Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

My company’s stated goal for my recent initiative was to install our latest and greatest software at all  our customers’ sites by a target date.  The company had never attempted such an endeavor, but felt it  was in the customer’s best interest for their continued success in their marketplace.  Our customers are  change adverse which added fuel to the fire that was already burning with the mere definition of the  goal itself.  In order to accomplish this task a team would need to be assembled and a highly scalable  process defined and created.   Having over 1,700 projects to complete in a challenging timeframe meant  that not only did the process need to be efficient, but also that the best customer experience was at the  forefront.   Succeeding with both speed and a great customer experience was the challenge in front of  the newly formed team.

Selection

In order to satisfy our stated challenge, we needed to best understand both technical concerns as well  as the emotional response of our customer-base to this “forced” change which was (in reality) to their  benefit.  In order to best scale our approach to the masses we needed to ensure our process was  refined, yet sensitive to our customers’ resistance to this change. This is where the “learning launch”  technique was employed to gauge the response of our customers to our seemingly well-thought out  process.  Without question the experiments that my team enacted gave us the opportunity to learn  from our interactions on a small scale before building the actual machinery that would be required.  We  needed to ensure our machine was built in a way that would not only get our software in the hands of  our customer, but in a way that allowed our customers to “buy-in”.  This was paramount and the  learning launch allowed us to gather information, learn, and adapt in ways we could not envision via  white-boarding with our current analytics and understanding.

Application

As eluded to in the previous section, small experiments in relation to our process were run with diverse  customers.  We decided to choose customers that were easy to work with as well as customers that are  “at the ready” to provide the not so positive feedback when we do it wrong.  This gave us the  perspective we needed to better understand the full spectrum of feedback from our customers.

We knew that various technical and educational information was required for the customers to be able  to embrace this change.  We were right, but the approach was off as their organizational structure did  not align with our interactions.

Insight & Approach

Feedback from our customers helped us determine that we were overloading the customer with  information and not getting the information to the correct resources on the customer side of the house.   As with any organization there are divisions of labor.  We needed to ensure the information was being  delivered to the correct resources instead of a massive “dump” of information to a singular resource.   This singular resource would discount information that was not pertinent to their role within the  organization.  Often this resource would not share the information the appropriate resources within

their organization to ensure everyone was provided the knowledge needed to complete a successful  engagement.  This caused delays and frustration on both sides of the house.

In order to ensure all key resources to an engagement were informed we realized more detailed site  assessments were required.  Proper identification of resources and their respective roles allowed us to  better target information.  The site (pre-)assessments gave us the proper insight into the customer’s  structure and therefore allowed us to adapt instead of trying a one size fits all approach.  This not only  provided more successful engagements but also higher customer satisfaction of the engagements and  the adoption of the required changes to their daily activities.  Our assumptions were adjusted, and the  proper machinery was then built to scale in a way that allowed us to accomplish this goal.  Without  deploying several iterations of “learning launch”, adapting our behaviors, and interactions we would  have missed the target while alienating our customers.

