Having identified their partner of choice, Louise and the RetroForge team were keen to kickstart their digital transformation journey.
But they knew slow and steady wins the race. Don’t run before you can walk. Or to be less cliche, they knew a gentle introduction to digital transformation was the right way to go.
With that in mind, CEO, Louise, signed off bringing in a small team of digital experts to spend some time with them over the next few weeks, and help them find their footing in the digital world.
The consultancy’s mission, should they choose to accept it, was to identify the key problem areas impacting operations and implement a strategic approach to tackling them with digital solutions, proving that revitalising RetroForge Manufacturing’s operations wasn’t Mission Impossible.
See what we did there? Anywhere, where were we…
The project team was introduced to Haley during the initial getting-to-know-you kick off meeting. She headed up the digital consultancy team, and presented a high-level overview of the plan for the six weeks ahead.
It all started with a simple survey that was sent out to the entire RetroForge workforce, intended to give the consultancy a broad idea of where everyone stood and help establish a potential baseline.
The question: how do you feel about change?
The survey was met with plenty of tuts, sighs, and eye rolls - the kind of reaction James Cordon gets whenever he appears on your screen. And predictably, responses were mixed. This was a company deep rooted in tradition, with tried and tested processes and practices ingrained into its DNA. ’That’s the way we’ve always done it’ was the unofficial mantra, in Haley’s eyes - and it was her team’s job to help change that.
Stage 1
The digital consultants kicked off with a fun workshop - something nice and laid back to help the team loosen up and feel more comfortable in a creative ideation environment. Or, if described by your Gen Z intern, something to get the vibes flowing.
In one session, Haley asked the project team to take it in turns drawing their favourite animal on a digital whiteboard. The aim here wasn’t some cringeworthy ice breaker (Haley and the team had survived enough ‘two truths and a lie’ for one lifetime) - instead, it was to subtly gauge everyone’s digital skills.
RetroForge’s Data Analyst, Samantha, took quickly to the whiteboard, sketching out a very respectful golden retriever. Others, including Head of Operations, Tom, had less success, fumbling with the interaction and demonstrating a lack of understanding of the interface. The result was a slightly less respectful…mouse? Elephant? Bird? The jury’s still out.
With everyone feeling a bit less awkward, the consultants dove into process mapping to begin visualising the current processes. Or to use the fancy term, they began current state analysis.
Across a series of workshops, RetroForge employees were asked to visualise how their current roles operated. What actions made up their day to day, what processes were in place, how things flowed, or in many cases, didn’t flow - often it was less rollin’ on the river, more floatin’ in the gravy.
Haley and her team guided the employees through this process, and what looked to the untrained eye like a bunch of squiggles, arrows, and notes on some whiteboards, quickly began revealing some critical insight into where things were going wrong. Or, if you’re a glass-half-full kind of person, the whiteboards unveiled plenty of opportunity for improvement.
Next came the pain point identification sessions. In these sessions brainstorming quickly became venting as the RetroForge team began opening up about frustrations they’d sat on for months, if not years. Luckily the atmosphere was firm, but far-from hostile - think of it less like a showdown on Big Brother, and more like a squabble on Loose Women.
It was nothing Haley and the team hadn’t seen before, either. After all, these sessions were intended to turn these frustrations into actionable outcomes, so the more input employees could offer, the more valuable the approach.
“We already have too many systems to deal with, we don’t need another”, complained one supply chain leader. This highlighted that they’d been manually inputting data into two different systems because they didn’t know how to integrate the two.
“Communication is all over the shop,” vented one of the department heads in a different session, unveiling that crucial information was regularly getting lost in the shuffle between teams, while another described how “nothing was ever delivered on time at this place”.
With a deeper understanding of the biggest pain points at play, the digital consultants ended stage one of their discovery sessions with stakeholder mapping. This allowed them to align their current state analysis and pain point identification with a framework of who owned which processes, and who was involved.
This all helped to paint the most detailed picture of RetroForge’s operational structure possible, ensuring Haley and her team had a comprehensive understanding of how things worked, and more importantly, how things should be working.
Stage 2
After a couple of weeks mapping out the current lay of the land, it was time to start looking ahead to the future. Not too far - where we’re going, we still need roads.
This kicked off with future state visioning, helping the digital experts understand RetroForge’s requirements for improving services, systems, and processes over time. In these sessions, Haley introduced the concept of the ‘5 whys’ - a method traditionally used to dig into root causes. Indeed, using this method retrospectively still proved impactful:
Why are delays happening in product development? Because teams aren’t receiving approvals on time. Why aren’t approvals happening on time? Because there isn’t a process in place for sign offs. Why isn’t there a process in place? And so on, and so on…
But Haley was also able to flip this approach on its head to unite the team on a vision of a future state. Instead of asking “Why did this happen”, she asked “Why would you like this?”, and began working back from there. That way, the team could stop getting bogged down in where RetroForge were now, and instead focus on where they desired to be.
Next came the tech brainstorming sessions. To keep everyone looking forward, the experts worked alongside the project team to explore what was available on the market to meet RetroForge’s objectives and requirements. Across these sessions, Haley was able to curate an exciting list of modern tools and platforms that could potentially help streamline operations without getting stuck in the nitty gritty. It wasn’t so much about the familiarity of the integrability of the tools at this point; it was about whether they offered a potential solution.
That’s not to say Haley’s team didn’t get stuck into the thick of it - it was just (to keep the Back To The Future references going) ‘those guys weren’t ready for that yet’.
Instead, the team would dive deeper by establishing a prioritisation matrix. Haley asked the project team to rank their priorities based on two criteria: impact and feasibility. From this, the experts could cut through the noise and identify the ways to offer the most value without overwhelming the business with complex changes.
Stage 3
The final sessions had been specifically crafted by Haley to extract more invaluable insights while having a little bit of fun. All work and no play makes this discovery a dull process.
Workshop activities included role playing, where the project team acted out common scenarios in their day-to-day work and explored how those situations could be handled better. While there were certainly no Oscars in the pipeline for the team’s performances, this exercise helped to bridge the gap between theory and practical application.
This was paired with scenario planning, where Haley sat down with the project team to review how these day-to-day scenarios could be improved with digital tools. It was in these sessions that some of the RetroForge team began to properly envision their new workflows for the first time, and began to truly understand the impact that digital transformation could have on their every day.
This breakthrough was a major milestone, so as the final workshops came to a close, documentation became king. Haley and her team worked tirelessly to pull together all their findings. The pain points, the brainstormed solutions, the prioritisation matrix - it was all pulled together to inform a comprehensive report. Being thorough was critical, as this knowledge hub would be the very foundation of the road ahead, after all.
While Haley and her team worked away in the background, RetroForge CEO, Louise, was reflecting on what had been a big six weeks for the business.
They didn’t have all the answers yet, but for the first time in a while, it felt like they had a vision, it felt like they had a plan, and it felt like the company was finally starting to walk in the same direction. But she knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and still had a lot to ponder. What would Haley’s team recommend? Would the team be able to cope with the changes? How would it impact the culture and spirit she’d spent so long fostering at RetroForge?
If she was in a 90’s music video, she’d be staring pensively out of a rainy car window…