Six Steps to Successful Procurement Transformations – Step 6: Enjoy the Journey

October 22, 2017 by Benj Street

This series looks at the key considerations in transforming your procurement function and building a modern, fit for purpose, procurement function.  This can look very different in different organisations depending on the goals of the business, the industry, and the maturity of the team.  This step is all about bringing it together and having fun.

Equipped with a solid understanding of your customers’ strategy, understanding of where you are now, a prioritised plan to be able to help deliver the strategy and a great team to help you do it with, what else do you need to know?  In our experience, the little things make a big difference to the success of a transformation project.  This includes building a sense of fun and competition into the team dynamics.  Gamification links all these elements to engage stakeholders involved in the transformation.  Employing a relevant reward and recognition strategy tied to common project goals and outcomes is one way to do this. Gamification of activities, goals and objectives will foster employee and stakeholder engagement and reduce the resistance to change.  Lots of resources are available to include gamification into your programme, please get in touch for more help on this.  Some areas to focus on are:

• Problem solving, root cause analysis, innovation, feedback and proactive suggestions are important for a successful transformation program. However, participation can be disparate, disconnected, uncoordinated and non-voluntary, especially in large organisations. Use of gamified crowd-sourced idea portals and gamified social innovation tools can help stakeholders to contribute, rate and segregate ideas. This can significantly impact overall involvement and outcomes.
• Positive user perception, wide-spread adoption and active involvement will make the transformation initiative a success and ‘WOW’ with an incredible experience. An improved process with an excellent customer experience is vital.  But, gamification will seal the deal by attracting users and creating a ‘sticky’ factor while making the whole experience ‘fun’. Gamification initiatives such as ‘Loyalty’ programs, ‘Points and Badges’, in-app games or surprise rewards will encourage users to use the new service.  They will also keep them hooked to come back for more.
• Provide plenty of training. Try and not use traditional training courses, but mix it up with gamified learning, assessments and recognition of achievements.
• Transformation works best when using an incremental and iterative development cycle with a continual feedback loop. Capturing feedback is as important as the program itself.  But getting timely responses can be a challenge when using some of the traditional methods such as interviews, meetings or lengthy forms. Gamified surveys with relevant rewards can be rolled out with every delivery milestone, to encourage involvement.
• An analytical model that operates on data captured can provide deep insights into the psyche and behaviour of each stakeholder. For example, aggregated insights from assessments can provide inputs for training needs, whereas level of activity on idea and innovation portals can provide insights about the level of involvement by individuals/teams/demographic etc.

Please let us know what you think, and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.  We love hearing stories of successful transformations, so let us know how you get on!