EDIStech becoming an Award Winning Company – Part 5
How to Discover Your Company’s DNA
Recap of previous blog
In order to build momentum and align the organisation so that everyone is on the same page, introducing Daily and Weekly meetings was critical. Weekly staff meetings consisted of sharing our client successes and failures, reporting on system improvements and sharing the company’s strategic plan as well as sharing the company’s financial results against plan.
As a SaaS company we introduced daily Scrum Meetings to give us transparency around every project. We had a history of exceeding our time budgets so this meeting regime helped us pull this back.
What Are Your Differentiators?
After about six to eight months into the job I started to look at the company and ask;
“What is EDIStech’s differentiators from our competitors”? I could not come up with any compelling answers!
Momentum was just starting to happen and internal systems were starting to improve. I felt that our staff were gaining more trust and faith in me and the management team.
So I felt the time was right to now start on;
Who is EDIStech? | What is our Why? | What do we stand for?
I guess I was lucky in that, both myself and the Global Business Development Manager were not from the IT Industry. This enabled us to look at EDIStech, our competitors and other IT companies (not in our niche) and ask ; “What do we HATE about IT companies?”
We came up with the following list;
Generally speaking, IT companies are terrible at communicating with clients about issue resolution. Worse still they are terrible at communicating how projects are progressing. They are not pro-active communicators. I guess this is a symptom of the sort of people attracted to IT as a profession.
When they do communicate, they use “IT Speak” and some lay people within our client organisations do not understand what is being communicated.
Post implementation Support can be poor. The sales teams and development teams generally are good, but once the project goes live, support can be slow and the client is forever following up with the Support Desk
Some IT companies take short cuts to appease the client. However this just leads to problems down the track.
External IT consulting firms don’t understand that the reputation of the client CIO and CFO is riding on the performance of the consulting firm, as they were the ones most likely to have made the appointment.
Create Your Company’s Values:
When I looked at this list and then at EDIStech, unfortunately I saw some of these shortcomings within our business.
So from this list, I created a set of values that if applied within EDIStech, would rid us of these shortcomings and create for us critical differentiators from our competitors.
How we did this will be covered in my next blog.
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