I’m going to focus a few posts on strategy.  As strategists like Harvard’s Michael Porter (no relation) have noted, strategy makes or breaks your company.  If you haven’t thought through what you do and how you compete then your company will be impacted. More strategic firms will outmaneuver you while winning a larger share of the pie.  There’s a gap in how companies act strategically..  In healthcare, we see this frequently but it’s a problem across all industries.  They tend to get lost in the implementation of their business strategy and devolve too quickly into ineffectual tactical projects.

The Story

Many consulting firms do great works as strategists.  I have seen some really good output that described the challenges and defined strategic focus and steps a business should take.  This output usually comes in a lengthy and beautiful PowerPoint presentation that brings home the key points.  It usually ends with a summary that shows the 3-5 steps that company should take.   This is a valuable step. It forms the start of a new approach for your organizations hiring, investment, and go to market activities. In this age of digital transformation, I’ve seen entire new organizations created with a focus on orienting towards the new business strategy.

The Gap

These strategies by their very nature can only go so far.  They identify high level actions to take but naturally don’t get into the detail.  That’s for the specific initiatives and projects that come from it.  Many companies just launch right into it which can result in ineffectual results. In discussions with Perficient colleagues like Juliet Silver and Jim Hertzfeld, we think of strategy like this:

1. Business Strategy: defining the market place and how the company addresses the market.
2. Industry Strategy: the place of industry and how that impacts what you do.  Our healthcare practice for example would always be part of any strategy with our business and technology strategists
3. Technology Strategy: the steps needed to correctly use technology to meet strategic business needs

In your typical gap scenario, we see the following:

1. Brilliant business level strategy created with 3-5 key pillars presented to executives and the board. This achieves buy off and funding.
2. Initiatives created at the business level.  This may include new hires or organizational shuffling and mandates to IT for change.
3. Projects created which in many cases include lots of new technology, technology modernization, or upgrades.
4. Projects move forward and the initiatives start to stall.  People all have their own opinions about what needs to happen and the “doers” have a lot of pet peeves about the day to day processes they want to solve in the midst of this investment. Delays occur.
5. Projects launch which provide some value but not that envisioned by the original strategy.  Executives begin to question the investment.

The gap occurs between steps 2 and 3 and to a lesser extent between 1 and 2.  When you go from the really high level recommendations straight to tactical initiatives or project, you tend to miss out on a few things.  Some of these are really important.

• Communication to those lower in the organization why this is being done and what are the expected outcomes.  You want to get the organization behind the change
• What is most important? What are the steps to success?  Which steps should be taken first and why?
• How will this be implemented?  What business, process, and technology changes are needed?

Filling the Gap

Fortunately, this gap in strategy can be filled by taking a step back and focusing on the what and how of the equation.  Perficient has actually done well here partly because of our own go to market strategy.  Like many consulting firms, our approach to the market is different than others.  We win by filling a market niche or a particular set of needs that our clients have.  Those niches can be quite large but at the strategic level, it’s because we focus on the what and how that is below the business strategy. It doesn’t mean our management consultants wouldn’t be happy to help you create a business strategy because they can and do.  But we have been successful in stepping into the inevitable gaps that happen after the business strategy is created.

Now that I’ve defined the gap, in the next post we can dive into the pragmatic approach to strategy that fills these gaps.

You’re ready to dive deep into Microsoft’s Power Apps, but maybe wondering the easiest way to use color schemes throughout your app. You can make your code into more readable and maintainable in just a few easy steps.

Themes help with consistency throughout your app and let you easily reference colors while designing. Not only do themes help with uniformity in design, but they also help your app be adaptable to change and easier to maintain. If you need to change the color scheme of your app, you simply have to change a few lines of code rather than changing the code in every place you used color.

Pick Your Theme Colors

Power Apps uses the RGBA color format. A great tool that can assist you in choosing your theme colors and getting the RGBA values is Adobe’s https://color.adobe.com/create. Upon opening the screen, you’ll see a color wheel. The circle containing the white triangle dictates your primary color.

You have the option on the left of the screen to choose a color Harmony Rule, which helps quickly build a cohesive theme! The Color Harmony Rules take your preferred color and automatically positions the secondary colors based on coloring rules. In terms of standard practices, most color schemes will fall under Analogous, Monochromatic, and Complementary Harmony Rules. This helps easily create color pallets if you don’t have experience doing so. Finally, scroll to the bottom of the page to retrieve your RBGA values.

Another great way to retrieve your RGBA values is through the “Extract Theme” option.

All you need to use this functionality is a picture or screenshot with your desires color theme, and Adobe will extract the colors from the picture.

Set a Global Variable

Once you have your theme, you can now easily set your colors in your Power App. Setting global variables happen in the ‘On Start’ function. You can find that by clicking the’ App’ tab on the Tree View Panel on the left. Upon clicking, you will see the ‘OnStart’ function in the function bar above.

Use the function Set() to set color theme colors.

Set(

        Colors,{

                Primary:RGBA(255,78,0,1),

                Secondary:RGBA(1,173,171,1),

                DarkPrimary:RGBA(1,131,128,1),

                DarkSecondary:RGBA(156,208,32,1),

                LightPrimary:RGBA(232,232,232,1),

                LightSecondary:RGBA(110,110,110,1)

                }

        )

To initialize your global variable, click the ellipses menu by the ‘App’ tab and select ‘Run OnStart.’

Referencing Your Variable

To reference your new global variable, you reference the object Colors and specify the attribute. Ex: ‘Colors. Primary’

Congrats! You can now easily define and set color schemes in your Power Apps. Happy Designing!

On June 28, I will be speaking at IRCE, the commerce industry’s biggest and most influential annual event. Sharing the stage with our client, Geriatric Medical, I’ll explore how B2B businesses can use technology to empower their sales teams and transition their operation into the digital world.
In an age of eCommerce, the modern B2B salesperson doesn’t just take orders. Rather, they must operate to be consultants for clients; a helping hand when necessary, and a subject matter expert always. To do their jobs well, sales reps need the digital tools to move forward and add value for their customers while the trends of self-service and eCommerce continue to evolve.
It starts with your sales teams. Often times there’s a disconnect between traditional sales reps and the digital reality. Customer expectations are shifting, and the mindset of your sales team needs to shift with them.

Technology to Do the Job

The B2B buying journey is more complicated and has more people involved than the B2C process. Multiple people – including a researcher, subject matter expert, or buyer – may weigh in before a sale is actually made. When placing an order, the customer may request multiple quotes, materials and spec documents, and other supporting materials. After the order is placed, they will probably want shipping updates, customer support, and the ability to review and reorder past items.
It’s difficult and a waste of time for a sales rep to be interacting with each of these individuals along their journey when they can get the information they need via self-service. Implementing technology to automate tasks like quote generation, shipping information, and re-orders will enable your sales reps to stop acting as order-takers and move into a sales consultancy role, where they can assist customers in product choices and larger issues they may face.

Bridging the Gap Between Sales and Marketing

Just as you want to empower your customers with the data and information they need, you want to extend the same capabilities to your internal sales teams. Endless cold-calling and email sends will not go far without the data to target and market smarter. Your sales team needs access to the data surrounding what their clients are ordering, how they’re buying, and when. With insight into these touchpoints, your sales reps can understand their clients better and create a more personalized experience when they do interact with them.
To improve the marketing experience you’re providing to your customers, you need to tailor your marketing approach as well. Using the data from your clients in your backend systems, marketers can create a more holistic marketing approach. You can target promotions to engage your customers, acquire new customers, and grow revenue. Connecting your data to benefit marketing will help your sales team in return.
Customers are at the center of your experience, and your technology needs to drive that experience. Technologies like marketing automation, customer-relationship management (CRM) systems, product information management (PIM) systems, and other eCommerce tools can enable your salespeople to be more proactive and provide real value to their customers. That is what is going to differentiate you from your competition in the long run.
To learn more about how you can strategically transition your sales team into the digital mindset and improve the customer experience you provide, check out my presentation at IRCE on June 28, 2019. I will be sharing the stage with Geriatric Medical, a client we helped with marketing automation and digital experience challenges.

As Digital Marketers we are bloated with options for tools and processes and have bloated backsides from sitting at desks all day long. Over the past 3 years I have lost and kept off 80 lbs and have led multiple end-to-end digital marketing transformations. I can safely say I’m a bit of an authority on both personal and digital marketing fitness.

In both our personal lives and careers, being fit allows us to do more with less, be more agile and frankly just be happier. I have found there are five keys steps to being both personally fit and fit in digital marketing.

• Have short term goals and long term vision
• Get the right information at the right time
• Remember it’s a journey not a destination
• Have a system

Short Term Goals, Long Term Vision

80lbs of weight loss is, to say the least, intimidating. However, with just a few changes, nearly anyone could lose 5lbs, right? Then 5lbs again and again. Small, achievable goals bring momentum and combine together to revolutionary change.
Having a vision is important, but even more critical is breaking the vision down into small achievable steps. These steps can be as small as losing 5 lbs, improving a particular customer interaction or improving a single campaign.
These small goals must align back to the larger vision and must be measurable and attributable to the desired outcome.

The Right Information at the Right Time

As I left downtown, my music dimmed and I listened intently to my pace for the last 1/2 mile split. Up ahead, I could see the path snake back upon itself as the course climbed over 300 feet from the river valley of the Ohio river to the peak of the hills surrounding Cincinnati in Eden Park. The next mile would make or break my goal for this running of the Flying Pig Half Marathon.
Having this wealth of information at my fingertips makes me a better runner as I can compare to how I expect to be doing and adjust my pace to respond. Running a bit too fast? I can pull back, running a bit behind pace? Time to pick it up!
As marketers, we need data in real time and we need to tie this data to actionable KPIs. A single split time doesn’t make a race, just as much as a single Ad doesn’t make a campaign, but understanding the trend and being able to respond in real time enables us to avoid missing our goals.
Similarly, in my personal fitness, I’ve found tracking my weight on a daily basis enables me to predict the trend and keep myself on target.
We need to have the data frequently enough to develop the trend, but not drown in irrelevant information. At the same time, you can’t expect progress every minute and every day, consistent progress over time is key.

A Journey not a Destination

One of the hardest things about losing weight is accepting that you can’t go back. You can’t eat the things you did before, do (or not do) the things you did before or you will end up in the same place. You will always have to at least think about calories and do some level of exercise or eventually, the pounds will catch you back up.
At the same time, knowing fitness is a journey is liberating. Just this month, I have made two personal records, running a half marathon in 1:51:39 and a 5K in 0:24:07. Now, I want to see if I can get under 1:45 and 0:24 the next time around.
It’s the same in digital marketing. A single project doesn’t make your marketing a success, neglected maintenance will come back to haunt you and every customer’s best interaction is now the bar they use to judge every brand interaction. After our success, we cannot sit on our laurels, we need to pick up and move the goalposts.
By thinking about the journey, not the destination, you will be better mentally prepared to be fit. Additionally, there’s no small pleasure in knowing that around every curve there’s a new obstacle to overcome and there’s always another mountain to climb.

Have a System

Collecting data and having goals is well and good, but how do you ensure you’re making progress? Physical fitness is largely a matter of will power, but having a good system can help put a finger on the scale.
I use MyFitnessPal to track calories and help keep my own worst inclinations in line. I’ve found that even when I go over, entering my calories into MyFitnessPal helps me keep an overage from spilling into a complete splurge.
Similarly, in digital marketing, having a solid governance plan and supporting tools ensures not only are you measuring progress, but that you are staying on track.

Overview

Being physically fit and being fit in your digital marketing requires determination, willpower and the right support. Contact us at Perficient Digital to learn how we can help you on your journey to Digital Marketing fitness.

Do you have a trick you use to be physically fit or be fit in your Digital Marketing? Leave a comment!

Consumers are looking for accurate, reliable, and accessible thought leadership. They want to know the information they’re consuming comes from an expert. So, can they trust your content?
Check out our recent video from Eric Enge and Mark Traphagen, who joined Perficient Digital through our acquisition of digital consultancy Stone Temple, where they explain the value in having content that is created by leading experts in your field. Most of your content should be created by experts. Here’s why:

To learn more about Stone Temple, read our blog post.

Many manufacturers and distributors find the concept of content marketing to be daunting and complex. In fact, only 39% of B2B organizations had a documented content marketing strategy in 2018. Senior commerce consultant Karie Daudt, who recently joined Perficient Digital after serving as VP of Marketing & Customer Experience for Insite Software, weighed in the importance of a product content strategy in supporting a better user experience (UX) in a blog post written for inRiver.
In the article, Karie outlines what a product content strategy is before exploring different types of product content and their value. “Start by incrementally building product content where you will make the biggest impact in the shortest period of time,” she advises.
Product content can support the buying journey and enhance UX, while simultaneously improving internal efforts. It’s important to develop content that fits the product, taking industry, user needs, and accessibility in mind.
“Now, product content is no longer just an asset utilized by internal teams. It is a tool that needs to support both internal business operations and the customer buying journey,” Karie emphasized. A product information management system (PIM) can streamline data organization efforts while disseminating content across a variety of platforms.
For more of Karie’s recommendations on building a product content strategy that supports UX, visit the inRiver blog to read the full article.

As people become more comfortable interacting with voice devices and assistants, marketers are faced with learning how this trend will impact marketing efforts.
Check out our recent video from Eric Enge and Mark Traphagen, who joined Perficient Digital through our acquisition of digital consultancy Stone Temple, where they share three actions digital marketers should be taking as voice interactions become more common. It’s important to take advantage of new and emerging technologies when developing future marketing efforts. Here’s why:

To learn more about Stone Temple, read our blog post.

Programming is not an easy thing to do, and developers require a significant amount of focus, concentration, and flow to do what they do best. Interruptions will break this flow and slow down an otherwise productive programmer. While environmental distractions can be a source of interruption, it’s also important that engineers don’t interrupt themselves either!

Fast Builds

Typical developer attention spans while waiting for a compile is between 30 and 90 seconds. Anything longer than about two minutes will result in broken focus and an opened browser window.
While not typically an issue in Interpreted Languages like PHP or javascript, compiled languages like C#, Java, and C++ all require a compilation step before you can test your changes. With the introduction of TypeScript, SCSS, and Node.js, even interpreted languages aren’t immune to this build cost.
This process needs to be FAST. A decent developer will be writing and running code multiple times an hour, and every second this process takes is an exponential waste of time. A build time of under 10 seconds is best, but complicated software can make this a challenge.
One common approach is to cache already-built assemblies, and only rebuild the assemblies that have related changed files. The Make system does exactly this for C++ project. Tools like gulp have “watch” commands, which can make the build process nearly invisible.

Efficient Tests

Teams that use automated tests to ensure their code quality will be running their Unit and Acceptance tests frequently, multiple times during development and at least once on the commit step in a Continuous Integration environment.
If the tests in the project take more than a few seconds to run, they won’t be run at every opportunity they should be. Tests that aren’t run might as well not be written at all.
Tests should focus mostly on the code itself; load-testing a database server for every run of the test suite is slow and impractical. Instead, try to use Mock objects for your Unit tests, and keep time-intensive tests separate from the typical test suite.

Streamlined Commits

Changes to the code need to be saved often, and preferably in a place remote to your local development environment to function like a backup. Hobbyist developers might use the copy-and-paste method of version control, making a copy of the current development folder under a different name to track changes and enable rollback. But this process is manual and slow, and because of that, rarely done.
Most modern source control systems are incredibly streamlined to be as fast and as invisible as possible. SVN, Mercurial, and git are very fast command-line applications that will keep versions of every change you’ve made. Commits are kept simple and viewing or reverting to an older version of the project or a single file is a simple and easy thing to do.
More complicated projects can even slow down otherwise fast version control. Git has post-commit hooks that can easily get out of hand and eat up valuable seconds that should otherwise be spent on development. Instead of putting scripts inside the git hooks, try instead to use a service like Jenkins to trigger its own separate process.

Consistent, Automated Deploys

Especially in web development, the deployment or release of the software is a common occurrence that can easily suck up hours of productive developer time. A manual deployment process can introduce missed files, missed servers, or misconfigured environments, resulting in even more hours of wasted time debugging easy mistakes.
Setting up your code to be automatically packaged for deployment is a great first step in making this process seamless. The best development environments are ones where a simple commit can trigger a deployment to a QA environment immediately. This is known as a Continuous Integration pipeline, and takes a lot of the distracting operations work out of software development.
At the very least, making sure scripts exist to deploy your code to each environment can keep a deployment down to a few minutes of automated processes instead of hours of copying and double-checking.

Summary

While every project has its own quirks and issues, trying to stick to these suggestions for fast builds, efficient tests, streamlined commits, and consistent, automated deploys will keep your development team happy and productive throughout the day.

References

The Work Life of Developers: Activities, Switches and Perceived Productivity

When beginning a journey of digital transformation, many business leaders make the mistake of starting by tasking their IT department with leading the initiative from the technical implementation aspect. The problem with this approach, is that while technology is an enabler, it’s not really addressing the problem. In reality, the company leadership needs to start by looking at their organization and realize that there is internal work that needs to be done before investing in technology.
Any digital transformation will impact multiple teams across your organization, so if you’re thinking about beginning a digital transformation, you need to start by assembling a team of individuals from every department that will be impacted, rather than allowing a single business unit to assert complete ownership. When a single team is given ownership over a digital transformation initiative, the result is often a solution that is too narrow and not suitable for all the teams that are impacted. By creating a team with members from various business units, you can ensure that the project is being tackled from multiple angles rather than from a single perspective.
Once assembled, your Digital Transformation A-Team will be instrumental in driving organizational change, working through any challenges that occur, and representing the interests of their respective groups. To be successful, your team should meet on a regular basis to ensure everyone is up-to-speed on how the transformation is going. Typically, your team will be reporting to a board of C-level individuals to provide updates and receive guidance moving forward. This piece is critical, because digital transformation is a strategic initiative within the organization, and it requires C-level support and backing.
While your change management team will be unique to the needs of your company, there are several key players that should generally be included in order for your digital transformation initiative to be successful.

1. An IT Perspective

When the time is right, choosing the proper technology to support your digital transformation is a critical component of the process. A member of your IT department can provide input and make recommendations on the types of technology they want to incorporate into the organization. They will also have the technical knowledge needed to support that initiative. This team member will be responsible for ensuring that any technologies being implemented are in compliance with the technical vision of the company, are scalable to fit both current and future business needs, and are supportable from an IT perspective.
This is a critical role to your Digital Transformation A-Team, as they will be interfacing with every other member of the team. Once the technology needs of the individual business units are addressed, your IT representative will be instrumental in understanding those needs, recommending solutions to meet them, and facilitating implementations.

2. A Marketing Perspective

A member of the marketing team will be focused on customer acquisition from a digital perspective and provide insights on how your digital transformation efforts will drive growth. They will be an advocate for initiatives that will meaningfully and positively impact customers, and will aim to improve marketing automation efforts. This team member needs to have in-depth knowledge of your organization’s marketing process throughout every channel, as well as ideas of where improvements can be made. They will also know the content management needs of your company and where content can be enriched.

3. A Sales Perspective

This team member will bring the ultimate customer perspective. They will be the biggest advocate for rolling out the transformation to customers as soon as possible. Their priorities may include leveraging digital to help them better conduct sales or gaining the ability to offload smaller deals to a self-service model, so the sales team can focus its efforts on larger projects. Improving the customer experience and streamlining internal operations are all a means to an end: increasing sales and driving growth. That means that other business units will need to be supporting the sales team in some way, and having input from that team member will prove invaluable.

4. Representation for Your Collective Business Interests

Perhaps the broadest role of the team, this position may require more than one person to contribute. This role represents all lines of business that your company is involved in, and acts as a voice for the collective business units. They will drive the vision of how digital impacts the business as a whole and how it can be a valuable differentiator for the organization. They will aim to position your company and all the lines of business within the market and find the most effective ways to bring digital experiences to their customers.

5. Guidance from Legal and Compliance

This role is a critical part of your digital transformation journey. A representative from your legal and/or compliance team will make sure the strategies being implemented are in-line with your organization’s rules surrounding compliance and regulation. This is especially important when it comes to industry-specific regulations and legal ramifications. This team member will focus their efforts on guaranteeing that any relevant tax regulations and legal restrictions are taken into consideration, as well as ensuring these strategies continue to meet existing obligations like service level agreements.
Each of these team members provide powerful knowledge that will be instrumental in developing your digital transformation strategy. They will ensure that the vision of the initiative is kept and meets the needs of each individual teams throughout your organization. They will bring the opinions and needs of their units to the discussion and, in turn, educate the rest of their department members about the upcoming changes. By creating a team of talented individuals who can come together and ask, “What does digital mean to my team and why?” you’ll be able to set your company up for a successful digital transformation.

Agile is a data-driven, streamlined project management process designed to minimize distractions while still providing multiple opportunities to check and adjust the course of development. If done correctly, it can allow for long-term project plans that are accurate and resilient to changes.
Unfortunately, “Agile” is a trendy project management term that project managers and leadership love to brag about, but in a lot of cases, companies don’t do proper Agile because they don’t understand what they’re doing or why. Luckily, we engineers can get to the root of things and do things right.

Meetings

First, the whole point of Agile Scrum is NOT to waste time; it’s exactly the opposite. A brief check-in in the morning should leave most of your day free from interruptions. Once each sprint (typically two weeks) the development team will have a planning/estimation session and a sprint demo. Once a month your team should do a retrospective to address internal process problems. If you’re having more meetings than this, you’re getting caught up in the ceremonies and not the Agile.

• Daily
  • Standup – 15 minutes
• Sprintly (every two weeks)
  • Estimation meeting – up to 4 hours
  • Sprint demo – up to 2 hours
• Monthly
  • Retrospective – 1 hour

Total time available to work: 160 hours per month
Total time in meetings: 18 hours or 12% per month

• Standups: 5 hours
• Demos: 4 hours
• Estimations: 8 hours
• Retrospective: 1 hour

Daily Standups

Standups are an important aspect of visibility between your developer teammates and your Project Manager (PM). It’s how you communicate with your team about what things they’re working on, as well as gives everyone an opportunity to help each other in case they’re not thinking of something important.

The three questions:

• What did you work on yesterday?
• What will you work on today?
• Do you have any blockers, issues or concerns?

Goals: Pay attention to your teammates, because they might be walking into trouble or might need additional information about their task that they don’t know to ask for.
Respect the Scrum Master (SM) – they’ll tell you to take your detailed technical discussions “offline” or wait for a “parking lot,” which just means you’re interrupting the flow of the standup. This is fine; engineering meetings outside of this are part of the development process and not explicitly part of Agile/Scrum.

Backlog Building/Grooming

Most developers are only vaguely aware of the backlog building and grooming process and it doesn’t fall in the typical set of developer meetings. The Project Owner (the Client), the Project Manager, and the Lead Developer will get together to discuss new features. This is where User Stories are made. Once the PM has a stack of cards, they need to have the team estimate the tasks.

Estimates

Sprint planning and estimation is a critical process that engineers need to be involved in. It’s how the team builds out the data that the Project Manager uses to make long term planning decisions like deadlines, feature priority, and even budget.  But it’s important you follow the process, or your estimates will end up inaccurate and the Project Manager will get annoyed with your team.
Each User Story needs an estimate, either in Ideal Hours or in Effort. These are both abstract concepts and are not directly related to actual elapsed time. At Perficient Digital, we like to use Ideal Hours. This means your team needs to agree on an amount of time each User Story will ideally take. But if someone says, “Oh, that looks really easy. It’s probably only 2 hours,” your team will be primed to give a low estimate, even if they have knowledge about the task that would make it much higher or lower. You can avoid issues like this by using Planning Poker, which I outline below.
Be careful though; only use Ideal Hours, and not an exact time. If you estimate a task at 8 hours and 30 minutes, you imply a false level of accuracy that can mislead your Project Manager and Scrum Master. These are estimates and intentionally include a level of uncertainty.

Planning Poker – How to Play

1. Read a User Story and discuss the requirements and implementation. If the team feels like the Story doesn’t have enough details, don’t estimate it and return it to the Project Manager.
2. If the team feels confident that they can complete the User Story, have each engineer pick an Ideal Hours value from this list:

• 30 minutes
• 1 hour
• 2 hours
• 4 hours
• 1 day
• 2 days
• 4 days
• 8 days

3. Have each engineer write their estimate down secretly and then count to 3.
4. On a count of 3, each developer will show the value they wrote down and discuss why they feel something should be estimated higher or lower.
5. Once the team has come to an agreement, write that estimate down on the Story and move on to the next one.

Sprint Demo

The Sprint Demo might seem like a pointless meeting, but the goal is important; you are expected to demo the things you worked on to force you to build things that are actually working. It’s tempting to split tasks into chunks like “front end” or “back end” but this doesn’t result in working software, just working pieces. Without the focus of constant delivery, developers will revert to building just the parts they’re responsible for instead of focusing on the true goal, a working application or website.

Retrospective

The Retrospective doesn’t need to be tied to sprints but should happen regularly. Standups, Estimates, and Demos are all opportunities to see and adapt the product; the Retrospective is the opportunity for the team to do the same.
The goal of this meeting is to talk honestly and respectfully with the team to identify good and bad processes and help reinforce or fix what’s going on.

Retrospective – 4 Steps

• Review what fixes we agreed on last Retrospective – did these things get fixed? Why or why not?
• What went well this iteration?
• What went poorly?
• Come up with solutions for how to fix issues or reinforce good processes, and make sure each goal is assigned to someone to complete before next Retrospective.

Takeaway

Agile is a popular business buzzword but originally was an exceptionally high-function development management system. If developers understand the why of Agile, they can make better use of the benefits.

References

The Scrum Guide – The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland
Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn
Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns and Practices by Robert Martin

In an age where technology is a major part of daily life, organizations (especially retailers) recognize the need to improve their digital presence to compete effectively in the marketplace. The catalog-driven approach of building out an online catalog for browsing products and placing orders is no longer enough to meet the needs of today’s demanding consumers. You need to build experiences for shoppers that make it easy to find the right product for the right purpose and to help them understand how to use your products.

A Shift in Customer Expectations

People have come to expect an elevated customer experience. Having rich product information and easy-to-use site functionality is important, but today’s customers want additional data such as video tutorials, product family landing pages, installation guides, customer blogs, warranties, return policies, user reviews, and online product manuals. This is precisely why we’ve seen a shift from offering catalog-driven commerce to experience-driven commerce over the past several years.
As the web has evolved, people have become accustomed to having information at their fingertips. As customers, they’ve come to expect a plethora of information to help them make a buying decision. Experience-driven commerce provides those additional resources to the customer to provide a more complete product view and improve the customer experience. It’s about understanding the needs and wants of your customer.
Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, your buyers all expect a smooth and pleasant experience. If the decision to buy is time-consuming or a hassle, customers are more likely to take their business elsewhere even if it means a marginally higher price point.

1. Understand Your Customer!

The first step to delivering experience-driven commerce is to understand your customer.

• How do they interact with your brand and with your products?
• Are conversions happening online or in brick-and-mortar stores?
• Do they engage with your mobile or in-store app technology when shopping?
• Are your customers happy with their experience from research to purchase to support after the sale?

The answers to these questions will help you understand the touchpoints your customers make with your brand along their buying journey.  These answers will help you develop customer personas to use moving forward.
Next, you need to know what your customers want, why they want it, and when, as well as at what points that they are unhappy with the current buying experience, the product, or your company as a whole. These answers will be specific to your business and industry, your audience demographic, and your product offerings.
While both groups want a great customer experience, there may be some differences between what B2B and B2C customers value most in experience-driven commerce. B2B buyers are more focused on understanding product capabilities, product lead-times and availability, deep product specifications and viewing order statuses. In contrast, B2C customers are more likely to engage when you provide user-generated content, reviews, testimonials, and blogs, all of which are all excellent ways to showcase your product success in a non-traditional way.

2. Improve the Customer Experience

Once you know your customers’ wants and needs, it’s time to build a plan to begin fulfilling them. Experience-driven commerce can occur online and offline, but it’s usually most powerful when brick-and-mortar and digital are combined. Customers are looking for omnichannel experiences, and experience-driven commerce aims to provide that.
Providing consistency across all your selling channels is a good place to start. Look at where your conversions are happening in the purchasing lifecycle so you can provide additional resources at those junctions. By knowing how and where your customers buy your products, you can expand your offerings more strategically. Mobile apps, in-store digital experiences, and interactive online pages are a few good examples of where you can start.
However, it’s important to remember that you have to provide the right content at the right time to the right customer. While customers expect a personalized experience, it’s impossible to provide that at every step of the purchasing cycle. You have to identify the touchpoints where personalization is possible and would make the most impact and move towards those first.
Remember that the work doesn’t end when you make a sale. Post-purchase support is an important part of experience-driven commerce. How are you taking care of your customers after they buy? Providing order history, shipping and delivery information, and easy returns or exchanges are all a part of that experience. If something goes wrong with their product, what kind of additional support can you provide? User manuals, video tutorials, and spare part resources are important to correct whatever error your customer is experiencing. If you can turn a negative customer experience into a positive one, that’s where you’ll begin to build loyalty and customer retention.

3. Continually Monitor Customer Behavior

An area that’s often overlooked by organizations is the monitoring of post-purchase customer behavior. Once you understand the customer journey and implement the initiatives they want to see, it’s important to keep updating your personas, tracking customer data, and working to improve upon the initiatives you’ve set in motion. You have to continue to evolve with your customers, which means the cycle of monitoring behavior never ends.
And what happens if you don’t make that sale? It’s important to know when your customers are disappointed or why carts are abandoned. Why aren’t buyers following through and making those purchase decisions? Understanding why customers don’t buy is just as important as understanding why they do. Perhaps shipping costs are causing shoppers to ditch their product picks in their digital shopping carts. Or maybe they found a better price elsewhere. Did negative reviews scare them off? Continuing to evolve your analytics to get a complete view of the customer from purchase to post-purchase and on to repurchase is how you can begin to answer these questions.
Technology is evolving at a rapid rate, and it’s imperative that organizations have an exceptional digital presence in the marketplace. Customers expect a positive end-to-end experience when they shop online, perpetuating the shift from catalog-driven commerce to experience-driven commerce. By building experiences for shoppers rather than just providing a product, you’re creating connections and building loyalty.
To evaluate your company’s effectiveness in creating and sustaining a compelling customer experience, check out our CX IQ Assessment.  

Did you know Pepsi’s intranet name is “My PepsiCo?” Or that AT&T’s is “Access?” As a company grows, the employee base’s need to streamline communication, as well as share knowledge and consumer business information in a secure place, increases. Hence, the intranet: A single source or a destination where employees can login to connect and stay up to date.
An intranet stands as a way for a company to communicate with its employees, post-critical (as well as fun) information, facilitate searching and the use of team and project documents, and serve as an all-around go-to destination for finding purposeful, curated content. The intranet should reinforce the brand, emphasize the corporate commitment, and support the organization’s culture. All of these objectives should factor into the selection of an intranet name.
Approaching intranet name selection from the perspective of content strategy, companies can draw inspiration for naming an intranet based on all that it communicates to its employees— so, begin with the end-user in mind. Think about or actually create a list of the types of content employees will be able to access, such as training videos, the events calendar, news, critical announcements, or policy documents. Associate the intranet name with the content while keeping your company’s brand top-of-mind.
Intranets often hold vast amounts of content. Consider these best practices when establishing a name that balances content with the brand:

1. Know the purpose

Think about the outcome for employees who use the intranet. How do you want your employees to feel when they use the intranet? How quickly will they find the information they seek?

2. Stay on brand

Align with the company identity to make sure employees connect with the name. Balance the brand essence with the utility of the intranet. What is your voice and tone? How do you approach writing for your employees?

3. Draw people in

Make sure your intranet is a destination that lives up to its purpose. What are employees seeking when they visit? How often do they visit? What are the key types of information they are looking for?

4. One team

Strengthen your corporate culture by increasing the identity within the company walls. How do internal communications enable intranet use?

5. Be human

Help employees identify with the intranet as a team helper. What is its persona? What does this team helper facilitate?

6. Keep it simple

Avoid names that lengthen when spelled out in its complete state. Are the employees used to acronyms? Is the acronym easy to understand?

7. Make it stick

Practice saying the name in sentences to make sure people are comfortable referencing it for its purpose. How will people refer to the intranet? E.g. “Is the training course available on [the intranet name]?” and “I uploaded the document to our [intranet name] team folder.”

8. Explore the industry

If there is common language within the industry that employees connect with, consider exploring those terms as a name. What terminology is uniquely used within your company walls or in your industry?
Taking the time to create an intranet name that resonates with employees and supports corporate objectives will encourage employee engagement— and maybe you’ll come up with something as fun as Charles Schwab Corp.’s “Schweb.”
Check out this list for more examples of corporate intranet names.