SLM

The highest executive body within the company, currently named Nordic Management Team, consisting of the Holding CEO, Holding COO/CFO and the 4 CEOs for each country, set an overall strategy for the organization back in 2016. One keyword in that strategy was Recurring revenue. Another one was Remote teams (aka off-shoring). A third was Flexible resources (aka freelancers). Being a Nordic company, but with autonomous branches in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, the vision of the owner has always been cooperation and consolidation on a Nordic level. All iterations of Holding C-suites have tried to execute on that vision. Nordic first has been the mantra. But not really the reality.

When push comes to shove, the branch CEOs has always put their own needs, wishes and whims in the driver’s seat. A lot of nice words about cross border collaboration has been said, but very little action has been seen. I think it’s an attitude thing, deeply rooted in the culture of the company’s branch offices. Also, it’s understandable, that if you, as a local CEO, is to deliver on a promise to the Holding CEO, you don’t really care too much about collaboration, if it doesn’t immediately show on your bottom line. There’s no room for long-term strategies that involves investments with short-term negative effect on the current result. I think most of the branch CEOs that has passed through the organization has seen the value of a Nordic first approach, but the reality has always been to prioritize making ends meet for the current budget year. Locally. Also, an unhealthy dose of competition amongst the branch CEOs has historically been noted.

Recurring revenue

Being a digital agency, and making dough selling hours a pop, it’s understandable for management to look for other revenue streams. Being a pure consultancy-based company, the revenue is unpredictable and fragile. But with lots of people on payroll, the cost is always there, regardless of the revenue. And the cost is raising faster than the revenue.

Anyone in their right mind should know this is a problem. To be fair, this problem is not unique to us, it’s the same situation everywhere in our line of business. So, what do we do?

• Stabilize the revenue with Recurring!
• Make payroll able to scale down with Flexible resources!
• Keep payroll cost in check with Remote teams!

To be fair there are plenty of other reasons to have Remote Teams besides cost. For example, actually being able to find and hire developers for one thing. Ok, as a digital agency, how do you go about creating Recurring Revenue? Without completely changing the offer and organization, that is. Some ideas were floated, but I would say all of them except for one can be disregarded, so I’ll just focus on that one: Support. Or Service Lifecycle Management, SLM, which was the euphemism chosen. Excellent! Let’s sell support for the solutions we build and charge monthly! Also, while at it, let’s make it Nordic first! And we can use resources in the Ukraine to ensure a good stream of competence (and keep cost in check, mind you), et voila, the Remote Teams tick-box has been marked! Ok, I come off as somewhat sarcastic, but that’s not my intention. I believed, and still do, this to be a great idea for the company!

SLM

Ok, so who can we assign to get this SLM thing going?

When I was first approached by the Holding CEO with the idea of me spending time on SLM, I was hesitant to say the least. I felt I already had my hands full with prior engagements like CDC and GDPR, none of which should be news to him. But I understood his reasoning in asking me. I already ran a department that was truly Nordic, and given my role, I certainly have experience in the field of support. Also, having been with the company forever, I possessed valuable domain knowledge and relationships with the “floor people” that certainly would help in the process. I don’t remember what our meeting amounted to, but I believe I politely denied the suggestion. Some months later, the branch CEO in Sweden at the time, approached me with pretty much the same “offer” but from a different angle: “I don’t care even the slightest about Nordic first, I want you to do it for me, locally.” I appreciated his honesty, so I gave him the chance to pitch it: “I’ve noticed your IT department, it’s a tight team you’ve built. I know you can do this support thing for our customer solutions as well. Just get the ball rolling and we’ll find a permanent manager later.” I gave it some thought. Then I accepted. Shortly after that, I was once again approached by the Holding CEO, and he expressed his joy in my acceptance of the assignment. He also made sure to re-introduce the Nordic first angle and making sure I had understood that off-shoring was one of the key elements in this. I understood.

Off-shoring

Selling support was not a new idea in the company. The Norway branch had been doing it for years. The Finnish branch had a model for it and was doing it actively but with not so many clients. It was mainly Denmark and Sweden that had not put it on offer yet. Denmark, however, have successfully worked with Remote teams in the Ukraine for a long time. Well, the success part is mainly during the last couple of years, but the collaboration has been going for 10+ years. As a side-note the Swedish branch tried off-shoring for some years, a decade ago, but abandoned it because of “cultural differences”. However, to me, off-shoring and building a support team to put on offer, had very little to do with each other. Yes, I could staff with people abroad, but the same goes for all departments and teams in the organization! I decided to be very clear with the Holding and Swedish CEO: “Yes, I will build a support offer, and I will use off-shoring where possible. But I will not take the responsibility for re-introducing off-shoring in the Swedish project organization! Remote teams and SLM are two, completely different things, and should have separate ownership!” They agreed. But disagreed. Some months later I found myself having (at least part) of the responsibility of re-introducing off-shoring in the Swedish project organization.

Road-map

I was not the first choice to get SLM going in Sweden. In fact, two managers had been assigned the task before me, the first one resigned promptly (I don’t know if it was related to the assignment) and the latter had just resigned and was leaving the company in 5 days (that was definitely related to the assignment). So that made for an obvious priority. Get her information before she was gone!

Hand-over

I was underwhelmed with what my predecessor had accomplished. To be fair, she was assigned the task of doing Remote Teams and SLM totally against her will. I hadn’t expected much, but I had expected more of the 6 months she’d spent on this. I would guess most of that time was spent looking for a new job. I absorbed the information and insights she’d gathered so far, and I put together a rough road map for myself.

Competitor research

I did quite a lot of online research. Turns out none of our direct competitors did support (any more). Not very surprising, since that’s just something digital agency people don’t do. They create. They don’t maintain. That’s something big old boring IT companies do. Or off-shoring companies. However, I found traces of previous support entities and offerings with our competitors, so I knew SLM had at least existed at some point in time. Fortunately, in this case, the Swedish digital agency market is a small pond. Many of our employees has worked for our competitors, some of them had even worked specifically on their support initiatives! This was gold! I scheduled one-on-ones with anyone I could find, who’d have something to share from their previous experiences. Turns out all the competitors, at some stage or another, had done support. And all of them had failed. Ok, let’s find out why, and I’ll avoid the same mistakes. The answer most given: “Well, we did a reorg and then the support thing was cancelled”. I kid you not. 2 out of 3. Did you make money? “Yes, plenty”. Did the team enjoy it? “Absolutely.” Where the customers happy? “Indeed”. It was strange to hear. But I suspect there’s more to the story. No management just cancels something without explanation, especially if it’s making money and keeping customers happy. I need to get to the bottom of this. At some point in time. In the bucket you go.

Inventorying customers

Another early task was to inventory current customers that would fit the offer. Well there was no offer yet, but I already had some ideas of what would qualify a customer. I had received some intel from my predecessor, so I started to work through these customers, by scheduling one-on-ones with the respective account manager. I was mostly met with confusion and lack of understanding of what this SLM thing was all about. Also, I discovered that many of the times I knew more about the customers and their solutions than the newbie KAMs did.

Internal pitch

I set about to create some slides and make appearances on the weekly account management meetings to sell the idea. In fact, I went on stage in a lot of meetings in a lot of different groups, not only to sell internally, but also to gather some useful feed-back. I received none. I talked to a lot of the developers. They were very clear about their position: “I didn’t sign up to work in support.” Ok fair enough. The company being a project based digital agency and all. Building new and shiny stuff. Oh well. How about remote teams? “I have no problem working with people in other countries, hell I do it all the time, I interact with developers all over the world, on Stack Overflow and GitHub, probably more than with my co-workers. A developer is either good or not, I don’t care where they’re located.” When asking the project managers and KAMs, their stance was pretty much the same. Well the sales people (ok KAMs, whatever), where open to it, and some of them saw a possibility to add value to the customer (and retrieve some cash, presumably) but the project managers said pretty much the same thing as the developers: “I didn’t sign up for support”. On the question of Remote Teams, the answer was: “I cannot work with remote teams. I don’t want to run my project in English. There’re too big cultural differences. It’ll never work. The customer only speaks Swedish”. I had a hard time convincing basically anyone internally and had to scratch some good potential customers off the list, because, well, there was no way the KAMs where gonna let me approach them. I realized the most important thing was to get the ball rolling and show some success, to convince all the naysayers. But at least I put SLM in peoples mind during this phase (“That support thing? Sooo… are we doing that now?”).

Learnings from Norway

Thankfully, I had a success story nearby to possibly use as a template. I had already had some interactions with the manager for SLM in Norway, and on my next trip to Oslo I made sure to have a tete-a-tete with him in the calendar. He is a nice guy. We spent a lot of time discussing the ins and outs of his operation. We discussed how to make it Nordic. He told me about how the attitude towards SLM had changed during the time he had ran the team. “In the beginning I was not able to find a single project manager willing to help me with a case. They where too fancy pants to do support. But over time the attitudes have changed. They see us making money, they see we provide value and most importantly, they see us being happy and proud in what we do! Recently I actually had a project manager come to me asking if I needed help!” His story was so inspiring to me! It gave me an energy boost, and I now knew it was possible to change the attitude! But I felt the pressure on my end, and I desperately needed a Swedish support success story to showcase the doubters back home. Also, I knew I was not going to be able to draft any internal developers to join the team. I had to go for hiring new ones. Locally or remote. Probably junior. So I suggested moving a suitable customer from Sweden to Norway in exchange for sending someone junior to Oslo to learn the ropes. He was very surprised about this suggestion. “Do I get the Swedish customer for free?”. Sweden was in the process of demoting all customers that did not make us enough money at the moment, and/or gave us assignments that was “boring”. Support customers. Big, nice Swedish names. Quality brands. Quality solutions. With good relationships that had been invested in over years. And we were cancelling them. So yes, I saw no problem in moving one of these customers to Norway instead of just throwing them in the dumpster. The SLM manager was open to the suggestion. I later retracted my proposition, because time ran out and the customers where gone for good. As trump would have put it: Sad.

Making it Nordic

We set together a group, SLM Nordic, where we spent time discussing which components in our respective offers could be made Nordic. Denmark had hit the ground running and had already assigned a manager and organized a team. They had not been met with any skepticism to my knowledge, and their types of customers really fit their offer. Good for them! So, what could we do together? After all, the markets are different, and there are a lot of other differences, especially in the way of working. And support is mainly about way of working. After some back and forth I concluded that we probably wouldn’t benefit from making anything Nordic at this point. After some debate the others agreed. I think.

Learnings from Denmark

Denmark, like mentioned above, had been doing Remote teams and Flexible resources, for a long time, and successfully for some years. And following my road map, it had dawned on me that I was never going to be able to build a team with Swedish techies. I also saw no room for freelancers. Supporting and maintaining a system is a marathon. The more you know about the solution, the better you’ll support it, and the happier you and the customer will be. I needed calm, sensible, employees, willing to build a long-term department with me.
Therefore flexible resources was out of the question. I absorbed everything the Danes were willing to share on Remote teams though.

Creating the offer

We’ll my fancy slides didn’t convince anyone to jump aboard the SLM train back in Sweden. So, I started to work on an offer, complete with SLAs, prices, off-hours, extras and conditions, and I stole a lot of the work that had been done in the Nordics. I was convinced there was a need for the service amongst our customers. Even if we didn’t see (or cared about) the need internally, I was certain that when a company buys a web solution, even if the speaking partner on the customer side don’t understand it (it’s usually marketing), someone in their organization is going to care about the system being up and running a year from now (usually IT). So even if we didn’t want to provide it, I was sure the demand was there. But I was obviously not going to get any help or support locally. Luckily, I had plenty of support from the Norwegians, Danes and Finns. Their enthusiasm kept me going.

Build a core team

One of the first thing I did was employ Micke. He had worked with the IT team, on hire, for a long time, and had proven himself. I saw an opportunity to make it permanent, so I took it. The official version was to put him on SLM duty, and I really planned to do it, but when the compact resistance for SLM in Sweden dawned on me, I gave him the opportunity to jump ship, back into the safe harbor of the IT department. He took the offer. So that basically left me on SLM alone. Again. But there was hope. I had a lead. Louise, an excellent, enthusiastic and easygoing QA, had showed interest. In fact, as it turned out, she was single-handedly managing a couple of support customers already! No project manager. No account manager. Just her, and whatever developers she managed to steal some time from whenever the solutions needed bug-fixing or maintenance. She was the perfect fit! The link between the customers and the techies! With a great understanding for process, quality and value! I offered her the role of Team Director. She rejected. “I don’t want to have to deal with agreements and paperwork. I also don’t want to be a manager, having salary arguments and crap.” I was gutted. “But I’d love to be on the team though, as a Production Manager”. Hooray! I’m not alone anymore! Let’s go and build a team! Developers, developers, developers! On the topic of developers: we needed not just average techies, but “real” developers. As mentioned before, the solutions we build are custom top to bottom, and therefore we need “real” developers to maintain them.

Remote teams

The wheels started turning even quicker. We had just gotten a new CEO in Sweden, and I had a slot on her introduction schedule. I tried to explain all the things I did, with IT, GDPR, SLM and Remote Teams. I emphasized Nordic first and was honest and open with my plans and intentions. Luckily, she had been well briefed by the Holding CEO, and it appeared I was kicking in open doors. She gave the thumbs up on Remote teams and SLM. I kindly suggested a short-list of people to be my successor, people I thought might be interested in the role, since I obviously could not be expected to run two totally different departments by myself. She declined. After some debate, I convinced her it was the right thing to do, and I had my hands full running the Nordic IT department. She reluctantly agreed, but disregarded internal drafting for SLM manager and decided we’d go look externally. Said and done. Off to HR to draft a recruitment ad for the role as Team Director SLM. Next step was to find some techies, primarily a Tech Lead who could have the responsibility for building the tooling and processes, and especially help with drafting developers to the team. Neither me or Louise can tell a “good” developer form a “bad”, so we needed help with that. I had a chat with the Swedish CTO, Mattias, and we decided to take a trip to Kharkiv together. We shared the same belief, that Remote Teams was the way forward for the company. There was just no way for us to hire local developers in the same pace as the current ones left us. So we had to broaden our horizons. Isac, our Front-End Lead tagged along. On the agenda was:

• Find back-end developers to join our project teams
• Find back-end developers to join SLM
• Find front-end developers with the right profile and mindset

I also had some pure IT related matters to attend, such as establishing relationship with our long time Danish branch office in Kharkiv and, while on-site, setting up a new firewall. Our small delegation (Isac, Mattias and me) had been properly primed by the Danish CTO. Our contact, Alex, the founder of the company we were interested in partnering up with, who’d also been brilliantly primed about us, was waiting for us at the airport. We were well taken care of. I stayed at a separate hotel, and Alex drove me there on the evening of our arrival. On the ride over, I took the opportunity to explain to him about the SLM initiative and ask if he had any suitable candidates lined up for me. He was brutally honest. “You’re not going to be able to find any developer interested in joining your support team. You cannot call it support. You need to mix it up. Offer some projects, and schedule them for some routine support and maintenance at the same time. I have no pure support developers to offer!” Sad. I had to shift strategies. Quickly. I decided to take Alex advice and change my request. I basically just joined Mattias and Isacs mission in finding developers. Not for support, but just developers. Period. Their mission became my mission. I didn’t come as far as I had hoped on my Kharkiv trip. Sure, relationships were established, and the ground work was done. But I came back empty-handed. Zero developer for SLM drafted. Mattias and Isac, on the other hand, was very enthusiastic about their mission. Mattias put together some good slides of our experience and presented on the all-hands meeting. The new CEO really helped pull the train, she was also convinced Remote teams was the way forward and therefore grabbed everyone’s attention and directed it at us. Remote teams became a thing. Even among the skeptics. Attitudes and concerns were addressed. Ambassadors was chosen.

The successor

Next step was to put together a second delegation, with the aim of actually producing some candidates. In the ground work, we had already assigned a Team Lead on the Kharkiv side and engaged another developer full time. Now we wanted to expand them to become an actual team. I involved myself in the process, to ensure Louise was on that delegation. She of course would look after the interest of SLM. I also snuck in the top candidate for my successor on that delegation. It was pure tactics. The recruitment of an external Team Lead was not going great. The few good candidates produced, was either rejected by HR or COO, or declined our offer. But since there was a reorg about to happen, and I knew my first pick for the role probably would be available (and possibly interested), I saw an opportunity to jump the gun and persuade her to join the delegation. My cunning plan succeeded. Louise and my-soon-to-be successor went to Kharkiv alongside with one of our most senior developers (who by the way had plenty of experience with SLM on a previous job. Coincidence? No.). When the second delegation came back and reported on their findings, I was thrilled. They had drafted some people and already staffed them in projects. They had bonded and formed their own vision on what SLM should be. They had decided to go for it! Now there was just formalities left, and I’d be off the hook!

The executive order

Turn back the clock a couple of months, while I was waiting for the second delegation to go to Kharkiv, I was approached by a KAM who had a case for SLM. She was very worried about whether the SLM team would be established in time, but I insisted it would be fine. Just show me the money and I’ll show you support! So, I created the first formal customer contract for SLM and send her on her way with it. A mile-stone! Let’s hope the customer accepts. And let’s hope we’ll be able to deliver. Shortly after the second delegation had returned, I was approached by my (real) boss, the Holding COO. She had started to pick up on how much time I spent on SLM and had noticed that my other obligations as IT manager had started to slip. She was not happy. “You are not a customer facing person. You’re just no good at it. I see you as an administrator. You must excuse yourself from this whole SLM debacle.” I felt guilty. Because I was guilty. I knew I had been swept away on the fun ride of entrepreneurship. I know I had let my other tasks slide. I knew she wanted me to deliver stability and now suddenly, I was stirring things up. I knew all this, and I knew she would disapprove, so I had gone through lengths to keep my work with SLM hidden from her. In hindsight that was stupid, but I really believed my mission was too important for the future of the company, to let my role and responsibilities be a hindrance. I thought I would be able to pull it off, without complications. But reality caught up with me. She made me choose. I choose sticking with IT. That was my plan all along anyways. The Swedish CEO was not happy about my decision to abandon SLM, turned out she had quietly counted on me running it perpetually. But after some negotiations between my two bosses, a final date for my SLM assignment was set and I was ready to go back to being “just” an IT director. Luckily, like described above, the scene was already set for my predecessor, and I felt I could pass the torch knowing I’d done my best.

The good-bye

I’m sure my successor was underwhelmed with what I had accomplished in the last 6 months. I’ll ask her sometime in the future when the water is in safe distance from the bridge. My short(ish) stint as a part-time, in-house entrepreneur is officially over. I wish I could have put more focus on it. Having a full-time job as group IT manager on the side and two small kids to boot, doesn’t give you the ability for full focus on anything. And this thing demanded more focus and met more resistance than I had imagined. But it was a great ride! I have some hand-over to do, and I plan to keep up to speed with the progress of SLM and the team, mainly out of curiosity. However, I have promised myself (and my successor) to not be too involved, or in fact not involved at all. That made sense (to me and her) since everyone wants to make their department their own. Kill your darlings and all that. Now, finally time to put all my focus on my real assignment: develop and maintain the IT department! I’ll possibly even be able to spare my family some attention… Back to basics.

The personal experiences, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this blog post are my own and in no way represent those of the company.