How Prime 8 Drives Innovation Into Every Project
Highlights
Through thousands of consulting engagements, we’ve learned what it takes to drive innovation—and keep it going long after a project has ended.
From creating continuous feedback loops to making smart use of prototypes and Agile methodologies, we’ve distilled what we’ve learned into seven key best practices.
Our experience across a wide range of projects—and even more important, our ability to capture and leverage the best practices gleaned from each of our projects—is key to our success. When you can effectively apply what you know, you’re more efficient, able to solve problems faster and with fewer steps. This is good for us and good for our clients, driving faster outcomes and helping keep costs down.
Most of our clients understand that while the challenges they face are pressing, they are not generally unique. And they want to know how we’ve been successful in solving similar challenges for other organizations.
But heading into a client engagement with fixed ideas about where the solution will go is a recipe for failure. For that reason, we apply our best practices in a way that’s more heuristic than prescriptive, emphasizing flexibility and the ability to respond in the moment.
In that spirit, here are seven key things we’ve learned from scores of client engagements about what it takes to drive innovation.
Encourage Creativity Through a Feedback-rich Environment
To maintain the creativity, experimentation, and risk-taking that are critical to innovation, companies must keep lines of communication open. The need for rich, deep, persistent communication is the single most important lesson we’ve taken away from our many projects. And perhaps because it’s so powerful, it’s a practice we lean on heavily.
This was vividly brought home to us during the COVID pandemic, when projects that typically involved lots of face-to-face interaction suddenly became entirely remote. This was an emotional time for many workers, so the goal was to avoid compounding these issues while still being able to address project issues in a thoughtful and proactive way.
Simple techniques, such as daily standups, regularly scheduled check-ins with stakeholders, and basic action logs, helped maintain the feedback-rich environment needed for collaboration and maintaining a can-do, forward-thinking approach. These techniques also helped us to develop new tools for keeping projects on track—tools that we continue to use today.
For Smart Adaptability, Follow the Data
One of our core values at Prime 8 is being a data-driven organization—data is the fuel that powers innovation. But supporting a data-driven business culture isn’t only about having the right technology and/or collecting more data; it’s about making sense of your data and focusing on the metrics that are essential for problem-solving and smart adaptability.
When we were engaged by a global technology services provider to ascertain why a pre-sale program wasn’t delivering results, we leaned into the client’s data and discovered that it wasn’t the program itself that was the problem but the customers the client was targeting and the promotions themselves.
When we analyzed the data, two insights surfaced:
Small vs. large customers. The vast majority of customers attracted to the program were small and medium-sized businesses that didn’t consistently progress into post-sales. We initiated a sharper focus on larger clients, which resulted in a higher ROI.
The promotional offer. The pre-sales promotional offer of a free assessment was underperforming. Our client saw much better results when they gave customers the option to pilot the solution with a free trial.
Finding the critical data points can be like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack, but once you are successful, you’ll have a powerful lever to drive innovation. For this particular client, using the data to drive decisions, adoption and sales volume grew from just a few hundred to over one thousand adoptions per year, contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to the bottom line.
Continuous Ideation—Keep Testing, Experimenting, and Prototyping
When it comes to implementing new IT capabilities, we find that many clients—and frankly, many competitor consultants—wait too long, fearing the consequences of introducing a potential solution that may not be fully baked.
In our view, that’s a holdover from an earlier and very different time. In today’s world of cloud, DevOps, and AI technologies, including no code/low code programming, the door is wide open to rapid continuous ideation through ongoing testing, experimenting, and prototyping—and the rewards can be great.
For example, a Prime 8 consultant was tasked to produce a business intelligence (BI) dashboard that would meet the needs of partners and executives of a large provider of cloud services. We introduced a prototype just weeks into the engagement. We knew it would be critical for helping the client understand the role that the dashboard would play. We then kept customizing so the dashboard could easily scale and flex to new requirements.
Similarly, when a well-known global tech giant asked us to help manage a new marketing initiative that extracted data from spreadsheets, our team turned to Power Automate, a low-code cloud service that met the client’s immediate needs today and could also easily scale without requiring additional coding.
Our process of continuous ideation enabled our client to overcome the fear of introducing new technologies. When we completed the project, the client was able to rapidly iterate, customize, and scale the solution on their own.
Prioritize Agility
“Fail fast,” “continuous improvement,” and “change management” are key elements of today’s agile development methodologies. Our consultants incorporate as a standard practice these and other principles into our projects. Staying agile is really a form of learning that enables both our consultants and our clients to take advantage of situations that can be pivotal moments for innovation.
During COVID, one of our technology clients, who operates 85 retail locations around the world, realized it had to quickly move from in-person training to virtual training. The company realized that it could use this transformation to build closer relationships with both prospective and existing customers.
With this in mind, our consultant worked with client teams to redesign the learning program by:
A mix of styles: Creating a mix of virtual instructor-led training and eLearning courses that would make the education delivery more flexible and customer-focused.
Real-time engagement: Using video conferencing, chat, and other digital interactions that would help maintain real-time engagement.
Learning preferences: Optimizing a blend of synchronous and asynchronous delivery to appeal to different learning preferences.
Using this formula, our consultant helped to optimize and rebuild 16 hours of customer-facing training in just ten days. In addition, other teams at the client organization were able to use our templates to rapidly develop their own digital training courses—a great example of ongoing agility in action.
Visionary Scalability
Prime 8’s goal for every client engagement is to create something we like to call “visionary scalability”—system, processes, and solutions that continue to drive innovation long after an engagement has been completed.
Working with a global software giant on a long-term business performance model, we found that their organic growth had inadvertently created communication and planning barriers that kept the company from going to the next level. Leadership teams were becoming siloed, which limited collaboration. They had also become overly reliant on quick-fix tools that simply weren’t scalable solutions—such as spreadsheets for business tracking and email for reporting.
Our consultant addressed these challenges by focusing on building a foundation for sustained growth. The long-term solution included:
Breaking down silos. Streamlining communication flows, aligning decision-making, and improving rhythm of business planning cadence.
A roadmap to maturity. Introducing maturity models so teams had a roadmap for advancing their approach over time as they built experience and confidence at each stage.
Playbook. Producing a comprehensive planning playbook with a detailed template for teams to leverage new processes and bring clarity to communication.
Our consultant leveraged their expertise to improve their own internal processes and adopt technology-driven solutions to streamline onboarding, resulting in greater efficiency and the visionary scalability we were going for.
Use Technology to Drive Transparency
There is nothing we love more than to apply our best practices in a way that gets quick results or predictable outcomes for our clients. As an ever-expanding company ourselves, Prime 8 hires new employees all the time. Our goal is to have consultants assigned within three to five days of a client request, but this became more challenging to achieve during the pandemic as demand for consulting services surged.
After analyzing the challenge, we realized it wasn’t the pandemic that was the problem—it was our own onboarding processes. Over time, they had evolved into an overly complex, manual system. Tracking new hires and communicating their status was extraordinarily time consuming, involving over a dozen stakeholders.
Having done this type of work for clients, we knew we could use technology to achieve the efficiency and transparency we needed. Using Power Automate, we set up a system to track onboarding tasks. Today, managers know where candidates are each step of the way and can anticipate when they will begin work for our clients.
We now have a scalable technology-enabled system that provides end-to-end transparency to all stakeholders and will also grow with our company.
Document Everything
If you take a look at our website, you’ll find more than 20 customer stories—in-depth accounts of successful projects. That’s just a hint of the kind of detailed accounting we like to maintain to ensure that we extract all the learning we can from each project.
For all of our completed assignments, we also:
Document processes. We document all processes, methodologies, and known outcomes so the information is readily available to consultants working on similar projects.
Focus on training and development. We are always on the lookout for how insights gained from projects can be used to develop training materials and teach-back programs for our consultants.
Conduct project post-mortems. We do after-project debriefs focusing on what went well and what we could have done better.
Analyze performance metrics. We maintain a complete account of performance metrics and analytics to measure outcomes, provide data-driven insights, and understand trends and areas that need improvement.
Extract best practices. We glean best practices and methodologies from every client assignment, which enable us to continuously improve our services.
Look for repeatable processes. Our consultants are continuously learning from each other. We place a heavy emphasis on creating and recognizing repeatable processes and sharing them with all of our consultants, a practice that plays a significant role in driving our success.
Our dedication to "document everything" extends beyond customer success stories. We thoroughly document processes, outcomes, and best practices, fostering continuous improvement and data-driven decision-making to drive our success and ensure top-notch service for our clients.
Take the Next Step to Drive Innovation
Innovation doesn’t just happen. Like all things in business, it’s part inspiration, part perspiration. But with proven systems and techniques in place, you can build a platform for driving innovation that’s productive, repeatable, and sustainable. Let Prime 8 Consulting show you the way based on our experience helping clients adapt and grow. Reach out to learn more.
