Ascend supported in increasing customer-centricity, speed and collaboration

The client, a global telecom company, experienced shifts in customer demands. They were determined that they needed to improve their digital capabilities to increase customer-centricity, speed, and flexibility. As a result, the company started a comprehensive transformation program, including implementing a product organization across their IT organization. Ascend supported developing and designing the product organization and ensured that necessary resources and competencies were in place!

The client had identified four main goals with the transformation to a product organization;

1. Make it easier to do business with them
2. Deliver excellent impact to customers
3. Enable customers to grow
4. Become a lot faster in their operations.

An overall product organization model was developed – but how do you go from concept to practical implementation? Ascend was asked to support the cloud services organization within the company to develop and design the product area based on the product organization concept.

Together with key stakeholders in the organization, Ascend formulated a hypothesis on the high-level product team design. The transformation was extensive, so the team decided to start with areas that had specific urgency and priority. The Ascend team supported in designing and dimensioning the product teams and implementing the new organization, including union negotiations and organizational communication. One challenge for the organization was to attain the necessary competence in all product teams, which Ascend also contributed to by supporting the sourcing process of identifying and securing agreements with relevant competence partners. To ensure transparency and ensure alignment with all key stakeholders, Ascend worked in an iterative approach with continuous input and feedback from the different stakeholders and held weekly demos with the management team to present the progress. The work resulted in a new product organization structure for the cloud services organization. Team resources, managers and responsibilities were clearly defined for each product team – and necessary competencies were secured. The new product organization balanced team autonomy with centralized control, enabling each product team to increase customer-centricity, speed, and flexibility while ensuring a common direction and secure operations across the company.