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The FODcast
In the FODcast (The Future of #DigitalCommerce) we explore the real career stories of the people who have made it to the very top of the sector and those who are working at the cutting edge of innovation and change right now. Listeners to the podcast gain insight into the journeys industry leaders have taken to be where they are today, the challenges they are facing now and their aims for the future.
The FODcast
Mastering Digital Transformation For Successful Business Change | S6, Ep 7 with Wendy Isaacs
Looking to lead a successful digital transformation in today’s fast-paced world? In this episode of our podcast, we sit down with Wendy Isaacs, Executive Director of Commerce and Experience Delivery at Valtech.
Wendy's journey—from the early days of CompuServe to steering modern digital strategies—provides invaluable lessons for navigating change in the digital age.
Wendy shares her insights on achieving transformation by balancing people, culture, and strategic planning. She also breaks down the difference between incremental and revolutionary change, showing how both require alignment across behaviour, skills, and organisational structure, with people at the core.
For anyone involved in digital transformation, Wendy’s advice on skilled programme management, effective product ownership, and forging strong business partnerships is essential listening.
Simply Commerce is the leading supplier of talent into digital commerce across technology, digital marketing, product, sales, and leadership.
Find our more about our approach and our services within digital commerce recruitment here: https://simply-commerce.co.uk/
Welcome to the latest series of the podcast where we bring you the latest insights into the future of digital commerce. In season six, we continue to interview some of the most respected professionals in the industry as we broaden the topics to cover what it takes to build a business within e-commerce, navigating through business change, as well as the future of technology within digital commerce. As we continue our journey to have one of the best podcasts within commerce, we ask you to like and share within your network if you enjoy our content. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Today, I'm joined by Wendy Isaacs, executive Director for Commerce and Experience Delivery at Bautech, as we talk through enterprise, business change and successful program delivery. Welcome, wendy.
Wendy Isaacs:Hi James, nice to see you.
James Hodges:Thanks for joining me. So I believe you've been in this space since the birth of the internet, or at least that's what it says on your LinkedIn page anyway. Now, no doubt you've covered a huge amount in that time. So do you want to give everyone a quick summary on your experience and career to date, and then we'll kick things off?
Wendy Isaacs:Yeah, sure. So, oh gosh, I'm winding back the clock a long way now, so giving away my age. But following school and college, I worked in the travel industry for 10 years. So this was back before the travel industry had any form of IT. Very old school having to pick up the phone to book holidays for people who found them in a brochure Couldn't be more different than how it is today. But towards the end of my I think it was like 10 years or so in trouble.
Wendy Isaacs:We started to get IT systems in and I just found that I had a natural affinity for using them and a real interest. And then I saw a job opportunity for a company called CompuServe, who probably people might remember. They were sort of way back at the birth of the internet, before we had browsers and things that we've got today. You could basically get onto the internet through this CD of software that you had to load onto a machine and you'd have some strange email address. That was a bunch of numbers. Nobody had thought of putting your name in your email address. That was kind of revolutionary. So I got an opportunity to go work at CompuServe, which was like a you know, first proper job in IT, and worked there for a number of years I think three years or something like that and then some of the people that worked at CompuServe had left that and set up a digital agency in Bristol and kind of said, you know, wendy, come and work with us at that digital agency. So that was kind of start, really, at the career that I have now Working there for I think something around seven years.
Wendy Isaacs:So we were doing software, development of our own content management system and delivering projects to a wide variety of people, from law firms to accountancy firms, to publications and all of that kind of thing. So I did a variety of roles. That was super exciting. Then I went and worked client side for a bit at playcom, looking over by recruiting. Then I came to an agency in Bristol many, many years ago, about 17 years ago, in, oh, many, many years ago, about 17 years ago that eventually got acquired by Valtech in 2018 and I'm still here six years later. So I must have done something right and Valtech must have done something right as well for, uh, for me to still be here. So during that time, all sorts of projects, uh, all sorts of transformations, lots of war, wounds, battle, battle, scars, successes and and failures, which you know all, have been a learning opportunity? I guess so.
Wendy Isaacs:I look forward to hearing more about them in the conversation today, hey and, as you probably might tell from my accent, I'm a west country girl, so I'm sure the Bristolians coming out there we couldn't tell right.
James Hodges:Thanks for that, wendy. I guess now's probably a good time to to kick things off. So yeah, I guess a good place to start will be let's understand what business changes and how you understand the business and its potential challenges in front of you sure.
Wendy Isaacs:So I guess, when we're talking about sort of businesses needing to change, there's sort of two ways it can happen. It can kind of happen in a really incremental way, just sort of natural, organic evolution, if you like, or sometimes there can be a, a trigger or a change of management or a change of direction. That kind of results in there needing to be a more revolutionary type change. But I think whether you're doing that organic, natural change or whether you're doing that big revolutionary change, there's sort of, I guess, four key dimensions that you maybe look at in terms of how that might happen. So you've kind of you've got the, the behavior and mindset.
Wendy Isaacs:So people don't like change. Uh, it's worrying, it's concerning, it's disconcerting. People are worried about their jobs, um. So, making sure that you're taking people on that journey, you're giving them the why behind it, you're alleviating the fears or sometimes addressing them head-on and being honest and going. Well, things are going to change. But this is why we're doing it, and with change comes opportunity etc. Etc.
Wendy Isaacs:Super important um capabilities and skills. So if you're moving from sort of one operational model to another operational model, you may find that there's people who've got skills that you no longer need or skills that you need that you don't have in-house. So actually identifying what those gaps are be super important. To know what you need for the transformation to be a success. The organizational structure. You know how you're set up versus where you want to be in the future. Having that idea of where you might want to be and what you're heading towards and where you might want to be, and what you're heading towards and how you might want to get there in small steps super important. And quite often we'll see things like well, maybe it wants to to transform, but actually the rest of the business aren't on board. Or we see, uh, the business are looking for something else, but it aren't there.
Wendy Isaacs:So making sure that there is a single company-wide view and vision of kind of that organizational restructure and transformation and that everybody is pushing in the same direction super important I'm sure that's something you see a lot right yeah, yeah, huge amount um, and we can talk about some of that a bit later maybe, and then I guess the the more kind of transactional stuff, like the processes that you need to follow and the tools and kind of actually what's going to change and how is that going to impact the people on the ground, based on you know, maybe they used to do something this way but now they have to do it this way and how you take people on that journey and make sure that the business are ready for any kind of um IT changes that may happen.
James Hodges:Okay, okay, so I like how you break it down into those, into those four dimensions. I think for any kind of IT changes that may happen. Okay, okay, so I like how you break it down into those four dimensions. I think they're certainly so. I like the way you break it down to those four dimensions. Next question, then, would be how do you go around understanding the challenges that said business will present you during that transformation?
Wendy Isaacs:I believe you might have some kind of uh tool that you use which is unique to valtech yeah, well, you know, I can't honestly say it's unique, so, uh, other people may have, may have something similar, but I can certainly talk about um kind of what we do. So we've got sort of, we've got a basically what we call a digital maturity tool. Um, that kind of comes in. It's a series of uh, workshops and interviews with stakeholders, looking into the business and kind of basically doing a bit of an audit and kind of going well, where are you today versus where you want to be in the future and where are the gaps? Um, so we look at that with across six lenses um strategy and transformation. So actually, the.
Wendy Isaacs:Is there a really clear vision from somewhere, somewhere in the business, as to why you're doing this change, uh, what the timeline for the change looks like, how you want to achieve it? Um, what you know you're looking to improve revenue or remove technical debt or faster speed to market or whatever it is. You know what are the? Is there a really clear why? And sometimes there isn't, or sometimes, when we get people in a room, they we discover that actually they're not clear and there's a bit of disagreement, which is also good, because one of the key things that any transformational program needs is really, really clear vision and direction from leaders. So if those are misaligned it's going to fail. So we can catch that nice and early People and culture.
Wendy Isaacs:You know talking to those. What are the people? What are the skill sets that you have? How is, how does recruitment happen? How do you attract talent? Do you retain, uh, good talent? Um, something that I know, james, you'd be more than willing to help any organization with who needs a bit of help in of course we all need a good recruiter right yeah, indeed.
Wendy Isaacs:Uh, organization and governance. Um, so how are you going to organize your teams around? I guess all of the customer journeys that you have, both the online and offline customer journeys, because you'll have both people using the website, people calling into the call center, et cetera. You know what does that look like, what are all the different touch points, what's your value stream proposition, et cetera. I guess, from a process and metrics and sort of talking specifically about software development teams, is you know what does good look like for you? You know we have an opinion that good software teams are using modern dev, sec ops type metrics and that everything sort of shifts left and you move away from these traditional oh, we go away and we develop something and then we go into a big long 10-week test cycle and maybe we only deploy once a quarter and if you miss that boat you have to wait another four months before anything else can can go out the door. So you know good would typically look like. You're measuring what good looks like in the teams. You're looking at things like cycle times and throughput times and velocity. You're measuring teams based on how often they can deploy, the number of incidents that you might have in production, what your recovery time is from any incident in production. So that's quite freeing really often and if something goes wrong, you can solve it in half an hour. That gives you a huge amount of freedom to make some brave decisions and that you might not make if getting it wrong means you wait three months to fix it.
Wendy Isaacs:Looking at data maturity so business intelligence what data have you got? How do you make sure that you're figuring out where to spend the money, based on a hypothesis that you can then prove whether or not that thing has actually had an impact on the business that you expected? Um, and then, I guess, the obvious sort of technology and architecture. You know what's set up, what's a transition plan look like? How do you move from system a to system b without really affecting the, the business?
Wendy Isaacs:Um, how do you make sure that these you don't end up having to kind of do a big replatform every couple of years because you've chosen something that's flexible for the future and maybe allows you that flexibility to go? I want to swap this system out for this one, so using sort of modern practices like middleware and APIs and things like that to ensure that it's very plug and play and you can swap one thing out for another relatively easily. So we look at those dimensions, we kind of look at industry standard as to where we have an opinion that you kind of should be where you are today and what your aspiration is. And then when we identify those gaps we can suggest transformation initiatives that kind of help you close the gap between where you are today and then where you might be in the future nice.
James Hodges:So you mean you covered a lot there and I like the different dimensions that you break it into. Would you say that there are um? Is any of those dimensions reoccurring across businesses where you feel as though um, it is slightly undervalued compared to others?
Wendy Isaacs:Yeah, you know every business is different and I think we recognise that.
Wendy Isaacs:So, yes, there's definitely sort of some similarities and some core features that we see.
Wendy Isaacs:The bit where I spoke about these kind of long release cycles and people do some development and then it goes into a big cycle of you know, end-to-end testing that tends to be quite manual, is quite, you know, risk averse. The solution may be to a problem in the past that one thing went wrong in production is. Well, let's put loads and loads of testing QA team that gets beaten up with a big stick by some manager somewhere if something goes wrong in a live environment, Rather than maybe looking at the root causes of why some of those things happen or just accepting that you know humans are fallible and they make mistakes, and actually maybe the making mistake isn't the biggest thing. Maybe the speed to recover from it or how do you mitigate the risk is maybe a better approach than well, let's just stick 10 weeks of testing in for every deployment cycle to try and stop the thing that's gone wrong going wrong ever again, because something will always go wrong or may go wrong but it will be something different every time.
Wendy Isaacs:So you're kind of closing all of these stable doors and meanwhile the horse is bolting out of another one.
James Hodges:I like it. I guess that goes uh, goes back to what you were saying earlier with people make people being brave with their decision making process as well and doing something different to what had been done before. And I think that's something that I've learned a lot over the last sort of two or three years and having these conversations is that a lot of the the move to composable architecture and going through this business change process does require brave decision making and it requires you to fail in certain aspects but learn from your failures and adapt and move forward, because ultimately, if you're not failing, you're not learning for the most part. Have you seen that that kind of braver decision making process become more common, or is there still a lot of similar pushback to that from, from maybe what you were seeing two, three, four, five years ago?
Wendy Isaacs:So I think we're seeing more of the the bravery, as people kind of see the benefits that it can bring, or maybe have worked in an organisation where they can see that actually having that MVP mindset and some of the modern tech practices that you can kind of bring to mitigate some of that risk is making it easier. You know, rather than deploying everything in a massive big bang and you suddenly launched a new system and it's disrupted everything. You know, can you do something clever like, um, uh, use some kind of load balancer or delivery network to kind of go well, we've got a new feature or a new thing that we're going to do, but we're only going to release it to a small percentage of customers. Or, uh, we're going to do some a b testing. So for two testing, for two different journeys and see which one is better. So, yeah, all right, if journey B isn't as successful as journey A, then maybe we've had an impact for one day on only a small percent of customers rather than absolutely everything at once.
Wendy Isaacs:Being able to kind of do beta launches out to a small group of people, or even before you write a line of software, doing a little bit of user testing, and things like that can can help de-risk things before you even write a line of code.
Wendy Isaacs:And you're right, it kind of requires a little bit of a mindset shift and people are, you know, sometimes scared of the word failure because they see failure as like a big thing and know it's hit my revenue and someone's going to come and beat me up and ask me why it went wrong.
Wendy Isaacs:So it does require that whole organization mindset shift.
Wendy Isaacs:It's no good it saying, oh, we're going to start being brave and do x, y and z if you've still got that you know big manager, somewhere with a stick that comes down and beats them up if the website's down for five minutes or something like that, which again, hopefully, that that website being down for five minutes is something that you would mitigate by, you know, having the um, the sort of uh, the two different deployment mechanisms, where you kind of deploy everything to a new server, make sure it's up and running properly before you actually switch the old one off and and you can, you know direct traffic and go something's not right here, let's move it to this one. So there's lots of. You need to change your appetite for risk and change your mindset and take that leap of faith and employ those sort of clever technology solutions as a whole. Um, and I think, rather than having the if it goes wrong, who can we blame and who can we go and beat up, you're moving from from that mentality to a what can we learn from it?
Wendy Isaacs:How quickly can we actually recover and actually going? Oh, you know, well done guys. We went live, we had a little bit of a problem, but we rolled it back within two seconds and hardly there was no impact or we got a hot fix out in five minutes. You know, those are really really good, powerful things. You know, it's something that we've seen a lot. We've worked with a big DIY retailer who were kind of really good on that MVP approach, had some good data to kind of back up the hypothesis, to see whether or not what they hoped would happen when they released this particular thing actually did happen. They were able to kind of measure the results super, super quickly and then kind of go right well, we've released it to 5% of traffic, now let's up it to 10% and make sure that it's still holding true, because we're looking at the data and we can see the effect that it's having. And then, oh right, yep, we're good now and you're kind of gradually doing that dial up like super, super effective practices.
James Hodges:So all of those things no, so I think really based on our experience okay, well, I mean, you spoke about quite a bit there, but I think one of the the key, the key factors there is just, it's just the mindset shift from everyone within their business then I mean everybody, but I mean particularly from from the different units within the business and the leadership team, where they come together collaboratively before making decisions so everyone knows what's expected of them, and removing the blame culture and having the what can we learn culture and that kind of stuff.
James Hodges:But I guess that's just part of the challenge of business change. Whenever you go from A to B, um, particularly when it's a substantial change if you're using outdated processes and technology from 20, 30 years ago, which many have been until recently, there's going to be a lot of change, um, and change brings a lot of challenges and I think that's going to form quite a big part of this conversation today. Is is some of the challenges that you've seen with business change over the years and just kind of the impact it has and maybe how they can be overcome in the future. So probably leads on quite nicely to the next part of the conversation, which is focused on challenges as customers go through that change journey. So, yeah, where do we start Should we talk about, maybe, what do you see as like reoccurring challenges? What are the biggest ones?
Wendy Isaacs:Yeah, good question. So I guess one of the key things we see a lot, particularly in, I guess, digital transformation and replatforming projects, is kind of old versus new. Typically, you'll see platforms that have been built up over a number of years. Features have been kind of added and things have been bolted on. Nobody really knows what gets used, what doesn doesn't get used, maybe data isn't really there to back it up. So you'll ask a question like well, for this particular feature, you know what, what revenue or what benefit can be attributed to that? And people can't really tell you. But they're like but we've got to have it. You know, we see a lot, lot of that um and that's, you know, quite hard. Because ultimately, if you've got some big monolithic platform that's taken ages to build and you just move all of that onto a new platform, you just kind of recreate your monolith.
Wendy Isaacs:So it's a bit like I always sort of think of it as sort of the moving house analogy. Imagine you've lived in your childhood home for like 20 odd years. You've built up all of this stuff, you've got all of this clutter in place. You've decided that you kind of want to move to a new house, but then you just make the old, the new house exactly like the old one. You know you, you decorate it the same way.
Wendy Isaacs:You take the same furniture, all of the clutter that you've taken out all the years, probably some of which is sat in boxes in the attic that you've never used. You take it with you because you're like, well, I might need it. You know that that mentality is is key. So actually the and it's hard right if you don't have good data that kind of tells you whether or not you need that new thing, letting go of it or not having it, or being saying, well, we're gonna just start with an entrepreneurial mindset, as though the whole business of starting again is like, really, really, you know, yes, obviously there's some risk there.
Wendy Isaacs:Um, but it's a team, yeah it gives a team a real challenge. If you kind of go well, take everything that you've got here that isn't documented, we don't really know what it is, and then recreate it all over here, immediately gives you a big challenge because you know, sometimes that is because maybe there's some business people or some marketing folk who've got sales targets that are based on the website performing in the way that it did before, and so they say, well, I'm not willing to forego some stuff that I've got here because I don't know what that's going to do to our revenue. So, again, this is where it comes back to that whole organisational mindset. Like somebody needs to be brave enough to kind of go look, we understand that there may be some impact of moving from here to here and that if we don't have this feature, we don't really know what's going to happen because we don't really know how many people use it or what revenue can be attributed to it. But because we don't really know how many people use it or what revenue can be attributed to it, but because we've got this new system that's got better data and we can deploy more quickly and we can roll back quickly, we can, we can try it and then see what happens and then quickly react to whatever we're seeing on the ground.
Wendy Isaacs:And it might be that we spend less money, less time building a new system and then find out that all of this clutter that we had in our attic we didn't need to move and we've actually got a really nice clean system with clean code that we can deploy quickly and we didn't need half of what we needed. And it's a bit like you know how much thing, how many things are there on your mobile phone and how many of them do you actually use day to day, versus the features that sit that kind of don't use, that somebody spent a lot of time developing. So you know, changing some of that mindset and being brave enough to kind of go, you know true, mvp and and maybe not thinking about features but instead of thinking about outcomes that you need to achieve is something that we see it.
Wendy Isaacs:Successful organizations in our experience are kind of changing everything and not necessarily striving for that future parity well, yeah, I guess there's obviously the whole like attribute revenue to it is really important.
James Hodges:But also, I guess you get a bit of resistance to change as well, when, if you've been using something for your career within a business and then suddenly it's like, hang on a minute, you're not using that anymore, you're using this. So I quite like using that. It's really really easy to use, I'm used to it. Now I can do it with my eyes closed and suddenly you've got to go and learn something new could be fairly similar, could be completely different, and you've got that resistance to change. That's kind of built built into that as well. So, uh, yes, we could double it short, I guess yeah, yeah, and you know it's understandable.
Wendy Isaacs:There's some change that you know happens or will be happening in the future, with kind of AI and things like that mean that some roles don't exist anymore.
James Hodges:Yeah.
Wendy Isaacs:And you know that's something that can make people worried or scared. We've seen it with a lot of the strikes that have happened in the train sector, where they're talking about taking people off the trains, guards and things like that. People are worried about it and that's understandable and that's human nature. But very much when one door closes, another one opens. So maybe the role that you do today might change. But actually maybe that gives you an opportunity to do a role that you never thought would even exist in your business before I love that outlook.
James Hodges:That's certainly how I think you need to be looking at it particularly, um, whilst we're talking about gen ai as an example, it's going to create opportunities. Right there, I do feel there's quite a bit of fear in the market with how it's going to impact jobs, but it's going to create opportunities and I think, uh, yeah, if, if you can keep, uh, an open mind and if you're able to think outside the box of what you can do with generative ai and in it's going to have use cases in so many different industries and so many different roles that actually you should be looking at it thinking, okay, cool, where can I take my career with this? Now? Not, I was going to take my job, yeah, but yeah, I mean, that's a conversation that we can probably talk about for a long, long time, so maybe we'll save that one for another day, exactly that We'd probably do a whole series focused on Gen AI in the next couple of years.
James Hodges:So, yeah, okay, just whilst we're talking about that kind of old versus new and being able to understand this, the roi from specific pieces of technology just off the top of your head, roughly speaking, how many companies do you speak to that can get that data for specific pieces of technology?
Wendy Isaacs:um, yeah, I would say very few of the larger organizations.
Wendy Isaacs:So we're seeing a big shift to it.
Wendy Isaacs:We're seeing a lot of companies kind of coming to us and maybe some stuff sitting in google analytics and some stuff sitting in power bi or stuff sitting in a financial system somewhere and there isn't a sort of a comprehensive joined up view.
Wendy Isaacs:So we do quite a lot of work to maybe provide that sort of centralized view of dashboards and data to help people with and provide them with the skills and dashboards and training in, like how you actually read it and how you um basically put together conclusions from from what you're looking at. So probably I would say maybe um 30, 40 percent okay. And then the kind of rest is we've got some stuff in google analytics but nobody really can access it and nobody really knows what they're looking at or what conclusions we can draw from it, and obviously the website's only one channel. So ideally you want something that kind of joins up all of the data that you get from everywhere. So you might want to know how does changing something on the website affect the number of calls that come into a call center and that's not going to be captured in your Google google analytics type?
Wendy Isaacs:data so you kind of do need something that aggregates all of that really good information that you're collecting and and kind of builds those, those funnels and um allows you to kind of go well, actually, when we change this.
James Hodges:This happened in finance and this happened in the call center, and this happened on the website and this is how it resulted in the gen conversion or product sales or whatever the thing is that has changed as a result okay, I think 30 to 40 percent is a little bit higher than I was expecting you to say, but I mean it just goes to show that there's still a huge gap between where that number is and where businesses would want it to be, which is, I mean, 100 is never going to be realistic, right, but you'd want it to be like 85 90. Mean 100 is never going to be realistic, right, but you would want it to be like 85 90 that kind of ballpark. So it's obviously a big gap and a lot that can still be done with with data.
Wendy Isaacs:Um, I think it's like hugely yeah, hugely, hugely important, because making database decisions and and being able to use that data kind of back up business cases or funding cases or help with product prioritization or understanding where your value is, is like super, super important. Other than that you're kind of just guessing and then you can't measure whether or not a thing that you've done has been affected or not.
James Hodges:Okay, effective rather, what other challenges do you? Do you see, then, on a regular basis?
Wendy Isaacs:um. So I think organizational structure. So a lot of traditional organizations and maybe um business sit over here and it sit over here and they're funded completely separately. You know it have a budget and they're funded one way and the business have got targets and and they're maybe funded another way. So you get this us and them mentality.
Wendy Isaacs:So I guess common things we've seen are IT are really slow. It takes ages for a release we give them, we ask them to do something. It goes onto a backlog, it disappears into a black hole. We don't know when it's going to get done. Meanwhile you've got IT saying oh, the business don't really know what they want. They're asking us to do things which we think are pointless. We can't see the value in it, it's a waste of time. Or we build them things and then they never use it, they don't turn it on. Or IT saying that we really could be better if we were allowed to investigate in automated tests and deployments and had a bit of time for, uh, maintenance and improvements of the tech platform. But it won't ever let a business won't ever let us do that, because they just want more features and they don't see the value of us investing in the platform, those types of things you know okay, does that come?
James Hodges:does that boil down to a gap in communication at the top?
Wendy Isaacs:Yeah, I think a gap and potentially just like how, like setting those two teams against each other is just fundamentally counterproductive. You know, ultimately they need to work together for the success of the business. So creating those departmental silos you know this is a sort of a personal opinion for me, based on kind of what I've seen in our organizations isn't how I think you can achieve the best results from organizations, and maybe we talk about it a little bit. But I guess it's the difference between setting up a, a project team. So if we kind of go well, you know the business want to do a project or to deliver some features, so they kind of throw it into IT and IT maybe do an MVP right, because there's a limited budget and there's a limited amount of funding for that thing or that project. So you end up sort of delivering something which is an MVP that fits the budget or the timeline that you've got, and then the project team kind of disappear and move on to the next project. The business maybe got their mvp that might have been short of some things they actually wanted. They kind of think, oh, we didn't quite get this thing or it would have been good if we could have this thing but because the project team has kind of disbanded and moved on to the next thing, it the business feel a little bit unsatisfied. And the main aim of an mvp is that you kind of do a minimum thing to to get something out to market and then you measure the effect that that's had and then you iterate it and we see a lot of organizations who maybe just do the project. You know whether it's a oh, we're going to build a new website and then the team disband and you know maybe there's somebody there just doing keep the lights on support and answering questions, but there isn't an ongoing development and I guess you wouldn't see that in any other space. You know, ultimately your, your, your website or your products is typically your front end and your experience and touch points with a whole bunch of customers.
Wendy Isaacs:And again I'm going to go back to the house analogy, because this is always a good one. But you can't move into a house and then never do any maintenance or decoration or anything to it because it would eventually fall apart. And then you're looking for your new house or you have to do a massive, big renovation job. You know you have to have that. You know I'm going to decorate the bedroom now or I'm going to build an extension or I'm going to sort out my leaky guttering or that broken tile on the roof. You have to have some kind of an ongoing presence.
Wendy Isaacs:And I think where we see teams and businesses really successful, they've kind of moved from that business versus IT and we just do projects and we just build features to more of that product team, which is a long-lived team who really understand the business. You give them a problem to solve rather than build this set of features and they're in it for the long term. You know they know the platform. You don't have to spend time onboarding them. They can be creative about.
Wendy Isaacs:We can solve that problem by reusing this thing over here because they know it super, super, super well and if they're, if the team that build it are the team that have to maintain and running it, run it long term. You see the the kind of quality improves because if you're going to be the person holding the baby and maybe getting a call at 10 o'clock at night, something goes wrong. You're going to make sure that you've got good automated tests built in. You're going to make sure that you've got good automated tests built in. You're going to make sure that you've got good monitoring and alerting built in. You know you don't cut corners to get something out and live. You make sure that it's good enough quality.
James Hodges:You know it's coming back to you, right, don't you? So yeah, I guess that's kind of bought the whole kind of project to product type mentality. Then, over the last sort of well, we've been seeing it for three or four years now, maybe, maybe a little bit longer, but I think it's really come to prominence in the last two or three.
Wendy Isaacs:Yeah, and it's that kind of difference between, I guess that project mindset is you know it's very temporary, we're just going to do some stuff, we'll get these outputs, we'll deliver these features versus that product mindset is, you know it's ongoing, it's a bit more strategic. You're focused more on the outcomes that you're trying to achieve up and down. If you've got bigger bits of work or smaller bits of work, but there's always that core team of knowledge who kind of they know the domain that they're working in and you know the platform super well, they're maintaining it. They can work really closely with a product owner on, you know, how do we actually solve this problem? What can we reuse or how can we do it creatively?
Wendy Isaacs:Uh, the product owner can talk about well, you know, it's probably only worth this much value, so I only want to spend about this much time. And the team says, well, we couldn't, you're not going to get all of this in the time, but we could do this and this, and all of that is super useful for bringing those teams together and getting the business and it to not be so segregated and just think about together as a team we are solving problems for the business that result in these outcomes that because we've now got our data also, we can really easily measure yeah, and becoming outcome driven as well, like you said at the start too.
James Hodges:So, no, it's okay something. Something I felt would be good to talk about as we talk about challenges is is having the right person in the right role, as well as hiring, because, um, I think it's safe to say, a lot of transformational programs do require going to market for either new permanent employees to join the business for specific roles, or even bringing in specialist externals for a short period of time to to bring in some expertise in specific areas. How would you feel is that this is generally perceived with some of your customers or?
Wendy Isaacs:subject close to your heart, james of course, of course yeah, um, yeah, absolutely so.
Wendy Isaacs:One of I guess one of the biggest problems we see um in in sort of projects and some of the clients we work with, where people are assigned to do a role in the project just because they happen to be available, but maybe they've got little or no training or they don't have the skills or the autonomy or the gravitas within the business to make decisions. Um. So you know typical examples uh, in the product space, or product owners or product managers who've had absolutely no training in product owning or product managing, uh, don't have the um, some of the skills that you need to be able to have that product mindset. You know who maybe don't know how to put together a roadmap, who don't know how to use a prioritization framework, who aren't able to kind of articulate return on investment. You know, if I have this much money to do this, then my hypothesis is that I'm going to increase the revenue or reduce the calls into the call center or some other benefit.
Wendy Isaacs:So often we'll see a you know, here's bob, he works in the business, his day job is this he can be the product owner and then, and then what you find is, from a team perspective, trying to deliver software is they're not really empowered so they can't. You know, someone's put them in a role but they don't have the empowerment that a team truly need a directional product manager to have. Uh, so the team will sort of say give you know, ask a question. Or they maybe say, well, we can do it this way or this way, and the you know bob, the product owner, who's been, you know, pulled over from the business, will say, oh, all right, leave it with me and I'll go and find out. So they can't make a quick decision and they'll maybe go out and speak to five or ten different stakeholders in the business who all give them a different answer as to what they want. And then bob's like oh god, you know, don't want to upset sally or mary or whoever.
Wendy Isaacs:So they'll come back with something which is like massively feature bloated to say, right, well, actually we need something that does this, but actually mary wants it to do this as well. Bob doesn't want what mary wants, she what he wants this thing. So you end up with sort of huge feature bloat and delays and uh well, if it's this market, we do this thing and if it's this market, we do something different. And actually you want somebody who understands the domain really well, understands the business benefit, who is trying to simplify and get maximum bang for their buck and go right.
Wendy Isaacs:Okay, I'm going to speak to my business change manager or something, because ideally I just want everybody working in a consistent way and one simple process build it once, and obviously you know that's idealistic. There'll always be regional or regulation differences that might mean you need something slightly different. But the mentality should always be how do I simplify, how do I reduce complexity? How do I leverage out of the box features of whatever platform or piece of software that I'm buying as much as possible and not over complicate it, which will cause a headache for maintenance and support down the line and cost me a whole bunch of money to build up front, so product ownership super important yeah, poor bob.
James Hodges:Eh, interestingly, you picked the role of a product owner, though. I mean, we just spoke about the importance of of that position, given the mindset shift of companies going from project to product. Um, I think if companies aren't investing in a good product owner, um, and like product function in general, then they're probably setting themselves up for some challenges in the future.
Wendy Isaacs:Um for sure yeah, and it's a real skill. You know it needs a combination of the. You need domain experience. Uh, you need sort of seniority and gravitas. You need to be a leader. You need to be okay with not everybody being happy. You know you can't be everybody's friends. Sometimes you're going to have to be a bit directional. Sometimes you're going to have to say no or no buts, um, you know there's no good just trying to keep people happy.
Wendy Isaacs:But going, I'll put it on the backlog and then knowing that you're never really going to build it, because then you'll go back to one of our earlier conversations where you know, oh, we never get what we want from it. It just goes onto the backlog and disappears into a black hole, like if you know you're not going to do it because there's nobody. Just say, say no so I can't give you this, but, but you know, take them on the journey.
James Hodges:Explain why and sometimes those softer skills are the hardest thing. They're much harder to train. I'm a great believer in you. Either do you have them or you don't. To a certain extent, and I think when you're being thrown into a role where managing expectations we're saying no um, where being in front of stakeholders is so pivotal, that's really a role where you want to be ensuring you have the best person that you can have in in that role. Now, it may not be the best person on the market because you might not have the budget or the ability to hire them, which is understandable, but make sure you have the best person that you can have within your business doing that role, not just somebody because they're available yeah, because they're available or their role is going to be mega redundant or what have you do, you know?
James Hodges:I mean, let's make sure it aligns to their skill set as well. So, okay, that's interesting. Just whilst on the topic, is there any other sort of uh roles that you see in general, where companies maybe just put someone in in there to for a short term, maybe like a? I mean, I've seen it personally where a company has assigned uh somebody to face off for the transformation to third parties, when that's not really their skill set either, but they're there just to ensure the transformation goes smoothly and, funnily enough, often it doesn't because that's not their skill set. Um, but is there anything that you see? Yeah, I think.
Wendy Isaacs:Um, I guess, if you're doing like a complex business transformation or digital transformation things, it's it's the scale that changes, so it's it's thing that you see. Yeah, I think, um, I guess, if you're doing like a complex business transformation or digital transformation things, it's it's the scale that changes, so it's it's having people that have experience of working at scale that's important. So you know, you could maybe have a business analyst in the business who was super good at kind of business as usual, continuous improvement, writing a few user stories, uh, working with a team. But actually where you've got a complex environment, you're looking at business change processes and having to do the sort of joined up coordination, maybe with multiple squads. You maybe don't have some like a coordinating business analyst who can operate at that end-to-end level.
Wendy Isaacs:And we see that maybe in architecture as well. You know, somebody was a super good architect who really knew the content management system, who can't necessarily architect an enterprise level. All of the new systems and how they talk to each other and how the transition from where you are today to where you go in the future will might work, uh, that's important. You know some great project managers who are sort of scrum mastery, who are really good at running a stand-up and putting a team together and removing impediments, etc. But coordinating massive sort of program plans where there's, maybe you know, multiple teams working potentially from many different vendors, where there's interdependencies between them and actually this vendor missing a dependency here will have an impact on this vendor's ability to deliver what they're delivering and therefore a knock-on effect down the line on all of the costs, all of the go live. Super important. So having people who can coordinate at a higher level across multiple squads and multiple work streams.
Wendy Isaacs:So program level, I think super key when you, when you're doing something big, you can't necessarily expect that somebody that's operated at this kind of micro level can can step up and just fill that that big enterprise level gap yeah, okay, okay yeah, and then obviously, you know, if you've got in-house development team and qa and things like that and you're moving platforms to different platforms and skills kind of, uh, how do you, how do you enable and and and get them on board assuming that you kind of have a desire to keep an in-house development team in the future? So we do quite a lot of work where we're able to kind of enable developers and bring them along. So you know, maybe they, as an example, maybe they've used sitecore or something like that in the past and you're moving to a different cms like optimizely or something like that. So we would kind of bring in people who have experience working with Optimizely, who've got a number of projects under their belt, they've been on training.
Wendy Isaacs:Um, we would kind of bring those developers who are used to Sitecore on board, maybe suggest that they go on some of the Optimizely training first. But you know there's the. The training course and then the actual real use of the platforms are sometimes like two different things. So us working in kind of like a blended team environment where we would kind of lead and then we're gradually bringing these people on board and then, you know, towards the end of the project. When they've got skills, we can reduce the team on our side, and then we've left the customer with a an in-house team of of developers who really know how to run the platform.
James Hodges:With a an in-house team of of developers who really know how to run the platform, is something we do quite a lot of nice, and that's a really good example of using an external are you valtech, in this case to to bring in some expertise in the short term, upskill the existing team and then move on um to to something new and leave the team there with a whole new set of skills, with a different technology that they can then keep within the business.
James Hodges:So, yeah, like yeah, I think. For me anyway, there's there seems like there's a lot of value in hiring the right people, uh, to do the right jobs. In fact, I think it's critical because if you don't, you're going to encounter challenges. They could be anything from small frustrations to severe business critical problems based on the role and the responsibilities and exactly what's happening. So interesting, and it's certainly something I think every company needs to be focusing on as they have these conversations. It's not it's not the cheapest option, or or the maybe the the easiest option to keep someone happy in the company, but it's about what's what's right for the business as it goes along its its journey of change, which is, which is often quite large yeah, and I'd recommend going and going.
Wendy Isaacs:What do we need?
Wendy Isaacs:What skills do they need to have?
Wendy Isaacs:And kind of starting with that rather than a oh, you know here's so and so they're available, or they can do the business analyst role or they can do the such and such role.
Wendy Isaacs:It's like be really honest with yourself, because those are the people that kind of make a key difference. And, equally, you're going to need business change people as well, because if you're changing a whole bunch of systems and processes, somebody needs to be in that business change seat. Who's understanding the downstream effect that all of those changes have, whether that's in your call centre or in your content editing team or in the warehouse or something like that. You know somebody who is really all over the or the it change that's kind of happening here will have knock-on effect on the business. And you know how do we actually ensure that end users and process are all aligned so that we all cross the line with this transformation at the same time and not just ending up with something that doesn't get adopted or brings you all kinds of business problems because you've not thought about that really crucial business change agent manager so how do you ensure?
James Hodges:I mean, it's all good talking about some of the challenges that we face, um, we've touched upon a few. I'm sure there's there's many more that we could talk about. But there's one thing I understand the challenges that come your way. There's another thing in educating the customer to um a avoid those challenges up front or, b educate them as they go through the change journey, both at the start, um, but then throughout the journey as well. So how do you ensure that you, that, uh, you and valtica are doing this to the best possible standard to make sure the client follows the journey as they need to?
Wendy Isaacs:Yeah, so we've got a big sort of enterprise transformation service line offering. So we've got a huge number of people in there who are kind of skilled doing exactly this type of project. They were kind of skilled doing exactly this type of project. So, um, I guess, from the, from the business side of things and knowing, uh, how to set these programs up properly, the kind of things that are important, the, the roles that are needed, the responsibilities that those people need to have, we will always have a fairly strong uh opinion on that. Uh, equally, on the kind of tech side, we've got some, some great people who kind of understand these challenges.
Wendy Isaacs:Every combination of client that we were with is different in terms of you know what they sell, how they're set up, the budget that they've got to spend on it, the systems that they've got in in place at the moment. So you know, ultimately it's. So it all starts with the conversation. You know understanding the problem space, what's there at the moment, what the aspiration is, and then kind of us figuring out as Voltech, like who have we got that are the best people to come in and help this organisation solve the problems that they've got? Number of service offerings. Like we spoke about the, the digital maturity, uh capability assessment, that we can do um. But you know, equally we've got things like uh helping with vendor selections. We've got various processes that we can go through from that where we just kind of fairly, we work with a lot of really good partners but we don't necessarily recommend, you know, this one for this situation all of the time. We kind of can come in with a fairly agnostic view as to, well, let's understand the arts, let's understand the capability of the, the team, how much money you want to spend, what aspirations you have in the future, what the business model looks like, and then maybe go through a very independent you know tech agnostic uh selection program for well, you know, we, you could look at all of these six, but maybe we've narrowed it down to two or three and this one comes out top with a fairly sort of binary sort of scoring system and usually an opinion as to what they would go with.
Wendy Isaacs:Um we can help with uh, you know, role descriptions or pointing out gaps in staffing and um, you know, sometimes on a project, we'll kind of be in a project where you know, bob from the business has been put into a role and we're going. It's not cutting it. We can see the impact it's having on our team. So then it's just about having really honest, open conversations with the client that you know there's a gap here that's not being fulfilled and you know either either Valtech can help you fill that gap or you can go speak to somebody like James who will help you find somebody. That that meets the gap. But, but equally, we've we've stepped in and helped with interview processes and things like that to help our clients find the the right candidates to to fill roles that they have in house. So okay.
James Hodges:So I mean, the education piece really starts with that, with that assessment tool that we spoke about at the start of the process, and then, depending on the route they go down, there's a number of different uh frameworks, methods, processes, whatever that you can do to help the client. You, once the client has um, selected you guys for the transformational program, do you find there's still pushback? When you're trying to help educate the client based on um scenarios that you've seen over the years, you can see that they're going to get themselves into a particular situation and you're trying to say, look, I've seen this happen twice before recently. If you don't make these changes, then this is very likely to happen in three, four or five months. How often do they just say cool, joe, we'll take your word for it, let's do that. Versus, how often do they say, no, well, we think we know best and we're going to do it this way because that's what we want to do.
Wendy Isaacs:Yeah, it's always hard. You can take a horse to Walter but you can't make it drink. And you know we're not arrogant enough to kind of think that that we're right all the time and that we know the customer's business better than they know themselves. They'll have constraints and fears and things that that they need to to work within. So you know, there's only so far you can sort of push your opinion or experience and ultimately it we really respect that the customer's right to to choose. Um, I guess the way we would kind of mitigate it from a baltic point of view is we would make sure that through our status reporting and our risk management processes that those things have kind of been surfaced and are really clear and they're going out to wider stakeholders. So you know, here was a recommendation, this is why we made this recommendation, but ultimately the customer decided X, y and Z for this reason. So you know there's a little bit of. Well, you know we want to make sure that at least it was surfaced and everybody had an opportunity to feel heard.
Wendy Isaacs:But we don't have to feel that we're right all the time or that we've won or anything like that. You know we're right all the time or that we've won or anything like that. You know, it's a we're kind of long-term partners. Everything that we kind of do, we we hope that we're doing it from a good place. That isn't just about, you know, can Valtech win more work? But it's. We genuinely believe that the thing that we're recommending, based on our experience, is the right thing for a customer. But if they kind of go, no, we're absolutely not going to do that, then we're like, okay, well, fine, let's um, let's try and work with what we have or let's try and manage that risk a different way or mitigate it this way.
James Hodges:So yeah, well, I think you shunned up. Well, there, you can take a horse of water, but you can't make it drink. And and, like you said, you don't always need to be need to be right or wrong. It's just very much a case of, like this is what we're advising. Um, you go and you're the customer, you do what you think is best, but, having been doing these for a very, very long time, we think you might run into these problems later down the line.
Wendy Isaacs:Um, and that's, that's all you can do, right and sometimes sometimes hands are tied right, sometimes they go. We'd really love to do what you're suggesting, but we don't have the budget or we don't have the authority to hire the product manager that you're talking about, so we have to try and find a way to make it work within whatever constraints with with that yeah, okay pragmatic too exactly and just on that point.
James Hodges:And one of the last questions I have for you is uh, is the definition of a partnership and and as a third party? You always want to have a true partnership with your, with your clients, where there's complete trust and transparency and everything else. It's the same for us with our recruitment partners as well and our clients. But how many customers do you believe at the minute enter into an agreement with a third party as a true partner, versus how many of them are just kind of look at, go and get the job done and move on?
Wendy Isaacs:it's a good. It's a good question. I think there's a. There's a bit of a mix, um, so I think, um procurement processes. So if you kind of have really old, what I call old school procurement processes, they don't tend to set themselves up well for finding a really good long-term partner. You'll get a sort of a faceless rfp or something like that. Comes in, no opportunity to have a conversation, it's a nope, sorry, we can't talk to you. Here's a rfp brief and here's a excel spreadsheet with 300 questions that you kind of need to to ask. And yeah, you know, maybe you'll get to speak to us in a presentation space, but there's not room for that dialogue back and forth.
Wendy Isaacs:Um, I would love with a couple of customers that we work with. They still have procurement and it's still a fair, open process, but they include things like a workshop or something like that with a potential partner in that that procurement process. And that is so much better, I think, for all parties, because ultimately, if you're going to enter into a partnership as opposed to a sort of supplier customer relationship, it's, it's going to be long-lived. You're going to spend a lot of time together, you know, eight hours a day, five days a week probably more than you do with a lot of your family for however long the project lasts, um, knowing that the chemistry is right, knowing that you feeling like, is this somebody that I can work with? Like both ways for valtech and the customer is super important.
Wendy Isaacs:Do we have the same values? Are we going to be able to have honest conversations? Are we going to be able to hold each other to account when the going gets tough, is super, super important. So I think those sort of traditional procurement processes where it's you know, send out a bunch of stuff that someone has to fill out, maybe the you have a supplier who's got fantastic bid writers, who put together beautiful presentations, who roll out the aid team to do a presentation to you as the client, but that isn't the team that kind of rock up to play the the match on to play the match of football on game day.
Wendy Isaacs:You know that we've all heard those stories a lot yeah, my recommendation would be it's like before you make a decision about who you're going to appoint, like, try and get in there and have that conversation and go. Are we aligned? Do we? Are they talking the right language? Is the chemistry there? Does this feel like someone we can work with? Because it will be a much better experience for everybody if.
Wendy Isaacs:If you kind of build that partnership and obviously you can't just say, you know, trust me, I'm now your partner it comes over time.
Wendy Isaacs:So these, these great partnerships, you know some of the, the, the clients that we have, um, certainly in vault at uk now, a sort of multi-year, I think 10 year plus relationships for some of them.
Wendy Isaacs:And you know our teams are almost so embedded in there they know the client better than the client knows themselves sometimes.
Wendy Isaacs:But it's taken a while to kind of build that trust in the team. And I guess from my perspective, the best scenarios and the best teams is where you can kind of walk into a room that you've never walked into before with a project team and you genuinely can't tell who in the room is from the client side, who in the room is from the, the Valtech side, or maybe even you know sometimes we're working in multi, multi-vendor situations it just feels like a team working together and you don't you know, if you have that supplier, customer, you know you're in this space, you're in this space. It's never as good as that long lived partnership. So for me personally, I'm much happier and more comfortable when we're working, in that you know I've got your best interests at heart. I'm not going to stitch you up on trading your money like my own, and if I'm having a difficult conversation with you or delivering bad news it's because I kind of I care yeah, and I need to do it.
James Hodges:Yeah, yeah, yeah, the the part that got me there was when you said about the faceless rfps and I, uh, I I think back to season four, when we were speaking to customer side leaders that have gone through change, substantial change, and over half of them spoke about the relationship between them and the third party being absolutely key to successful transformation and, regardless of a company's capabilities, that's to be expected when you're in this space.
James Hodges:It's about the people, and how do you get to know the people that you're going to be working with from a faceless RFP? Now, I fully appreciate you can't go to RFP for multiple third parties and invest half a day to a day in running workshops and meeting all of them, but there has to be a better way in which you can understand the people, or you can see who you're going to potentially be working with up front to start making decision making process. Um, because it's clear from all of my conversations that is one of the most important factors when it comes to successful transformation, and you've just some. You've just said the same thing yourself, so, yeah, so, yeah, there we go and ultimately you're going to spend a lot of money.
Wendy Isaacs:You're going to spend a lot of time if you genuinely can't spend. You know, even if it's five potential vendors and you'd have to do a one hour workshop with them, if you really can't spend five hours up front to talk to people before making a multi-million pound multi-year partnership decision, probably the balance is a little bit wrong yeah, I mean, when you put it that way, it sounds.
James Hodges:It sounds crazy, right, it's certainly. Uh, um, an investment of time, I think, is well worth making. Um, even two hours of each 10 hours, it's a long working day, right it's. It's not a lot in the grand scheme of things, and over the course of a transformation as well. It's very small, so so, okay, all right. Well, I think, um, yeah, I think that probably draws in a nice end to the conversation.
Wendy Isaacs:Thank you, wendy put the world to rights certainly did now.
James Hodges:I really enjoyed it. Thank you for joining me. Um, and yeah, look, I hope everyone that's listening has enjoyed it as well. Um, thanks again for joining us and um, yeah, I look forward to seeing you all again soon. Thank you very much.
