It’s the new year, so I’ve been painting the walls in my living room (Sage green) over the last few evenings. One of those jobs that has been sitting on the list for too long. It got me thinking about the similarities between painting and technology value creation…
When painting a wall, there are three essential steps: masking, priming and painting.
Too little time masking asking you’ll have paint everywhere at the end. Too long or too little priming and the colour won’t be even. Too long painting, and your wife will ask what you’ve been doing all that time.
When it comes to technology value creation, the three essential steps are: Planning, scale testing, implementation.
Technology teams typically take one of three paths.
- They spend too little time planning and scale testing and jumping straight to implementation. They are often causing issues in production that affect end users.
- They spend too long in the planning and scale testing phase that they deliver very little actual value. Users can be equally frustrated by the lack of new features and functionally.
- They get the mix right between planning, scale testing and implementation. They deliver a technological transformation that adds significant incremental value.
Only 16% of all transformations succeed.
Some symptoms to look out for; reacting to these early will keep your value creation programmes on track.
Tech change is hard. Cost is increasing while user experience is degrading.
The benefits of being in the new platform or technology aren’t realised.
Service outages and platform Instability are occurring despite increased investment.
The best portco tech teams will know when to stop masking and start priming.
They will look at how they can remove barriers to growth, bringing innovative tech solutions to the board. Tech change will feel natural.
They will measure technology-related churn, NPS and survey results to drive product development. Increased investment has measurable ROI linked to EBITDA and revenue growth.
They will measure, assess and reduce their cost profile, starting with the cost to service an individual user.
How would you benchmark your portco tech teams approach to value creation?
Could they use a second coat?
Until next time.
Thomas
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