR paper 

. Implementing old processes in a new system is not transformative, that’s just a systems upgrade, yet it is an inevitable outcome when the program is structured and oriented to do so.

Simply picking a delivery methodology is certainly part of this design but alone it is not enough. As mentioned in the opening, a successful and truly transformative change need as much consideration into the 

 describes how information is shared within and outside of the project, what the hand-off points will be with team members and between teams, how the information will feed delivery execution activities and continuous improvement. It considers what cadence information will be shared, to which groups and to what purpose. It will consider how the program will transition through various phases and will provide a stake in the ground from which individual project teams can find their own groove. It will be the playbook for the program as a whole.

For example, how will a service design or process re-engineering team be empowered to define truly transformational process change without defining solution requirements that a software delivery team can’t possibly build within the allocated time and budget? Similarly, how does a software delivery team build our the solution using ‘out-of-the-box’ configuration so that is it supportable and maintainable? How will one stream prioritise conflicting requirements from different stakeholder groups? How is progress, accountability and ultimately success measured? How will the people at all levels in and around the program stay inform aligned and true to the program purpose and objectives? 

None of these problems is new and many solutions exist to address them but a single unified multi-disciplinary approach does not exist for business and digital change. Many assume there is a unified approach and we have all heard people quote how their last project did it properly, or make ridiculous statements like ’this isn’t true agile’. The fact is projects are hard, they are typically unique and bespoke solutions and will most certainly be bringing people together with very different ideas of what is the right “way”. The most important thing is to define “away”, educate people about that “way”, continue to improve the “way” and don’t assume the “way” is a given and inherently understood. A balance, of course, will be required so as to give teams within the program the autonomy to find their own groove while guiding them toward a common purpose and rhythm.

Thorough consideration must be given to how the component parts will all fit together and the role the program and project management leaders take in establishing this interaction design will be crucial.

Side note, if you are running a project(s), particularly in the form of a large transformation program, it will need project management. The project can support agility and flexibility and use Agile methods to manage the work tasks but the discipline of managing the project and program as a whole cannot be neglected. The topic for another discussion.

Delivering change that transforms business across all aspects of business operation is hard. Someone once told me that if you find it easy, you are likely not doing it well. This article has discussed the consideration needed to design 

 the change as much as designing the change itself. In summary:

Designing for Transformational Change

 has formally joined the Exco Partners family.

 has worked to mobilise, operate, manage, enhance and transform countless Project Management capabilities and Project Offices in organisations of all shapes and sizes. They have experienced first hand the emerging ways-of-working movement driving business agility and challenging traditional notions of the PMO. They have had to innovate with tools and technology to provide portfolio visibility. The CCG team are ideally placed to participate in the emerging business agility space – tackling the blurring of capability lines, the challenges of bi-modal delivery and all that goes with it. 

CCG has rapidly gained a reputation as thought-leaders, helping customers build their project, program and portfolio management capability through pragmatic, best-practice improvements as well as hands-on support and innovation.

They have helped their customers improve productivity, agility and success through our advisory services and by promoting better ways of working. For customers who run conventional portfolios, the focus has been on the strategic plan and delivering strategic project and program outcomes within the constraints of the investment decision.

More recent years they have helped customers pursue Business Agility by leveraging Lean Portfolio Management, contemporary funding and governance models, Scaled Agile Delivery practices and New Ways of Working.

As part of the Exco Partners family, the CCG practices will continue to evolve to support those looking for flexibility in how they deliver change to their customers and within their organisation.

With Exco Partners as a purpose-built collective of capability partners focussed on the business challenges caused by digitalisation and the alignment of the 

, CCG forms a cornerstone in our capability and ability to deliver exceptional results for our customers.  

We have set out to be specific and accountable for the outcomes we provide. Commit to services, true to our customer promise and known for delivering something of value. CCG fits perfectly with this vision and our values.

In addition to this business agility thinking, we have assembled significant capability in Transformation and Change that has been refined and led by our Managing Partners and now able to be fully realised with the skill and expertise of CCG.

Exco Partners acquires Core Consulting Group

Most organisations have in recent times undertaken significant self-reflection, analysis and in some cases external validation to define a new ‘way of working’ aimed at delivering a better customer and employee experience and improved business performance. This change varies from subtle tweaks to product development practices through to significant business re-organisations – brave, ambitious programs that have delivered varying levels of success.

The changes in the ‘ways of working’ have invariably preferenced more visibly accountable methods for delivering and operationalising change, which in turn enables critical flexibility to manage priorities, focus on valuable delivery and positively impact efficiency. These methods require and depend on greater localised, individual accountability and value the efficiency gain from the dilution of large scale command and control structures. Organisations that are seeking this kind of model have typically initiated a transition of accountability to a “product ownership” model, structured to align with core organisational capabilities. This transition has been evolving across internal capabilities (BAU systems and platforms), customer-facing products and services and internal centres of excellence.

This change has significant potential to enable competitive advantage to organisations who leverage this model effectively. However, when not implemented well, it can cause a disconnect between strategy and delivery of change and have lasting effects on organisational performance. Effective implementation of the “product ownership” model relies on 3 key elements. 

Integration of product planning with strategic planning through regular (quarterly) alignment is crucial in ensuring the desire for the product remains aligned to the organisational strategy and the delivery of shareholder and community value.  Integral to this mapping is the coordination and alignment with other products and capability to enable the right level of synergy, leverage, overlap and proximity. Without an agreed process for aligning product and capability across the organisation, this model will fail. 

You will notice that although
the word has been avoided, the process described above is a governance process.
However, the inherent message is that this works when the desire to align is
pulled by the product ownership level in preference to it be driven by a
command and control, funding aligned approach. 

Product or capability delivery becomes effective when the ownership model requires the owner to be intimately involved in the day to day development, delivery and operation and when the team who develop the product or capability are also responsible for the performance once in operation. This often means a move to cross-functional teams who are able to deliver and operate an outcome with minimal handoffs and maximum delivery efficiency and quality control. 

The establishment of genuinely cross-functional teams has proven to be tricky for some organisations. The people in the team need to depend on each other. Trust and respect for each other is paramount as is the leadership skill of the team lead. Unlike traditional Practice or Centres of Excellence Leads, the Cross-Functional Team Lead must have an appreciation for multiple disciplines and be able to lead and facilitate the team to not only achieve maximum delivery velocity but remain focused on delivering the highest value items – not just the easiest – first. 

This doesn’t mean we necessarily get rid of Centres of Excellence. In fact, in anything, their value increases when people of similar skillsets are dispersed across the organisation. There is still – possibly even greater –  need to align people on practices, approach and standards in order to deliver in a consistent fashion across the organisation. There also exists the opportunity to share broader learnings and thus ensure  continuous improvement over time. 

The product ownership model, the cross-functional teams model and contemporary ways of working are highly dependent on information. What is it, how big is it, how will it be built, how will it be released, what value will it have, are all questions that need to be answered with information. Typically, this is information that is fast-moving, subject to change and relied on by the team.  Cross-functional teams become productive when the information they rely upon is available in real-time and is trusted. Strong engagement of the team with the information will give insights to further questions such as how fast are we moving, what value are we delivering, what is blocked, what areas need help to speed up. 

Vertical alignment of information from delivery teams through product and capability lines, through business service lines to strategy, becomes important in this model. It helps alignment of products or capabilities that depend on each other, touch similar markets or have technical or service proximity.

The importance of managing to deliver information digitally has become even more critical in the current environment of Covid-19, with many teams working from home and no longer able to rely on face to face contact.    

The “product owner”
model can deliver organisations a significant competitive advantage in speed to
market, focussed valued creation and delivery and adaptability. However, this
model requires careful orchestration of people, process and information to
enable efficiency and effectiveness and the promised competitive advantage.   

2020