The Mission of Our Solutions Group: Becoming a True Business Partner
In this new episode of the ‘’Applied Digital’’ podcast, we meet Gabrielle Garand, Product Owners’ Team Lead, and Charles-Olivier Levasseur, Solutions Director, to talk about the partner relationship we establish between our Solutions Group (product managers, solutions architects, project managers and solutions managers) and our different clients. Enjoy!
Identifying, Understanding, and Translating Objectives
As partners to our clients, our role is to truly understand their real needs and goals: this starts right at the beginning of our first discussions and meetings.
For example, the client will sometimes articulate a need in the form of a digital solution: ‘’Our role is then to take a step back to really understand the concrete goals, and to define the multiple users who will use this solution’’, explains Charles-Olivier. Indeed, there are many stakeholders beyond the final user since internal collaborations can also benefit from the solution.
Before jumping into describing features, we must ask ourselves all these questions to best position our teams to meet these objectives.
In fact, the strategy and discovery phase are often very useful for this: we get the opportunity to group all data and eventually do research to ensure each of these points are well thought-out.
Once the structure is established, it becomes much easier to get the project’s true vision and value.
Listen also to this episode: Mapping the Client Pathway
A Human Partnership
’’We not only start our collaboration between two companies, but also among several people‘’, shares Gabrielle. We need to ensure we fully understand the role of each person to work efficiently. Many workshops are organized throughout the collaboration to facilitate practices and information exchange.
During these discussions, it is important to align ourselves with internal processes, but also to identify experts: back-end development, inventory management, customer service, finance team, etc. To list needs and explain processes, our experts may need to interact with many teams.
To guarantee the digital solution’s success, the members of the Solutions Group must also raise the team’s awareness on internal change management and on the project follow-up throughout its duration.
Determining the Decision Process
One of the aspects that can significantly complexify or simplify a project’s progress is the decision process. For instance, at each sprint end, our teams present their work’s progress and how the needs are met. At that time, it is crucial that the clients’ feedback be harmoniously formulated so that our teams can, in return, prioritize the next sprint’s tasks.
So, a clear decision process must be established in the client’s teams to continuously move forward.
Supporting Teams to Ensure Success
Beyond the creation of an efficient digital solution, we must assist the client’s different teams to guarantee project success.
Therefore, we can meet several teams:
- The marketing team, to confirm a launch plan or a communication plan or even to create content for the solution;
- The analytics team, to find all necessary data to analyze to optimize the solution;
- The administrative teams, including the finance department, who receives all the invoices and who can interact with the digital solution.
The list of examples varies in proportion to the number of projects, but our teams find it important to listen to each person’s challenges and needs, to then address them in the digital solution.
To know more about this topic, listen to our podcast now. Enjoy!