During my period in the Digital Strategy team at Aegon we identified as an organisation we’ve become very capable of implementing solutions that positively influence the bottom line but that we hit an invisible wall. Although the initiatives were successful from a silo perspective, several caused a rise in costs on other locations. For example the implementation of a new Customer Identity & Access Management service hit the initial target cost reduction on IT, but led to a major increase of calls.
Together with our customer journey expert I managed to create buy-in to create a disciplinary team to implement a triple diamond approach on our initiatives. Whereas the customer journey management discipline helped us identify issues and opportunities, the triple diamond will help us bring about positive change from a holistic standpoint.
The challenge that Aegon as an organisation brings is its diversity in how it approaches its digital service delivery. Across business units there are different configurations of how the IT is organised, how services are delivered, how decisions are made and how bottom line profit is received. Instead of attempting to immediately overturn these structures and enforce the triple diamond we chose to approach it differently starting with: “What kind of structures are already in place that we can use, connect or overtake to achieve this?”.
Most of the business units applied the Safe 5.0 methods to manage delivery & implementation with specific owners for it’s entire A to Z. Knowing we can’t change much in that part of the organisation we knew we had to make changes in the front. The positive thing about Safe 5.0 is that it forces a clear start and finish, pillars that we can build our triple diamond on. Other colleagues understood this too and were making attempts to build innovation funnels for their own silo’s. We invited these key stakeholders to join us in mapping out how exactly the organisation works when it coms to service development and helping us build our stakeholder network by identifying other key players.
After several iterations we al felt we had the following 3 items crystal clear:
We purposely focused on different kinds of metrics to help us create a clear dashboard to help us keep grip on our work and it’s impact.
At different locations of our organisation I started facilitating hands-on experiences for our colleagues to get accustomed to the triple diamond and the type of thinking that it comes with. From completely digital sessions during CoVID to special christmas themed sessions at the end of the year.
Each of these sessions focused on 3 key points:
Paralel I was working with my design team to create concrete cases on how this way of working has helped us learn what works best for our customers. With some designers it was fairly easy to persuade product owners and managers to support us in this new way of working. In other corners of the organisation where time and budget were a higher priority I aimed for supplying and coaching interns to introduce them to the triple diamond.
As the awareness of the organisation started to grow and buy-in was increasing I managed to facilitate the decision to create a dedicated multidisciplinary team to fully dedicate it self on working with the triple diamond. Consisting of a complaints coordinators, service designers customer journey expert, data analyst, marketeer and content manager. We approached it as a pilot team with the aim of creating a blue print for the other teams. From experience we know that this would most likely be more abstract than concrete but hope it will suffice to get the learning loop started.
Connecting to the Safe 5.0 methodology we started up doing PI planning events. To prepare we analysed different data sets and went around the organisation looking for potential workloads. We found many and by applying rational guess work we could prioritise them on impact vs effort. During the PI planning events we started at the highest priority work and together planned how we could apply the triple diamond approach creating a manageable way of working. At the end of each 2 week sprint and 3 month cycle we facilitated retrospectives to look back and learn how we could further iterate and improve on our way of working