The Story: Simplifying the Complex
I went to business school while working full-time at Jersey Bell. I studied feverishly on all the "real-world" case studies and got pretty good at nailing down the "root cause" of the business issue. As my career continued to develop, I had a sharp awakening however when I realized at best I could have a portion of the answer, but collaborating on complex business issues always resulted in a better solution.
Flash forward to my career managing real estate for Verizon/Bell Atlantic, then starting a consulting engineering practice in Washington, DC for WB Engineers+Consultants, I also realized that business unit decision makers and stakeholders come from all walks of life. However, there was one thing they all had in common – they all had a need to become an educated consumer. This sounds easy enough, but there's actually a lot more to it, particularly when it comes to corporate real estate, for it to be a collaborative process where each stakeholder's voice is heard.
From business school and my experience trying to gain consensus with senior-level executives, I knew there was merit in developing a strategy to address complex issues while providing the team with the ability to speak in one voice of the customer. There were just a few challenges to making this happen:
- The service delivery teams struggled to fully understand the owner's dilemma and the challenges they faced within and without the organization. They were challenged to provide advice and deliver on what they thought was best for the client with a commoditized process that didn't leave room for business objective exploration. Some also wrongfully assume that the client is the decision-maker where corporate governance actually defines financial approvals by the client's senior leadership.
- The corporate client needed information from planning and program development to site selection through acquisition to design and implementation to name a few. All of which can be overwhelming. This, coupled with the career risk of unexamined assumptions, communicating up to senior executives with limited understanding and insight, while ensuring the internal business unit customers and peers are fully communicated with can be daunting.
After being on both sides several times - the service provider and the owner - and with the help of some of the best industry professionals, we have developed a tool that offers a balanced perspective so both sides win. Our tool collaboratively identifies all decision criteria (quantitative and qualitative), rates and ranks them against the various options and presents them graphically in an easy to interpret form that helps everyone see the trends and relationships with the decisions at hand.