Transformation will typically have four phases: Awareness of the need, Exploration and Innovation, Planning and Execution, and Steady State Support (Maintenance phase). This is similar to the technology S-curve concept, where a technology moves to the next S-curve after maturity and before obsolescence.
Shared services (SS) is the concept of enterprise sharing of resources for a common or seemingly common function. Examples as Design and Product Management and Marketing, Incident Management, Appeals and Grievances, FP&A, Continuous Improvement and Root-cause Analysis, among others. The objective is to share resources among various locations where similar functions occur, such as, in subsidiaries or lines of businesses (LOBs). For example, a centralized product management (PM) function can be used across LOBs to economize over scale and improve margins and standardization, as each LOB will not have to maintain its own PM function.
The objective of SS design is to offer steady state support to the transformed organization. For success, it is critical to engage the SS concept or the existing SS organization early in the transformation cycle preferably once the innovation concept has solidified. This will assist in understanding the transformation objectives, the change magnitude, and support process, talent, and technology needs. As the initial transformation execution commences, it is also critical to SS support for a prove-out. This will help qualify and quantify the support attributes, measures, and re-calibration necessary for the steady state SS support model. It will also assist in identifying crucial scalability factors after full-scale implementation. Once the SS support is validated to the transformation requirements and future-scale it can move to a mature phase.
Challenges in implementing this SS support model include: 1. Early engagement: is there a structure in place for cross-functional engagement to determine the SS scope and requirements? 2. The transformation effort and change sizing: is the effort and size of change adequately identified (people, process, and technology) and are possible jeopardies and risks identified and mitigation planned? 3. Developing a proper SS structure, by asking what is the objective, what skills are needed, what communications protocols are to be used, who is the audience? 4. What is the expected scale? 5. What are steady state monitoring measures and reporting of the SS operation. 6. What is the likely evolution of this support, as the service is likely to evolve over time.
This article was originally published in Linkedin.