What was been an interesting outcome of this current crisis?
We’ve observed that data at all leadership levels has been more important than ever. The insights our clients have gotten from our Operational Excellence software has played a large role in helping them manage the crisis swiftly and efficiently, allowing crystal clear pin-point solutions for action across even the highest levels of management.
They’ve been able to driving for results effectively, redeploy staff and even see a dramatic increase in workloads (fig. 1), with one example in the finance sector achieving a spike in work from an average of 75 hours for a particular team to 747 hours – a nearly 1000% increase within this period.
How does the Single Source of Truth ideology enable these results?
It’s allowed our clients to very quickly understand what are the meaningful metrics for this period and then take the data to look internally for the skills and tools they need. This means they’ve been able to learn from this experience in a way that’s going to help when we shift back to a more traditional form of working, having uncovered opportunities to drive results that may not have been as obvious before.
Our clients are moving through the phases of crisis management really quickly and there’s definitely a sense of readying for a return to business as usual. Initially, it was about exercising their business continuity plans and focusing on critical activities but they were able to transition rapidly into the second phase and look at identifying and upskilling staff and now, the data shows that for most cases, we’re well into the third phase where clients are stabilising the newly expanded workforce and delving into performance and quality metrics.
What are some critical lessons from this period?
We’re hearing from our clients that having been able to explore in-depth the impact of the new working model, this increased workplace flexibility is here to stay in many industries. Business metrics have become more targeted rather than overcomplicated and a lot of senior leadership has become more involved in operational management, giving them better context for high-level decisions.
Following the crisis, from the feedback we’re getting, I expect to see a period of growth in the use of Enlighten’s Operational Excellence software as clients put a greater emphasis on driving for results and having better visibility on true business performance, especially in identifying exactly where capacity has to be allocated (Fig. 2).
