Understanding and growing digital maturity
The purpose of products and services is essential, where we work to define outcomes over features, whom those outcomes will serve, understand user jobs-to-be-done and work to serve these, while also framing product and service around organizational requirements and benefits.
Taking a wider view, this means that focusing on individual projects or products is not enough. Omnichannel means considering all the ways a customer may interact with a service. System strategy provides a framework for aligning organizational efforts and capabilities with market needs. And maturity in technology, service models, outcomes, OKRs, KPIs, governance and service delivery processes, customer engagement, and more, is required.
Bringing in-depth capability to all strategy and project planning teams is essential in order to uncover all the requirements to define a product or service, ensure successful implementation, and ongoing excellence.
Phases of organizational needs assessments
While each needs assessment is customized based on the organizational structure and digital maturity of the organization, the following stages of our process highlight typical activities and outcomes.
Phase 1: Information gathering
Within this phase, you can expect the following:
- Service mapping, customer journey mapping, process mapping
- Information gathering across key organizational units to identify strategy and process, customer data and insight, and other documented objectives, challenges, and goals
- Staff-wide surveying to uncover sentiment, perspective on customers, influencers, roles and alignment, and followup interviews based on survey insights
- Understanding historical context: reviewing key shifts in operational models and resource allocation over the years, as well as planned hiring, training, technology, and changes to organizational structure
- Workshopping and exercises to uncover day-to-day processes, requirements, and objectives
Phase 2: Current state mapping
The purpose of information gathering is to uncover the detail needed to map the organizational systems.
- Interviewing a variety of people from across the organization around strategy, objectives, current and customer-facing technology use and departmental needs, OKRs and KPIs, customer engagement, human-centred practices, and future goals
- Mapping relationships and resources across the organization and at the departmental level, including assessing human-centred, inclusive, and digital practices and maturity
- Mapping organization-wide strategic alignment, gaps, perspectives, knowledge sharing, objectives, and technology decision-making processes
- Identifying customer engagement processes, data processes, and knowledge of the market, while engaging in the supplementary and consumer-focused research as required to map customer journeys and describe jobs-to-be-done
Phase 3: Future state planning
With organizational and market systems identified and mapped, we have the foundation to understand where we are today, and how to get to where we need to be tomorrow.
- We’ll establish a system strategy to uncover key opportunities to drive customer engagement and retention while optimizing operations. We achieve this by mapping internal capabilities and consumer objectives to define an actionable roadmap that meets organizational and market needs.
- Identify organizational relationship and resource opportunities and gaps in order to accellerate organizational objectives and improve human-centred, inclusive, and digital practices and maturity
- Articulate and build consensus toward strategic alignment, perspectives, knowledge sharing, objectives, and technology decision-making
- Ensure alignment to the strategic goals and team needs relating to planned hiring, training, technology, and department structure plans
- Coaching through customer engagement processes, data processes, and expanding knowledge of the market
Inclusive stakeholder research
As part of this holistic review of the organization, we are careful to connect with a representative group from across the organization, to cover different roles, seniority, backgrounds, processes, knowledge, and diversity of the team.
These conversations are an integral part of understanding how organizational efforts can facilitate or hinder inclusive practices, informing our recommendations on resourcing, processes, the team’s ability to meet shared objectives, and to deliver more inclusive products and services in order to serve a wider market.
Organizational assessment success story: Toronto Public Library
How we helped
We performed a readiness assessment for the organization as they looked to make profound changes to their online operational model. This research initiative aimed to explore TPL’s technology options and decisions.
The findings that came out of this work illustrated complex organizational dynamics which, when factored together, presented numerous opportunities to improve service delivery.
Our research and the recommendations that came out of our work have informed decision-making within the library, as new roles have been hired, departments have been realigned, and new technology decisions have been made over recent years.
The value of organizational assessments for your products or services
Most organizations employ a variety of approaches towards making service and technology decisions, some more collaborative than others, some highlighting more or less technical expertise across different project teams. Bringing in-depth capability to all strategy and project planning teams is essential in order to uncover all the requirements to define a product or service, ensure successful implementation, and ongoing excellence.
Our organizational needs and digital maturity assessments take into consideration the full complexity of achieving organizational excellence across customer-facing and internal processes, including enabling more effective product, service, and technology decision-making.
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