Challenge
We were approached by this mission-driven organization to help them understand their current state processes and how they might be affecting their employee engagement. They are an industry-leading impact financial services fund bridging the gap between investors and underserved communities. As an organization, they operate in an all-hands-on-deck environment which has become increasingly challenging as team members design their own workarounds. Attrition also played a role in the workload becoming difficult and inconsistent. They wanted to document roles and responsibilities and gather tribal knowledge of the existing team and standardize how they were doing their jobs.
Additionally, they asked us to look at their current technology and offer suggestions on what might aid in creating a single source of truth for their client’s data. Their goal was to prepare the business for growth and add additional headcount in the coming months.
With over 10% attrition, and 18 different software interfaces, that were not stacked, managing the lifecycle of a fund was cumbersome. The current software setup required the individual teams to cobble information together, not knowing what or where the most current information was.
Approach
We began this engagement with our discovery phase. Discovery is a grassroots approach to understanding the current state of both processes and technology. The team shared with us their manual workarounds and ways they have managed their role and responsibilities when the technology given does not serve their needs.
Through process mapping, we helped the company gain an understanding of its complexity and identify technology best suited to implement a business process management (BPM) architecture. We also mapped out their technology stack to help them understand there was no single central source for client data creating a compartmentalized internal environment.
We discussed our findings and steps to mitigating their operational gaps. By deploying this strategy, they will optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of their business. We worked to create a unified technology stack with detailed documentation and systemized processes that staff will use to train and maintain their processes. At the end of our engagement, 17 core processes had been fully automated, and their data and reporting will be streamlined creating a significant impact on the company’s operations.
Results
We provided leadership with a detailed roadmap on how to scrub 20 years of data and migrate to a new appropriate technology stack. By stacking technology that works for the team and the business they can effectively identify KPIs and truly track and manage their success. Our plan provides a 46% increase in productivity and a 35% increase in authentic data, however, the processing time to produce that data will be 50% faster.
