Author: Shlomo Swidler

After enjoying initial success, a mid-sized tech company in the San Francisco Bay Area began faltering in the face of bold competition and an increasingly crowded market. The company’s R&D was encumbered by numerous shortcuts taken to patch up issues and could no longer deliver value as rapidly as their customers demanded.

In our work with the CEO we pinpointed the essential elements for his operation to regain its innovative spark. We realigned the priorities of the business, shifting investment away from underperforming areas and toward a streamlined R&D process. We helped the client take the unprecedented step of ceasing new R&D efforts for a period of six months in order to clean house. Along the way, we ensured that short-term thinking did not imperil these investments. After this period we restored normal operation.

As a result, within ten months the company quickly regained its position as an innovator in the market. The company achieved a 90% reduction in time to market and began delivering new value to customers at a pace unrivaled by their competitors. As a result of its improved reputation as an innovator the company was able to increase sales dramatically and attract new talent.

In late 2010, KT, South Korea’s second-largest mobile phone network operator, was in the process of launching three IaaS clouds and transforming itself into the first cloud service provider in Korea. Executive management, middle management, and line staff were unfamiliar with the ramifications of this transformation and sought the advice of a seasoned consultant and cloud expert.

KT engaged the services of Orchestratus, led by Shlomo Swidler. Shlomo acted as IaaS Product Manager and Cloud Application Architect. Shlomo diagnosed these specific challenges:

• An unfamiliar target market. IaaS is consumed directly by system administrators and developers – a very different audience than KT’s usual customer, mobile phone consumers and corporate IT departments. KT needed to ensure the cloud services would appeal to its potential customers, and to ensure it could effectively sell to this audience.
• Appropriate tools, processes, and skills. Operating IaaS demands updated tools, processes, and skills in order provide reliable service – which KT lacked.
• Technical expertise. KT needed to migrate existing applications into its clouds in order to benefit from the cloud’s elasticity and agility and in order to develop their own PaaS offerings, but lacked the expertise to do so.

In order to ensure the service would appeal to its potential customers Shlomo shifted R&D’s priorities to focus on the areas with greatest customer impact. He educated KT’s sales and pre-sales engineering teams to understand the cloud customer’s concerns. To internal and external developers, Shlomo evangelized cloud-appropriate application architecture and solved application-specific design issues for application scalability and elasticity. He mentored R&D teams to guide the design and development of PaaS services. Shlomo also set guidelines for the most reliable service level guarantees KT could provide.

With Shlomo’s help, the KT Cloud Service Business Unit successfully released its IaaS services on schedule and won significant customer adoption. Hundreds of employees were trained to operate the service, to support customers, and to sell effectively. High-profile applications were successfully reengineered to use the cloud service, saving millions of dollars in hardware costs. And KT’s reputation as the leader in Korean cloud was firmly established.

“I feel like we’ve been stuck for the past year and a half,” the director said. 18 months prior, the startup company he founded was acquired by a large multinational firm. All twenty employees chose to carry on as members of the new corporate division, and the director went from being a controlling partner in his own business to being a middle manager. Since then, the director had overseen the integration of his product into the parent company’s offering. But the startup spirit had gone: his team could no longer deliver product improvements rapidly, nor could they delight customers with fast complaint turnaround time – and employees were increasingly frustrated at having their hands tied. Market share had fallen, and a new competitor had begun to make significant inroads. The director was concerned that his organization was losing its ability to innovate where it mattered most: for the customer.

Shlomo worked closely with the director to determine the underlying causes of his organization’s stagnation and to remedy them. Through a brief series of interviews with the staff, Shlomo quickly discovered that the organization was expending an inordinate amount of effort internally focused, at the expense of externally visible initiatives. In addition, the organization had become very inflexible, following rigid processes that were not suited to rapid turnaround. Shlomo coached the director and his team to restore a sense of engagement and excitement about their work. He helped the director “manage up,” explaining to his peers and management chain the harm that the current approach had done to the business, showing what they could do to support a turnaround, and gaining their commitment to help. Shlomo and the director jointly created specific initiatives to increase the organization’s customer involvement, restore employee empowerment, and realign their values toward flexibility and external focus.

After several weeks it was clear that a remarkable change in the organization was happening. Team members reported feeling more supported by other departments. The director gained the trust and influence among his managers and peers to elicit their support for his initiatives. The organization now resolved more customer-reported issues in a single week than they had previously closed in an entire quarter. New product updates were now delivered in under 24 hours. And within several more weeks, customers began noticing too: several customers expanded their use of the product specifically crediting the newly introduced improvements and the speed and stability with which they were delivered. Over the next few quarters the director recorded a marked increase in sales. “It’s a completely new organization now – a much better one!” he said.