Shift the focus
Shifting from a product-focused mindset to a customer-solutions-driven mindset was more than a strategic shift. It was also a cultural shift. Paul had to change the way his developers and salespeople thought about creating products and taking them to market.
At an established company like Compuware, with entrenched processes, the shift needs to first occur on a tectonic-plate level — at the absolute base of the company’s foundation.
There was a lot of prior inertia that Paul and the leadership team needed to rein in and redirect.
“It’s a very common trap for technology companies to fall into,” Paul says. “They become so enamored with their own technology, they often lose focus on what is going to be required to value for the customers in the marketplaces they serve.”
To shift the ground beneath the company, Paul started at the top. Compuware assembled a core group of business leaders from within the organization and proceeded to hold off-site sessions with the assembled team over the course of several months. In the sessions, the selected leaders began a frank, honest dialogue about where Compuware needed to go in the future and in which areas the company could build the most core-competency muscle.
Compuware’s leaders were quickly able to define areas of strength and sketch an outline for goal-setting across three periods, dubbed horizons one, two and three. Horizon one was defined as the immediate future.
“We identified horizon two as anything beyond that quarter, and horizon three as anything beyond that fiscal year,” Paul says. “So we started investing in the capabilities we defined with the understanding that this is how we were going to accelerate the business. It’s all about focus.”
After setting ground rules regarding strategy and time frames, Paul and the leadership team began to roll out the new company focus with a three-pronged strategy focused on communication, process and consistency.
The first leg of the communication process involved staying on the message, making sure that every manager was hammering home the idea of identifying customer problems and fashioning solutions to address those problems, then repeating the concept at every opportunity.
“We were consistent in our communication bulletins that we sent out, we developed a global online collaboration portal where we talk about the problems we are solving for our customers,” Paul says. “At many levels, we were communicating business problems and value creation in the same sentence or paragraph.”
The second leg was to focus on the company’s process of allocating people and resources, again placing a priority on creating value and solutions for the customer, as opposed to solely developing products.
“We created checkpoints where you could not pass unless you had the problem and the value creation solved first,” Paul says. “From there, we’d go into how the solution is supporting that.”
The third leg involved getting people at different levels and locations within the organization involved in promoting the messages. Paul and his leadership team couldn’t be in all places at all times, so as the cultural shift began to take root, the leaders closer to ground level began to play an integral role in making the messages stick with employees in every corner of Compuware.
“Some of our leaders got it right away,” Paul says. “Some of our leaders are new to the organization and didn’t have the history of ‘That’s not how we do things.’ So we got everyone on board through a relentless pursuit of consistency not only in communication but in discipline around the processes.
“What is very rewarding is to see our internal IT group or our research and development group, they won’t even start to do work now unless they understand how it supports the customer problem. When you have a clear articulation of a core strategy that you can then align everybody else behind, it is amazing the kind of leverage and agility that you can have when executing in the field. It is a very powerful business model.”
To make it happen in your organization, you need to build a strategy, build a team and build trust.
“The most important thing in all of this is focus,” Paul says. “Focus on a business strategy that is going to be effective. Then, by bringing in cross-functional key leadership from around the organization and starting to frame the conversation first, you then have the opportunity to come up with what you want to be when you grow up to the next level as an organization. Only once you’ve gotten that strategy figured out can you really start to make all the other decisions relative to aligning the organization around that strategy.
“So you get the focus, get the strategy right and then start cascading it through a series of effective communications and decisions that are consistent, and narrowing the organization down to what you believe you can be the best in the world at.”