Combined CollABorative June 2023 - Tech Talk with Cathie Hall, SVP Experience

IFS CollABoratives - Combined Session - Tech Talk Session with Cathie Hall, SVP Experience at IFS

Date of Meeting: 29 June 2023 11:00 AM US Eastern Time 

Cathie Hall Background:

• SVP of Global Customer Services 5 years at IFS
• Part of R&D
• Previously implemented ERP projects
• Previously Ops director and worked heavily on the customer side with various organisations, then moved to the vendor side
• Spent time in the commercial part of organisations as well

Slides Covered:

• Agenda and Discussion Points
• How we think about Experience
  Total Experience – Creating amazing Moments of Service TM at every step
• 6 friction points along experience
  • Capturing the imagination
  • Focus on value
  • Delivering success
  • Functional excellence
  • Value driven deployment
  • Continues value realisation
• Digital business value assurance
  • IFS Six box model TM
  • IFS Digital BVA
  • IFS Scope Tool TM
  • Demo Studio
  • IFS Success
  • IFS Cloud
• Discussion
• IFS Voice of the Customer
• Discussion
• Experience Led Design
• User Research End User Pool

Figma Board Feedback:

• What have we got right about how we think about total experience?
  • Browser Based
  • Support Tools
  • IFS Community is very resourceful – indexing could be beneficial, so info is easier to find
  • Connecting us with peers and IFS decision makers. I always feel very involved with IFS
  • Your specialists really have a good input
• What are we missing?
  • An “introduction package” for my IFS (FSM+PSO) key users (to grow them) in terms of for example:
    1. Where can my key users find information around FIS trainings / certifications?
    2. Where can they find local key user group contact details?
    3. Where can they find list of events (F2F/webinars) that IFS is organising?
    4. Could be more things useful for them to know about what I have missed)
  • Community Engagement. There is almost none
  • Basic functionality, viewing PDF’s, basic filters on lobbies, searches are a significant challenge
  • Smooth data migration between Astea and IFS
  • Shop Order Scheduling. Scheduling resources is available for services
  • Shop orders – serialized by product
  • Cycle counting needs some additional functionality and/or improvements
  • Using Cedar Bay: What improvements are coming for WaDaCo for improvements for easier setup and use like CB
  • Sorting in IFS Cloud
  • Pegging parts on Shipment Orders in cloud to demand on customers in other site
  • Links for easier flow from related modulus
  • Ability to evaluate if IFS cloud meets our need. Separating marketing from reality
  • Best practices sharing between IFS customers (events are back and this group is useful, but would also like to connect to other customers how they are working for example with requirement prioritization, roadmap/backlog visualization, user adoption measuring, technician-app-UI, non-out-of-the-box-reports/dashboards/KPI’s
  • Processing credits on POs linked to WOs/Tasks is very challenging : the negative costs should flow back to the WO (and then the client) Apps 8 used to let us add a -$ line on POs
  • Easy link between all service modules as many resources as cross module users: project, tasks, shop order : modules sometimes feel disconnected
  • Automation, more results with less user involvement
  • North American Support Vendors for “Legacy applications”
  • Running a legacy version makes it hard to comment the latest developments as we don’t see them.
  • Getting the most out of the release notes is challenging
  • Tool for production scenario planning. What happens if customer order x is .. A simulation tool
  • Better access control possibilities, e.g. end user just have access to data related to one Top Part / Product. Better control than today’s for e.g. “Site”. This is a great worry for us to stay ITAR compliant
  • Fully project connection” in CRO area. See ide from Virginia Vascos on IFS Community
  • General export of “document package” from e.g. Eng Part Navigator
  • General import of a TopPart including structure and connected documents
  • Much earlier release of information about included features in the release update. Today’s schedule gives us a challenges to implement new releases once a year.
  • Standard reports/KPI’s good enough to monitor business performance (service operations) from go-live (so customers do not haver to re-invent the wheel outside IFS)
  • FSM/PSO Release Notes with “end user translations” (i.e. what does it mean (what is the value for “me as end user” (where applicable)?)?
  • Roadmap: legacy/on premise FSM/PSO (i.e. not Cloud – that roadmap is clear) visibility (and yes, roadmaps are not equal to committing to what to be delivered when, but would like to have visibility around what’s coming in the future, to align my roadmap with IFS
  • Hard to know what basic data drives what: which is mandatory, and which is a nice to have; definitions are sometimes ambiguous
  • As Apps 10 customer, ability to evaluation if IFS cloud meets our needs. Separating marketing from reality.
• Do you participate in Surveys? Why / Why Not?
  • Yes
  • Yes, knowing is half the battle
  • Whenever I can because its good to use the channels available
  • Yes, my colleague does, but I would enjoy helping
  • Have only received one support ticket survey in 6 months I’ve had a role as primary support contact
  • The case surveys stopped at some point (years back). Now they are back in the current new portal.
• Where else would you like us to survey?
  • The community could be used more in this area. To bring active discussion along.
  • A survey on the IFS Community per topic would be interesting: if you sign up you could get a pop-up when a new survey is out.
  • Idea: have in-tool (FSM), built-in survey functionality so that we as IFS customers can ask our end users how happy they are with the system (would help IFS customers a lot already from day 1 to monitor this from the go-live and onwards). All companies are very good to measure customer satisfaction these days, but at least few I talked to are measuring end user satisfaction
• Action Items – What’s your number 1 piece of feedback for us?
  • Training for the public – videos – community style
  • Some more free training videos on community. Especially for end users
  • One nit-picky thing, but when advertising executive importance of surveys, make sure the person writing stakeholders back are not titled ‘Intern’
  • Would like to see Transparency into the results, and IFS responses communicated. Now it’s a black hole
  • Opportunity to improve communication strategies for customers

Other Feedback / Responses:

• F: Regarding feedback “FSM/PSO Release Notes with “end user translations” (i.e. what does it mean (what is the value for “me as end user” (where applicable)?)?”.  This is about anything translated into what it means for business.  Basically the value of it. Customers have a collaboration between the business group and the IT Group in terms of how they're selecting and using all of their technology. The release notes are very technical so it would be nice if there was sort of an executive summary or a synopsis that really highlighted the points that are important for the technical team members to understand specifically for the business leads on here's what this means to you in terms of how these things are providing additional value.
  R: It’s hard when it’s a service update and it's just a bunch of fixes cause you tend to be disconnected, just small little points, so it's hard to summarize from a business point of view, but I think definitely from when we're looking at the release notes from a full release point of view, one of the things we do is we have a road map that talks about what's coming, but we don't then kind of bookend that with the release note that says this is what we've actually delivered.
  We kind of expect customers to go back and put it together and because the road maps also talk about the next year and it sometimes doesn't clear exactly which release it's coming in, there is a gap there.
  And interestingly, I was speaking a couple of months ago now about the need to get that done. Because we have an automatic process in our half example, that we tick off the things that we've shipped in a release and ticked them as shipped. There's no reason we couldn't export at that point the business value description for each one of those and ship that in a release note. So hopefully I think you should start to see that that come through soon. 
• F: Regarding feedback “Easy link between all service modules as many resources as cross module users: project, tasks, shop order : modules sometimes feel disconnected”. So both so we're going to cloud and we're working on that, that upgrade.
  So I'm in 10 right now, but I have technicians that will work in all modules and they're not power users, so it's very difficult for them sometimes because they're not sure how to go about it, whether they're entering time and expenses. So, it's a lot of going from one place to another and sometimes the words are not the same from 1 module to another so does feel very disconnected for any user. And that's kind of challenging. So that's not just on the service aspect, that's just in general.
  R: And the teams are supposed to keep things standard and there is standard and sort of languages, but I think that's a fair comment.
  One of the things that we've noticed recently is we've drifted away, for example, from always using an English American and drifted away from some of the standard terms in the system. And so again when we're starting releases, we're now introducing a process where we kind of have a release launch and we recap all the release criteria for that launch, including some of those things. And that becomes even more important if those words are then translated, because what might be an equivalent English word in two places, that's annoying and confusing for users, but it's sort of means the same thing when it's translated to other languages, can end up meaning something really, really different as well.
  So I think that's really good feedback.
• F: Feedback regarding “Best Practise sharing between IFS customers (events are back and this group is useful, but would also like to connect to other customers how they are working for example with requirement prioritization, roadmap/backlog visualization, user adoption measuring, technician-app-UI, non-out-of-the-box-reports/dashboards/KPI:s).” IFS don’t have user groups in all countries and in the Nordics, its very much ERP related and what I’m looking for is more service operations related. I attended the event in Stockholm a few weeks ago and I sat down with the TETRAPAK as an example. It was a fantastic discussion about these things. How do you visualize roadmap backlog? How do you prioritize requirements versus each other? And I'm sure that others have these questions as well. So, going live with the the first country is one thing, but then how do we monitor? How do we prioritize? How do we train continue training? One big training is the easy one, but how do we ensure user adoption also after go live etcetera.
  I would like a forum where I can discuss these things. And it could be that we have a separate sessions around these topics, perhaps I don't know.
  R: Well, that's one of the reasons I asked is because we sent placeholders for the fall session, so obviously last month and this month for anyone that's joined more recently we've done these combined sessions because when Matt came to speak to you all about success, Kathy being here today, there isn't distinctions in how companies would use those things or how we view experience regardless of what products someone's using.
  But obviously we do have our three different groups.
  So, in the fall, we could talk about what session would be most valuable because we still need to define some of those topics. So again, this is more of a tech talk where we bring someone from IFS in. We do also have the think tank sessions where it's more open conversation among you all.
  So, we could prioritize some of those topics and make sure we cover a couple of them off.
• F: Regarding feedback “Searches are a significant challenge”
  R: Completely agree is not great and search is one of the areas that my team is definitely looking on.
• F: Regarding feedback “The Community could be used more in this area. To bring active discussion along.”
  R: We definitely want to action that.
• F: Regarding feedback “Idea: have in-tool (FSM), built-in survey functionality so that we as IFS customers can ask our end users how happy they are with the system (would help IFS customers a lot already from day 1 to monitor this from the go-live and onwards). All companies are very good to measure customer satisfaction these days, but at least few I talked to are measuring end user satisfaction.”
  R: So, we did sort of start down that route, and we actually can look at telemetry from the back end in terms of customer like users, actual behaviour and what users do. So, and we're able to do that, we only really use it for various cases where we're actually looking at what improvements we can put in that area of the product. And the reason for that is what I don't want to do is turn on a system and where people give all this rich feedback, and actually we haven't got the capacity to process it to be like the changes. What we do look at, when we're looking at an area of the system to refactor or a new area of the system, we're trying to get this better experience like design and one of the things really important in that is understanding what users are actually doing and also talking to end users. And sometimes what they think they do and what they think they want, what they actually want are all so of different and trying to line those pieces up. So, when we would use that survey tool or put it into the product, it will be around getting specific feedback for specific part of the product that we've already got the intention to improve so that you know, we're not really leaving and users hanging.

Questions / Answers:

• Q: We used to have videos, right?  I think Christine LaVoi used to create these monthly or so videos and she kind of explained how things work. A lot of it tailored towards PSO, FSM, etcetera, but every month or so we get a new training video. Here's how to set up contracts. Here's how to work the studio, et cetera. Is something like that still existent outside of the Academy?
  A: I think most of that content is served up through the Academy now.
  R: Yeah, because I mean the free to all users was very beneficial for both myself, we pick up a couple things that we may not know, but also for me to share out with our organization, we like hey guys, you want to understand the system of record better, here's how you could pick something up so you know something like that more. I understand the monetization of needing to sign up for Academy pay for training, etcetera for end users. The way that makes a lot of sense for ultimate configuration analysts and engineers within your organization, people responsible for administering the platform, I feel a little bit of end user training available to all for free excessively to the public would be very beneficial to a lot of people.
• Q: Back in the days, the content of, for example, the user groups were really focused on exactly that. We'd visited a company. We'd look at how that company uses system to deliver their services. A lot of that I feel has been replaced with look at how IFS is roadmap looks. Here's what we're going to do. Here's what IFS is going to do. So we're kind of missing out on learning from our peers and where we still are by ourselves, right? Because you definitely have the platform to support us communicating with each other and collaborating on solutions. I kinda miss out on a little bit of that. I feel that that has fallen a little bit to the wayside. It's more theoretics and presentations, unless use cases which personally is what I learn most from. Look at, you know this company. There are B2B service provider. Hey, that's what we are too. Look at how they're setting up their customer portals, how they're offering self service capabilities with IFS as assistance to better their service delivery to their clients. A: I think it's a really good point as well and I think it's consistent with some feedback about the events that it tends to be very C-level people get up on stage and talk very kind of high level about how great everything is. So even when we do get customers in, it's not really a detailed enough level that a lot of the audience are wanting and obviously trying to get that balance, think more things happen in the different breakout rooms where you can really get to ask questions, but they're not necessarily attended by everybody or not as visible or you know well publicized.
• Q: So, there's a lot of videos to learn and not everybody learns well that way. And some of the documentation, some modules are wonderful, some others is not existing for cloud right now. So, is it on the plan to improve these or to work on this? Because sometimes it feels like a circular conversation. Click here to do this, but you don't know what this means.
  A: Yeah, definitely. So whole documentation and how we serve up education is definitely completely up for a review. We've recently moved that to a different area, so there's two things we're doing. One is more enablement and I won't necessarily cover that, but on the documentation side itself, which obviously feeds into enablement, what we're also trying to bring in is more contacts, like more contextual help so that it starts to guide the user as you go in through to say, I think you might be stuck here. Try this. Try this and also be able to use different sources of information both from our standard help and information that customer might have provided. But you're right, there is also a hygiene issue with our existing documentation. Some are much better than others. There are various levels of quality, so there's new quality checks being introduced. There's new career path around user education specialists, and we've recently hired an additional 15 user registered education specialists to start on that journey. 
  And if you email me on cathie.hall@ifs.com if you're interested, I can set you up with the VP who looks after this area and his team. They work directly for me, so it's an area that I took over because it wasn't really happy with it either.
  So, feel free to reach out and I'll get you in contact with Aaron and you can talk to him about your feedback and specifics and you can make sure it's listened and put into his program.

What we're really trying to put together is some end users.

So, this is really about how we can short circuit that communication pyramid and actually have our research team be able to talk directly to end users and this might be to observe what they're doing in a prototype and ask questions and listen and understand, why they did use a prototype in a particular way or to get feedback on a particular part of the product.

We use this really successfully when we started to introduce the dispatch console and IFS Cloud, so some of the things with the mapping and there's various different icons, we heavily, heavily tested that and that actually led to quite a substantial redesign because the initial design that we had, nobody understood it. It was just too complicated and it wasn't intuitive at all.

People wanted to click it in the wrong place. They wanted to drag things in a different place, and by prototyping it and getting that observation and talking to actual dispatchers, end users, we're able to redesign it before we even started writing code.

Search is something we want to do something similar on. Search is not great across our system and we’re looking at how we can use generative AI to give as much better search capabilities within the system.

But we need to understand more about when users search how this search types of things are searching for, where they move around.

So yes, we need to understand some of the telemetry in the back of the system, but we also need to be able to speak and engage with end users.

The end user research pool, it doesn't matter what system people use, we're after putting prototypes and seeing and then standing behaviour from users and what they're doing in an non filtered way.

So even if you're on a legacy system or you're on Astea or Clevest, it really doesn't matter from that point of view.

It would be good to get more people and involved in in that as well.

And so if people are interested and they want to become a part of this program, and you can either contact me on cathie.hall@ifs.com or Sarah on sarah.nicastro@ifs.com or email directly to ifs.research@ifs.com

I think it is a really great opportunity for people to also give feedback around the actual user research and how that comes together.

Steve Jeff Watts who came to speak in one of our earlier Service CollABoratives, he is looking for IFS Service Customers who use contract technicians because they are building out capabilities within the solution related to managing contract technicians. So, if there is anyone on this session who does use contract technicians and wants to be a part of that development process, email Sarah on sarah.nicastro@ifs.com

In cloud, but I think at this point it's really more him looking for customers that use contract workers that would want to weigh in on what's important to them, what they need. So, I don't know that it would matter necessarily what version of any given solution you're on really. Just if you use the contract workforce and would want to give some feedback. External resources, meaning not on your payroll and wanting to use the system in some way to also help manage those workers.

If you are an IFS Customer and would like to watch the recording, please email jessica.foon@ifs.com

A copy of the slides can be found in the attachments section below.

Next Meeting: 20 September 2023 11:00 AM US Eastern Time
IFS Service CollABorative - Think Tank Session TBD

If you are an IFS Customer and you do not have the next meeting invitation to this CollABorative and would like to join, please email jessica.foon@ifs.com