Fighting to keep the business entrepreneurial

A few weeks ago I began to get more closely involved with an important project in our Telematics Division to migrate customers (and their 40K asset trackers) from one of the software platforms we inherited as part of an acquisition to our most modern one, “Kinesis Pro”. The aims of this project were firstly to improve the overall customer experience and functionality and secondly to reduce our ongoing operational and IT support costs associated with running this legacy platform. We originally began talking about this project more than 2 years ago and at our annual development plan meeting last September, fed up with the progress so far, I said that we had to get on and get this done in the next 12 months and I wasn’t prepared to accept any more delays.

Well, surprise surprise, a few weeks ago when I asked for an update I found that not a single customer had yet been migrated with the team giving me a long list of reasons/excuses for the delay. These included waiting until they had thought about every software change to the new platform that was needed for parity with the existing one before getting going, changing the customer billing entity at the same time which wasn’t part of the original plan (this now involved legal - brakes on !) and they now also wanted to do the Salesforce integration work in tandem (no comment needed). Despite these new additions however, they were still confident of their time frame for completion, as they planned to do a big bang change of every customer and every tracker at the same time at some point in the summer. Sounds perfect !

This “over theorising” and “letting software projects grow legs” are exactly what happens in big corporations and should be the marked difference and advantage that an entrepreneurial business like Radius has in the market place. Needless to say I told them to start migrating the smaller easier customers immediately and in a manual way and have the other work flows they had added go on in the background and not to worry if these took longer. 

Now they have got going they are already encountering changes to the platform we need to make that they had not thought about and have also realised that speaking to every customer over a much longer transition period will be a much safer way of maximising the migration of the 40K units as well as hopefully identifying some up-sell opportunities.

This example leads me nicely on to introduce you to Lesson 2 in the book “Start before you're ready” a critical lesson the senior team need to understand if they are going to contribute to keeping Radius entrepreneurial as we scale. You can find lesson 2 here.

I’m also pleased to say that you can now officially pre-order “It’s Not Rocket Science” on Amazon, although C-3PO seems to have found a way to short circuit the system and is already half way through and can’t put it down!