Context

A Large Electric Utility company ($15B+ ARR) is preparing to embark on a multi-year enterprise transformation journey to enhance their core systems, reinvent both back and front-office processes, and ultimately go-to-market in a new, digitally-driven way. This cross-functional effort will take place over the course of many years to come, and will require the close collaboration of leaders across Operations, Finance, IT, and more.

My Role

As an Experience Manager, my role was to manage a small team of designers, analysts, and strategic facilitators to deliver an intensive 1-day workshop to establish a unified vision and guiding principles for the enterprise transformation. This workshop would involve 20+ cross-functional leaders, who would serve as the core team driving the transformation.

With a 6 week runway before the session, I worked with my team, client sponsors, and client account managers to define a concrete set of desired outcomes: Establish a first-team mentality amongst the participants, align on a unified vision of success, and establish a set of guiding principles that the team would adhere to throughout the transformation. To meet those objectives, I established and drove a project plan which included a series of stakeholder interviews to understand various perspectives going into the session, market research activities to identify and incorporate best practices from transformations within and outside of the industry, and a series of working sessions to develop the content which would be used to facilitate the session and gain buy-in from client and internal stakeholders.

On the day of the workshop I kept us moving smoothly through a packed agenda, which included insight and guidance from a panel of cross-industry leaders who had successfully navigated similar transformations, a series of exercises designed to rapidly brainstorm and gain alignment on a set of guiding principles and critical success factors, and a set of compelling anecdotes from the world of team sports to illustrate the importance of a first-team mentality. The breakthrough success of the session came when the participants all agreed that what we had accomplished in this 1-day session was a microcosm of their shared vision of the transformation itself - breaking down siloes and making corporate success feel more like a team sport. Following the session, we received feedback that the participants were still talking about the experience months later, that the executive summary document we produced had become a core document driving the transformation, and that we had opened the door for Deloitte to become a key partner in the transformation journey, an opportunity representing $40MM+ in ARR.