Trium

Background

Trium served a 25-member cross-functional Executive Board charged with setting and driving the strategy for the company's multi-billion dollar technology Services business. The company's options and customer landscape in Services changed frequently, and there was a high cost for missed opportunities. These dynamics within and across markets made aligned day-to-day decision-making in Services very challenging. In addition, there was unclear alignment with product and corporate priorities that the Services teams support. Fear of missing opportunities led to reactive decision-making, often in a siloed, uncoordinated manner. An increasingly global presence and virtually dispersed workforce would only amplify these challenges. The client hired Trium to clarify and align the Services organization on a 3-5 year vision and strategy, to prioritize the investment areas for the coming fiscal year, and to ensure aligned execution of priorities across diverse locations.

Trium's Role

Trium assessed that confronting such uncertain environments required having a clear view on how to serve customers in a few, carefully selected future market scenarios. Framing and building the scenarios required significant iteration and buy-in, but in the end would build clarity and alignment, shorten response time, and would guide investments and resource prioritization decisions. Trium helped the client develop strategic plans for each of four critical market scenarios that accounted for the most important business uncertainties. Through interviews and a series of facilitated workshops, a globally and functionally diverse group of managers and executives articulated the following for each scenario:

• Customer needs and requirements
• Client's winning strategies
• Implications for go-to-market models and partner/competitor positioning
• Requirements for portfolio of offerings, investments and innovations
• Named market signals that would indicate one scenario was emerging over another

Client Impact

The highly collaborative process helped build shared language for describing the Services strategy which made large scale alignment on a single playbook possible for the first time. The client aligned on the strategic choices they made (what was in and explicitly out) given multiple market evolution paths. Together, they created priorities and placed bets thoughtfully based on shared beliefs about near-term dominant customer needs. Finally, this work created a foundation for ongoing strategic dialogues that would keep strategy execution clear, aligned and relevant as market dynamics evolved.

Next Case Study: Fortune 500 Software Provider