Collaborating across boundaries: lessons from experience

I know of no large company where the answers to these questions are an unequivocal yes. But increasingly cross-unit collaboration is becoming a critical strategic imperative, and a lot of companies are actively seeking out new ways of raising their game in this area.

Here is an example of how a large division of Siemens sought to develop a new integrated offering for its global customers. Or, rather, it is the story of one mid-ranking manager, Christian Doll, who took it upon himself to help Siemens develop such an offering. Like many corporate entrepreneurs before him, Doll pursued an opportunity that went way beyond his formal job description. He made some mistakes, but he did some clever and innovative things, and ultimately the project was a success. There are lessons for all of us in Christian Doll’s Service Sourcing Project.

The strategic challenge

Doll worked for Siemens IT Solutions and Services (SISS), a 40,000-person division of Siemens competing in the enormous IT services sector, against the likes of Infosys, Accenture and EDS. In 2007, he was assigned to a large bid where the client was asking Siemens to provide on-site services (for handling technical problems) in 100 countries. And as he recalled, “we did not have these technicians in our organisation.” While the bid team eventually made this project a success, Doll felt it was a complex and high-risk game they were playing. “I wanted to do something about this, to avoid the situation occurring again.”

How might Siemens have done things differently? “Developing a proposal for new business can be complex. It’s vital to engage with potential third party service partners as early as possible in the proposal development process. The process draws on different skills, roles and input from various departments. We need input from procurement, the delivery organisation, solution design, key customer account teams, legal support, quality audits, risk management etc. Then, after contracts are signed, we have to deliver on our promise, which again involves multiple functions working together.

“Our business wasn’t set up to do this efficiently. We had limited experience in this area. The bid development process was thus far more complicated than it should have been. This was the challenge that I wanted to address.”

Consider, for a moment, the magnitude of this challenge: Doll wanted to get eight internal divisions of Siemens to collectively rethink the way they would work with external providers. There may be tougher management challenges out there – reworking a bank’s compensation system comes to mind – but this is just about as tricky as it gets. And consider, also, that this was not Doll’s official job, it was simply something he felt was sufficiently important that it needed to be done anyway. “It was not my job to think about processes across the organisation; it was my job to design services for customer needs,” he recalls.

Building and focusing the team

Doll began canvassing his colleagues, beginning with his boss. He approached some 20 people in different roles below Board level. All of them agreed that the sourcing and management of third party service providers needed to become more professional, and they offered help. This buy-in from key stakeholders was crucial for getting the project off the ground. “The main challenges at this early stage were to approach the right stakeholder at the right time and to convince colleagues about the approach we planned to use during the project.  This buy-in ensured that both the project team and steering/advisory boards were defined. Managers allocated employees to the project team and volunteered to be members of the boards.”

While sanctioned at corporate level, the project team members also had to continue with their day jobs. Much of the work was undertaken ‘out of hours’ because local legislation prohibited employees working more than 40 hours a week. “It had to be designed in such a way that everyone really liked what they were being tasked to do. Without this enthusiasm, why would they give up their spare time?”

At around the same time, a new team was set up to manage the operational aspects of working with external partners. While this began to address the ‘delivery’ aspects of third party relationships, it still left open the issue of how best to engage with subcontractors early on. The focus of Doll’s project was thus sharpened: to propose a new model for the sourcing of services from the external market. The team agreed to come up with a vision and strategy, with a specific focus on field services.

Prototyping the future

Using ideas from his MBA, Doll used a standard process with six key steps: Knowledge exchange using mood boards and storytelling; Ideas generation; Modelling and discussion; Prototyping; Feedback (road shows); and Finalisation of the prototype.

But he also decided to push some slightly unusual ideas, especially in the area of visualising and prototyping new ideas.  “I decided to use Lego™ building blocks to help model the service processes in 3D. Often it is hard to express something abstract or complex in words, so I asked the team members to build a model, a prototype, out of Lego. While it’s not a new idea, it was certainly something that provoked a reaction in the team members.

“The first time the Lego bricks came on the table, people were really confused – we are playing with Lego, is that leading to anything? So I came up with a very small Lego model, where I showed how the top-level process might look; and with that they understood and it became an important part of our work.

“Everybody was buying in except one person. He couldn’t get beyond the idea of Lego as a children’s toy, preferring instead to illustrate our business concepts in PowerPoint. His was the only real dissenting voice. I had a tough discussion with him, in front of the others, and at the end the others felt trust in my approach and they wanted to try it out. The guy who was not happy to work with Lego never again showed up in the project.”

Doll has no doubt about the value of using prototypes. “Working with prototypes in a trial and error-mode and involving stakeholders along the whole project lifecycle can help to reduce uncertainty. As a result the risk of failure can be significantly reduced. Nowadays there are several tools available to generate prototypes. Lego is just one of them.”

Selling the concept

While the value of using the Lego prototypes was clear to the team, they didn’t know how it would look to the steering and advisory boards. As Doll recalls, “Everybody was worried: how would management react if they see a big Lego town on the meeting table?

Doll sensibly got some early buy-in: he showed the Lego town to one senior member of the steering board. “At first this executive was shocked, but I took him through the logic and he liked the idea. He gave me the backing I needed to sell it to the others”. In fact, during one board meeting, the Lego prototype helped to push things forward: “I remember one board meeting where they were first confused, but then the most senior guy on the board said, thank you for using Lego, now I understand better what your ideas are about, but I am encouraging you to be more crazy; it’s too soft, too conventional at the moment.” So in further workshops the team developed the service concepts still further: for example, a Global On-Site Services (GOSS) structure was put forward for managing service contracts with service providers in the delivery phase.

But the Lego prototype also proved to be something of a distraction when Doll presented the final project findings to the steering board. He was given an hour to convey the project findings. He worked up a PowerPoint presentation and, to help clarify things, and he brought the prototype with him to the meeting. “I wanted to explain the main ideas using the sophisticated Lego prototype, but there was one person on the Board who I was not able to brief up front. She raised an issue that was not part of my presentation and that killed the whole presentation. I spoke to one of them afterwards, asking where I had gone wrong, and he said, the prototype is good for fostering discussions, but that is not what you want in a Board presentation. That was a lesson.”

What were the outcomes? Despite the problems at the final Board meeting, many of the ideas were implemented. The details are confidential, but they included novel ways of pre-selecting service providers and defining a “best and final offer” to the customer, as well as clarity around who should start an engagement. Some of the more ambitious ideas did not work out – for example one idea to use open-source principles for delivering field services was deemed too radical.

Responsibility for implementing these ideas was handed over to the manager responsible for service delivery to external providers. Some members of the project team joined that group, which by 2011 numbered 50 people. Doll himself moved out of Siemens IT Solutions and Services in 2010 and joined Siemens Corporate Technologies, an internal consulting group helping the company to be more innovative.

Lessons

The power of collaboration. Large organisations don’t make collaboration easy. But for a business like Siemens IT Solutions and Services, effective collaboration isn’t optional – it is the essence of what it is offering its customers. So projects like the one Christian Doll put together will have to be become the norm. In reflecting on his experience, Doll observed, “Our project convinced me that drawing on stakeholder input to gather information, combined with prototyping and mood boards, really can bring new ideas to fruition.”

Prototyping accelerates innovation. Karl Weick’s famous dictum “How can I know what I think until I see what I have said?” reminds us that innovation is an iterative process, not a linear one. We try something out, we make sense of it, and then we try something else. Prototyping is essentially a way of accelerating the natural cycle of invention, development and reflection. As Doll observes, “The creation of knowledge is an important discipline; prototypes can be used in several phases to share new ideas. It’s true that building a 3D prototype for an intangible product might seem strange at first, but it is a powerful enabler as the project progresses since it helps to overcome misunderstandings.”

Navigating the corporate Immune System. Life as a corporate entrepreneur is never dull: Christian Doll saw himself navigating through a “corporate immune system” that seeks to reject alien bodies and it is testament to his tenacity and skill that he survived. The tactics he employed are well known: he made a compelling case for change, he got early buy in from his boss, he built advisory boards to co-opt potential detractors into the project, and he neutralised the threat from those who didn’t like his approach. But he made mistakes as well, and he was agile enough to adapt his project accordingly.

Something old, something new. One specific challenge Doll faced was how radical the project should be. If he had broken too many rules, the corporate immune system would have rejected him; but if he had done things entirely in the traditional way, nothing novel or interesting would have emerged from the project. The Lego-based prototype was a case in point: he took a risk in pushing it and it helped the team come up with creative ideas, but it also disrupted his final Board presentation. Corporate entrepreneurs, it seems, have to be conformists and mavericks at the same time – they need to judge which rules to break, and which ones to follow.

It goes without saying that the Service Sourcing project was risky, but in Doll’s view the value it created far outweighed any potential negatives. He concludes: “This approach to innovation can help to reinvent both a company and its products as it copes with competition in a constantly changing environment.”