...And what you can do about it.

The statistics of failed transformations have barely changed in the past decade. Why has it become so difficult to break through? 

A recent McKinsey study found that c-level leaders hit a ceiling when extracting value from a work transformation. Of those polled, less than 32% had improved organizational performance, and those that had improved captured an average of only 37% of the initiative’s potential benefit. 

There are two obstacles limiting your ability to grow.

1. Data misrepresentation

Do you ask your operations or implementations teams; “when are we going live?” or “when will this be delivered?” If so, you have revenue gaps. The faster you onboard a new customer, the faster you recognize revenue. Process consistency makes scaling easier, and ultimately increases margins. Closing a revenue gap, however, is impossible without an accurate representation of live operational data.

• For example, if you issue a revenue forecast with flawed delivery dates, it will fail to identify work surges that put your already lean technical staff over capacity. 
• Burnout will cause quiet quitting and further delays. 
• The shortage of skilled workers will cause a (difficult and expensive) rush to hire. 
• Cascading delays like onboarding will bleed into other projects.
• Costs spiral while revenue, reliant on operational throughput, stays stagnant.

Do you want to know, right now, that in 63 days your newest key account’s onboarding will face a major delay? Or do you want to wait 62 days while the issue lays dormant and then scramble with 7 hours of notice?

Processes are dynamic. The data that feeds operations is dynamic. But decisions are made based on static, point-in-time information. 

What you can do: leverage live, interconnected data

Interconnected, real-time data enables you to hone estimates and processes to become more predictable. Imagine if your team could see, in real time, that a key engineer has a capacity conflict. They could instantly see who else is available, or prioritize that person’s work, preventing burnout and infighting over resources while accelerating delivery (and ultimately revenue) throughput.

The closer forecasting can be driven by live operational data, the more teams can quickly learn and improve their performance. Expect to see these contributions to growth:

1. Resourcing and forecasting decisions become more accurate and reliable, leading to revenue recognition consistency.
2. Departmental silos erode, opening paths to holistic process improvement and cost efficiencies.
3. Process throughput accelerates as obstructions are identified and rooted out, shortening time-to-revenue.
4. Access to centralized and synchronized data leads to fact-based decisions, removing obstacles (including those with customers who are often a roadblock to their own onboarding). 

When your systems are connected, showing how one change impacts your work environment, you maximize throughput with insight to make faster decisions.

2. Finding and fixing operational issues

Operational plans break on day one. They rely on thousands of details, calculations, and fluctuating tasks and schedules that all change by the minute. We addressed the live, interconnected data, but how can you find the root causes and patterns causing revenue gaps? It is impossible for a person to scan every detail that goes into a portfolio of projects and react as they change, but it is easy for an AI.

What you can do: Apply AI to achieve what’s humanly impossible 

If change is constant, and operations change from the start, then what we need is a way to continuously monitor details across a portfolio of customer programs, projects, schedules, and data points; a way to check the math.  

Today, your options are limited to looking at plans and believing them to be true representations of how the operations will play out.

A connected AI, however, will continuously monitor your programs and processes for structural flaws. You don’t have to ask the data warehouse team or the analytics team to run reports. You can look at it any time, and it will be up-to-the-minute accurate, flagging issues instantly.

With operations that are updated constantly by an AI (that can perform an unlimited number of calculations and never has to go home to rest) you sit at the seat of real knowledge. There is no need to guess – or pad estimates for uncertainty. You staff exactly who you need to staff, at the right time, you know exactly how to adjust course, and you know exactly how to hone your processes, ultimately unlocking new growth.