Our goal at Centric Consulting is to solve your business and technology problems with solutions designed for your success. Meet your problem solvers from Cleveland who always strive to deliver an unmatched experience just for you.
While helping find solutions to our clients’ toughest problems, we’ve learned a thing or two. In this blog series, we share insights from our Cleveland team of seasoned problem solvers about overcoming today’s business, technology and people-related challenges.
Business
Meet Your Problem Solver
Matt Adler | Senior Consultant, Cleveland Team | Business Consulting Services
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
One of the most common issues I see facing clients is needing support to optimize the “handshake” between their business and technology teams. How do you move an idea from a hallway conversation into production, and how do you do it quickly? The good news is business users are much more tech-savvy than they were a few years ago, and vice versa. Technologists are much more in tune with their companies’ missions or value drivers, which means both understand where the other side is coming from.
For example, we worked with a healthcare data analytics company that was growing quickly and needed help streamlining its prioritization process. With all their competing priorities, they had to figure out and focus on the right things to deliver their product as quickly as possible. That particular company did not need a robust, full-blown prioritization model, so we built something more lightweight to fit their needs.
We also helped make their teams more efficient in their delivery by working across spheres within Centric, including our Agile practice, Modern Software Delivery practice and Enterprise Product Portfolio Management (EPPM) team. We took the best of each of those to build a solution for this small, growing company that fits their needs.
OUR INSIGHT
Business leaders nowadays are facing so many challenges between artificial intelligence (AI), lights-out management (LOMs), remote work, hybrid workplaces and creating a more engaged employee base — it’s a lot. That’s why it’s important to have someone trustworthy on your side to help you navigate all of these challenges. We have already worked through a lot of these — we were mostly remote even before the pandemic hit, and we’ve been dabbling in the AI space for quite some time. While there are a lot of challenges facing business owners, we already have a leg up in most of them.
Because of this experience, we can strike the right balance between bringing our knowledge and experience in certain domains to our clients while not being so inflexible and rigid that there’s only one answer. I’ve been on client projects in my previous life where an outside company just does what you tell them to do without much direction, or on the flip side, toes a certain line where they believe their way is the only way and won’t make any exceptions. We can offer clients that sweet spot in the middle where we do custom solutions to meet specific needs while being flexible.
Technology
Meet Your Problem Solver
Kaity Swanekamp | Senior Consultant, Cleveland Team | Data and Analytics
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
As a data visualization specialist, clients generally come to me because they need to make sense of their data. Sometimes they don’t know what questions to ask, or sometimes they do, but there’s not an easy way to find the answers they need in the data. They need to be able to use that data to make business decisions.
For example, it’s pretty common to see clients who have a lot of data and reports they still put together manually. Sometimes it’s one person’s entire job to keep updating these reports and sending them out, and that is really inefficient and takes up a lot of time. We can build reports in a data visualization tool — whichever is best for them — so they can have a really accurate report that everyone can access in near real time. It saves many, many hours of manual work. It’s also easier to understand information when looking at a bar chart or pie chart instead of tabular data like you have in Excel. You gain insights more quickly.
OUR INSIGHT
One of the very first steps we take is to talk to any stakeholders who will use the report or data to discover what they actually need. Oftentimes, what people say they want at the outset is not what they really need. They may want to see a certain five metrics, but once you dig into the actual business problem, you need a different set of metrics to solve it. Or you need to see data differently. We help clients figure out what questions they want answered through the data and how to make the data tell the story they need.
Sometimes businesses are really focused on specific technologies that they want to implement, whereas it is more important to focus on the overall data strategy and the problems you want to solve. Understanding the “what” and the “why” before thinking about how you will solve the problem sometimes leads to realizing that a specific tool is not the right fit.
It’s also important to make sure that your company’s culture is data-focused. Everyone in the organization needs to use the data to make decisions, and they have to trust the data, which often requires training. If people don’t trust the data or reports, that information is worthless, so overall data literacy is important. Companies need to make sure everyone in the organization — not just IT or another data-related team — has the skills to work with data and make informed decisions as a result.
People
Meet Your Problem Solver
Diane Weidrick | Local People & Change Practice Lead, Cleveland Team | People & Change
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
When preparing to make changes, not all companies look at the engagement aspects at all levels, making adopting change very difficult. They need to focus on all three types of engagement: sponsor engagement, leadership engagement and end-user engagement.
Sponsor engagement requires someone takes a leadership role up front. This person should set the vision for the future and help people understand why they need the change. If you don’t have this before kicking off change efforts, it’s hard to get people motivated and involved. This leader needs to discuss where the company is going, the vision for success and the “why.”
This process will also create a sense of ownership and accountability. The “people managers,” or those in the organization whom employees look to for information, require leadership engagement. If you leave this to the project team, you miss the opportunity to engage people and bring them along on the journey. The end user, or the people impacted by the change, are on the front line doing the work. If you don’t engage them early on, they feel like change is being done to them, and nobody does well when something is forced on them.
Companies need to explain what will change, how it will impact the end user, what they need to do to get ready, and how they will be supported once the change is initiated. These three things together will result in a company being able to adopt and adapt to change and also builds great resiliency in the company as everyone works through the change successfully.
OUR INSIGHT
Whenever we look at a project helping on the people side of change, we talk with the leaders of the sponsoring organization about the three components required: communication, training and change leadership. While communications and training are important, providing sponsorship coaching throughout the change journey is key. I use the analogy of teaching people to fish instead of doing the fishing yourself. A lot of projects skip over the leadership engagement part to go straight to technology and implementation. But if you don’t understand what’s changing and who it will impact, it’s hard to bring people along with you, and you’ll have to overcome more resistance early on.
Our coaching approach is unique in that we tailor every engagement and every approach to the needs of each client. We don’t take a cookie-cutter approach. We understand our service offering focuses on different types of people of all different backgrounds. This tailored approach is at the core of what we do.
Competition how? Against whom? Business and tech competing? Why would they compete after we talked about understanding each other?
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