#2

It has become increasingly difficult to predict the way that we as humans will actually relate to these new technological innovations. You look at for instance, in 2006, our moms would tell us to never get in a stranger’s car, and to not talk to strangers on the Internet. Now we use the Internet to find strangers and get in their cars. That shift in human behaviors and expectations was impossible to predict.

For our clients and their businesses, they have to deal with the reality that technology is extremely disruptive because the price-performance is improving so fast and human behavior is hard to predict. These two factors contribute to disruption.

So the value of speed has increased substantially. How do you get ideas into market as quickly as possible? How do you pivot when you realize your guess around how customers would react is not exactly correct? To really orient around customer behavior, how do you do all of these things?

But most businesses aren’t geared for that. Most are geared for a world in which change has been much slower and more episodic.

Think about the way we used to manage projects. Every project manager would manage three variables: time, scope and cost. How long will something take to do? What is it that we’re doing? Tell me exactly what the requirements are, which is the scope. How much is this going to cost? Project managers have had this trifecta drilled into them from the time they started their careers. But in this world in which change is continuous, that management system is not working well. The reason is quite simple.

When you think about trying to nail down what it is that you have to build, scope, essentially you do a lot of analysis up front. You do a lot of analysis that you might never use. By the time you actually get to building all of the things you thought you needed to build, the world has changed around you or customer expectations have changed.

When you think about time, any good project manager worth her salt is going to add buffer, which actually makes you slow because the project expands in size to fill all that available buffer. And same with cost, we tend to add buffer to the budgets and all of that buffer is consumed, as Parkinson predicted.

So what if instead of focusing on time, scope and cost, we focus on speed—how fast can we go from an idea all the way to putting it into the world—into business and into customer’s hands? How can we do that with quality so that whenever we do that, we are not breaking things? In addition, how do we make sure we’re not just completing the scope but delivering the value to the customers and to the business?

When you make this shift to speed, quality and value, you gain the ability to move at the speed of disruptive change in the face of uncertainty. Shifting the steering system from time, scope and cost to speed, quality and value is easy to say, it’s not that easy to do. This shift is the essence of what we’ve engineered into our HOW. We help our clients go from ideals around transformation all the way to delivering transformation at scale with this new steering system.

When we talk about quality, what are we measuring?

Are we simply measuring defects in the software-development process as many companies do? Are we measuring how effective the experiences we design are, or the strategies that we come up with in the C-suite?

How do you change the notion of how you are measuring value?

Not just in terms of internal proxies but value as defined by the customer and shareholder. How do you switch the orientation from internal outputs to external outcomes?

You can only do that if you develop a measurement system and you have all of the people who are involved in the product development process focus on the same set of measures and now change their behaviors and response to this new metric system. You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Former Publicis Sapient CTO John Maeda talked about the LEAD framework. In that framework, he proposes that great experiences exhibit four essential qualities—Light, Ethical, Accessible and Dataful.

What is phenomenal about the framework is it really measures beautifully the effectiveness of the products we create, and also scales well to how we work. We can measure our ways of working and democratize these with metrics dashboards. Everyone from people who are working on the nuts and bolts of inventing and building these journeys and experiences through to executive management -- knows how we are progressing along LEAD metrics. By making work visible and measurable, it allows everyone to improve and know how to ride this new bicycle.

Our PS HOW packages all this into methods and tools for rapid change. Our HOW is our recipe for digital business transformation. It enables the shifts our clients must make to connect customer value to business strategy, experience to brand. It moves clients’ steering systems from episodic projects that optimize time, scope and cost to lean product thinking that emphasizes speed, quality and value. With our PS HOW, your business will have the tools and capabilities to make itself ever-relevant.