Meet four of our St. Louis team members. They are experts who can solve your business and technology problems.
While helping find solutions to our clients’ toughest problems, we’ve learned a thing or two. In this series, we share insights from our St. Louis team of seasoned solvers on overcoming today’s business, technology and people-related challenges.
Business
Meet Your Problem Solver
David Wilkinson | Senior Manager and Practice Lead, St. Louis | Operational Excellence
BUSINESS PROBLEM
One of the biggest challenges my clients face is defining a problem. Often, stakeholders view a problem differently based on how it impacts them, whether directly or indirectly. They may also have difficulty establishing a goal that is SMART — specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. Typically, they don’t have the data they need to know where they are currently — what their starting point is. If senior leaders say they want a 20 percent decrease in cycle time, stakeholders don’t know what that 20 percent decrease looks like. As a result, they are reluctant to buy into the goal.
OUR INSIGHT
A 360-degree view can help stakeholders define a problem. Such an approach looks at the problem through multiple perspectives: people, processes, technology, data, and systems. The 360-degree view gives them a holistic, innovative viewpoint that helps them frame the problem in a way that defines success and sets them up to deliver both short- and long-term business value.
Gaining this perspective can be challenging, especially for more siloed organizations. A stakeholder analysis of the various perspectives helps obtain that 360-degree view and captures how each stakeholder defines success. While difficult, this process is critical as companies race to embrace technology or use innovative tools such as AI, ChatGPT, mixed reality devices, and so on. Failing to define problems or to set SMART goals risks a company’s ability to keep up with competitors and to be leaders in their industry or business segments.
Technology
Meet Your Problem Solver
Heath Hunsaker | Senior Manager and Agile Coach, St. Louis | Modern Software Delivery
TECHNOLOGY PROBLEM
Today’s rapid shifts in economics, technology and customer preferences pose difficulties for many organizations. For example, an organization might find itself forced to integrate disparate systems and coordinate contributions from various departments, all while consistently delivering value. Agile is one of the primary strategies for managing such challenges. It breaks work down into smaller, value-centric segments, allowing organizations to adapt regardless of external circumstances. However, Agile’s success within an organization depends on how it is implemented.
OUR INSIGHT
While Agile implementation will vary based on the company’s culture, a collaborative approach is generally better than a top-down or rigid methodology. Employees from various levels and perspectives should work together to identify their unique requirements, classify pain points as people, process or technology issues, optimize prioritization and execution processes, and pinpoint the most pivotal, value-driven deliverables.
A collaborative approach also encourages experimentation, a significant benefit of Agile. Experimentation empowers employees to swiftly deliver value to their customers by making changes while obtaining vital insights through prompt customer feedback. Armed with real customer input, they can know sooner which strategies are effective and which are not, allowing them to pivot as needed to fulfill their customers’ evolving needs.
The pace of change is poised to escalate further, but taking a collaborative approach and leveraging Agile allows businesses to be ready for the future.
People and Change
Meet Your Problem Solver
Jennifer Oertli | People and Change Lead, St. Louis | Organizational Change Management
PEOPLE PROBLEM
Companies often struggle to make the connection between projects and impacts across functional organizations or teams. While a project upstream may have downstream impacts, clients often operate in functional silos with limited visibility into other areas. This results in a solution in one area that causes a problem in another.
OUR INSIGHT
Successful change management considers all stakeholders across functional teams and projects to ensure multiple disciplines are working together to understand impacts and achieve objectives. Having a “triad” between strong program and project management (EPPM), operational excellence (OE), and organizational change management (OCM) ensures the program and associated projects are managed holistically, with business process and change management practices driving teams toward business outcomes that are good for all.
Technology
Meet Your Problem Solver
Becky Gandillon | Senior Manager and Local Service Offering Lead | Data & Analytics
TECHNOLOGY PROBLEM
I see many companies struggling to become more data-driven or stick to a data roadmap, all because their data strategy is vague or outdated. Frequently, the result is a poorly managed data warehouse, a large pool of expensive data tools that all claim to do different things, and executives who get different answers to their questions based on who (and when) they ask.
Without an actionable data strategy, new tool purchases and implementations happen in an information silo, employees struggle to know what data resides where and how best to access and use it, and the company becomes hamstrung because it’s unable to move quickly and decisively based on the same underlying set of data.
OUR INSIGHT
Before you can start repairing a data warehouse, replacing tools, or getting the right answers when you need them, you need to know how business leaders and data users from across the company want to use their data. How are they interacting with it now? What problems are they encountering? What would they like to be able to do in the next 30 to 60 days, one to two years, and three to five years?
Gathering this data about the current state and future state makes it easier to create a roadmap of actionable projects to help them get from where they are today to their envisioned future. The roadmap should address stakeholders’ unique needs, strengths and weaknesses while giving them the flexibility to carry out their roadmap items with whatever staffing they think is best. Once everyone is aligned on what needs to be done, you will have a faster — and more sustainable — data solution.
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