#LoveCustomerDigital Customer Interaction Services

What to Get Right in an Omnichannel Technology Implementation

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An omnichannel experience is what every customer expects and what every telco aspires to deliver.

Telcos must not only identify what it takes to deliver cohesive, connected and continuous multi-modal omnichannel experiences, but they must also discover the secrets to quick value realization and navigate the labyrinth of transformation pitfalls along the way.

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To achieve a consistent omnichannel experience, business units, processes and systems must be integrated where everyone and everything talks to each other and operates as a single unified unit. While the front-end experience must exude simplicity to the customer, behind the scenes this requires ultimate sophistication. People, processes, systems and technology (both front-end and back-end) required to achieve this, must all be orchestrated together in a concert like never before.

Making this a more daunting ask is the number of moving parts across an organization which have exploded with time. For all pieces to work together like clockwork, silos must be broken and processes and systems integrated so that everyone and everything talks to each other.

But how do we tackle such a complex transformation? In this paper, we will explore what is required to transform the technology delivery model, by leveraging our experience of

standing up and operating a large scale omnichannel implementation. We will analyze what it takes, to help enable the new omnichannel customer interaction capabilities, to navigate the technology delivery complexities and the things to get right when developing an omnichannel multi-speed technology platform.

Illustrated below is the comprehensive delivery model for a multi-speed omnichannel interaction platform. The user interface (UI) is developed using agile methodology tightly synchronized with a flexible

abstraction layer to access the back-end data. The multi-speed architecture helps enable the flexibility of the agile for the front-end and waterfall for stability at the back-end. This interplay

between agile and waterfall coupled with a multi-speed architecture approach cannot and must not be underestimated.

Tackling the Obvious Complexity

Architecting and Building for Business Agility

IT PMO

ServiceDesign

Scopingand StoryMapping

ScopingDecisions

Waterfall(MW / CoreAPI)

Requirements Integration----Design----Waterfall

Grooming

IterativeDesign and Intake

(Creative/Arch.) andDev Planning

Iterative UIDevelopment

and UAT Testing

SprintRegression

Testing

E2ETesting

Performance Engineering/

Testing

OperationalReadiness Testing

TestReadiness

DITTesting

(Dev integrationtest)

Dev OpsPlatformArchitecture

Governance and Delivery PMO

External Sync pointFeedback Loop

External Sync pointFeedback Loop

External Sync pointFeedback Loop

External Sync pointFeedback Loop

Out of Scope

External Sync pointFeedback Loop

Middleware

Backend

• Vetted Story Maps• Release Roadmap• Release Scope Doc

• Features • Working SW

Out of scope for thisdocument

Sprintplanningdevelopmentand testing

KeyDeliverable

• Features • Working SW

• Sprint Scope• Sprint Roadmap Plan

• Functional Stories• Working SW

Note: New RQMTSs will funnel through planning/Design

• Approval Package • Wireframes

• User Stories • Change Log

• Scope /L2 Experience Mapping • Dev Sprint Roadmap/Plan

• Completed Assembly • HTML Stories

• Arch Stories • Functional Stories

• Updated Sprint Roadmap Plan

Itera

tive

and

Incr

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tal A

gile

Spr

ints

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We examine the “What to Get Right” for the key activities in the delivery model illustrated above. There are broadly seven key areas (covering multiple activities) from sprint scoping to testing including enterprise PMO. One of the activities that is specifically not covered in this PoV is “Service Design” since it may fall outside the conventional IT transformation scope. However, this is a crucial activity in itself and must be pursued in order to ensure the problem has been clearly defined, an emotional resonance with the consumer is created, and the overall customer experience is defined, before moving to an agile delivery cycle for UI production in later phases.

The first activity is Scoping and Story Mapping. This includes cross functional and technical teams coming together and collaborating

at the onset to develop a big picture view of the E2E functionality and user experience flows. This activity helps teams to better understand the functionality, feasibility, dependencies and risks of the system at the very outset rather than waiting until the end of the process, thus saving precious time, cost and effort, and resulting in faster time to market. It also helps effectively plan more complete releases that deliver concrete value to users and the business. Lastly, this activity is also critical to synchronize the front-end UI activities with the back-end waterfall projects.

Scoping and story mapping feeds into Iterative Design and Intake activities. This phase includes developing the functional design using sketches, finalizing functionality and flow relative to screens and developing wireframes,

comps and user stories to help enable the E2E experience. This is a crucial phase as the theoretical idea of the functionality gets translated into tangible “flesh and blood” wireframes/comps. This also determines the quality of the customer interaction experience from a visual design standpoint across the various digital touchpoints.

Platform Architecture and Iterative UI Development includes planning, designing and building the platform architecture as well as the development of HTMLs and actual working software for each sprint. This activity is the point when the experiences move from design to working software and is important since it determines the user experience. The planning and delivery in this phase is crucial to avoid cost, time and resource

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overruns which will cascade down to the entire systems development life cycle (SDLC).

Development Operations helps to ensure a quicker time to market by creating a production-like environment for the development and test teams and providing tools to maximize their efficiency. This includes building and managing tools and environments as well as developing, managing and deploying source code for enabling successful development and testing. This helps enable the continuous software delivery model with less complex problems to fix and faster problem resolution resulting in faster delivery of features, more stable operating environments and more time to add value to the system.

Testing comprises various in and outside sprint forms of testing including Sprint Regression Testing,

Development Integration Testing, Performance Testing, E2E Testing and User Acceptance Testing. Overall testing is a critical phase since it helps identify bugs and defects at an early stage rather than later or post deployment when the time and cost of fixing a defect is exponentially higher. While in-sprint testing helps to identify bugs and defects in the software being developed as part of that particular sprint, Performance and E2E testing helps to determine how the functionality is behaving in conjunction with the other systems of record and engagement, both upstream and downstream (in-house, third party vendors, etc.)

Governance and Delivery PMO activities include program management and governance of in-sprint delivery activities including Design, Architecture,

Development and Testing and is important to ensure sprint work product commitment and delivery timelines are met and issues/risks are flagged on time. It also helps prevent sprint teams operating in silos. It is important to have a heightened focus on this function given the added complexity of the multi-speed work streams that must come together to deliver these omnichannel capabilities.

Enterprise PMO function oversees the program progress at the enterprise level including both the agile and waterfall solutions delivery, change management and program management teams. This activity helps connect the dots (the agile sprints with the waterfall delivery), to ensure that the big picture is kept in mind while planning and delivering the sprint work products.

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Scoping and Story Mapping

During this activity, it is important to focus on the overall functionality and flow. At the story mapping stage, the focus should be on defining the E2E functionality (of L2 experiences) and the narrative flow instead of the creative and visual aspects of design (copy, style guides/ patterns, etc.) since at this nascent stage it may not make sense to focus on the details of the UI as the overall experience has not been designed yet. Telcos should optimize for the

primary use case (as the Pareto principle suggests), while edge cases should not be excluded, but should be treated more as exceptions. Lastly, one of the most critical aspect to get right is to ensure business and technology speak to each other. All teams including business, technology and other cross-functional teams need to be engaged throughout the process to collaboratively develop the end-to-end narratives with functionality and general flow.

Iterative Design and Intake

From a business perspective, not only is it critical to have proper representation from each of the channels during the design phase, but it is also important to assign a single person to be the cross-functional point of contact across all channels. This cross functional point of contact should sit and have the authority across all channels—mobile, Web, retailand call center—for each user experience to ensure that the different customer interaction

What to Get Right

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channels are on board with the unified design and experience changes as well as one code base. This will help build consensus and also ensure concerns are raised on time. In addition, it is important to determine how the business should be incentivized for these changes. For instance, what is the right way to incentivize the business (channel owners) to create a common set of cross-channel requirements versus standalone optimization of their own channels?

From a technology design perspective, there are several operational constructs to get right. The most important from an efficiency perspective, is to create a standard set of reusable foundation deliverables upfront for production design. These deliverables may include the Design User Guide which is an important reference point and helps ensure consistent design; the Pattern Library, with reusable widgets to prevent rework at later stages; and the Site Map with the reusable widgets mapped to pages. Secondly, it is essential to clearly define handoffs between teams. Since agile delivery in sprint cycles necessitates a number of handoffs, for the smooth operation of this conveyor belt, it is crucial to clearly define the handoffs among teams, including the timing, input and output so that the work products advance smoothly from one team

to the other. For instance, the handoff between the PM/ Creative and Development teams needs to be clearly laid out.

Lastly, it is important to have the team within a certain proximity as there will be some tasks that are more complex in nature and are critical to do in person such as the project scoping, story mapping and iterative design activities, and these will require teams to be co-located to better plan and design the sprint. As such it is more productive to have all resources within a closer proximity during the initial stages of the delivery life cycle until you go into further production/ maintenance.

Platform Architecture and Iterative UI Development

Iterative development is the name of the game. Both developers and users must shift to a test and learn approach where the teams are developing and testing in smaller increments and in shorter cycles. A large number of joint collaboration sessions with stakeholders and partners should be conducted to assist them make critical decisions that shape requirements.

Also, Agile Planning is important to enable Agile Delivery. While this sounds obvious, if the planning is not done well, you risk running into issues in development. Better planning would also entail getting

the technical team involved earlier in the life cycle to vet feasibility and dependencies. One component of agile planning is to implement story mapping as a first step in the life cycle. Doing this earlier in the process rather than during Functional and Technical Grooming provides a 2-4 week head start on any dependencies. Lastly, it is important to have the Definition of Ready (DOR) and Definition of Developed (DOD) checklist clearly identified and laid out at a user story level for each sprint.

Development Operations (Dev Ops)

For the Dev Ops team to be successful, it is important to get buy-in for tool usage, early in the development cycle, from various stakeholders. A leadership push for specific tools can help increase adoption amongst the team. In addition, having the leadership encourage a highly collaborative culture between Dev Ops and the development/ testing teams is critical for getting the most out of the Dev Ops capability. Another way to innovate is to leverage existing tools (rather than procuring new ones) and apply them to the development and testing context, which can help reduce time cycles to move code into production.

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Testing (Including Test Readiness)

With a multi-speed platform, testing becomes more complex as it is needed not only to do integration testing across the sprints but also across the systems of engagement and systems of record. The testing regimen will include in-sprint UAT testing, sprint regression and development integration testing for the systems of engagement, and end-to-end (E2E) testing and performance testing across the systems of engagement and the systems of record.

Sprint Regression Testing

With the objective of making sure that everyone is tightly aligned across the sprints, a publication of a closure memo after every release cycle with all the planned versus actual test details and a clear statement on the sign off status should be an integral part of the sprint regression testing phase. This also helps capture the status and the performance versus targets.

The importance of testing on different browsers and devices should also not be underestimated. It is important to test the functionality on different browsers and devices to determine the performance more accurately and for this capacity planned should support a detailed QA on every browser-desktop-device combination. Lastly, in order to keep up with the fast pace of change, it is critical to automate tests for key scenarios.

Development Integration Testing (DIT)

Because of the complex downstream implications, it is critical to have an E2E defect management capability in place for the DIT phase, where there is a clear view of the downstream defects which are impacting the upstream/ front-end systems. Likewise, it is important to conduct an impact analysis to determine which fixes need to be prioritized during the DIT phase, and those back-end defects which are impacting the highest number of front-end screens needs to be prioritized before the others.

Given the short testing cycles, it is also important for the triage team to quickly identify the defects and assign issues to the appropriate owners. To isolate the back-end issue causing the problem, it is important to have collaboration between the front-end system teams, core system teams and the triage team.

In-Sprint UAT Testing

It is important to build strong engagement between UAT and Dev/Engineering/QA teams. Since there will be sprint interdependencies between these upstream and downstream teams, and time frames are very short, it is critical to get things right the first time. For instance, while testing the working software developed by the Dev teams, any questions/ clarifications on the functionality that the UAT team may have should be promptly addressed.

It is also important to keep Quality Assurance and User Acceptance Testing separate when conducting client demos, so each team has the flexibility required to most efficiently execute their testing, eliminating dependencies between the teams and their schedules. Lastly, during UAT, it is important to keep some of following key questions in mind—Is this a unified experience? Is the functionality right? Is the user experience right? Is it the most efficient way? Are the style guide guidelines being met?

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E2E Testing

For this phase of testing, we cannot stress enough the importance of having a well-defined E2E test strategy and tight governance of how all pieces come together.This includes establishing a metric-based plan that clearly outlines what can be achieved and when, including clear entrance and exit criteria. Managing and automating test data is another area to get right for E2E testing. Test data management (TDM) and test automation are also key enablers to drive success, especially test automation which is vital for handling the volume of use cases in the required time period.

Lastly, it is critical to have a dedicated point of contact that can look across all the components that need to be tested and create a clear view of how they all come together.

Test Readiness

One key role to establish, that many telcos may feel is not that necessary, is an overall delivery governance manager to be the design and methodology authority during the test readiness phase. Otherwise downstream dependencies and timelines can be negatively impacted.Another commonly made mistake is to separate the configuration management system for systems of engagement and systems of record. A single configuration management system may be used by all teams (UI through the back-end) to capture and track requirements and all associated system delivery components throughout the life cycle. In addition to the system, training and a disciplined culture to consistently use the tool is a must to maintain order and deliver at speed.

Performance Engineering/Testing

It is essential to have a finalized scope before beginning this phase of testing. It is necessary to have a handshake with the other upstream teams and understand the scope early so that it does not impact the planning and scripting timelines of performance testing. Another key element to get right for performance testing is to have a collaborative effort from all interested parties including SMEs and architects for resolving show stoppers of performance test cycles.

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Delivery PMO

A good delivery PMO can really make or break the delivery efficiency. This team will help communicate between Product Management/ Creative and Development/ Architecture teams and is of paramount importance to ensure that agile delivery runs smoothly. However, it is critical that they have a strong executive sponsor and leadership to push tasks as needed, and to have

influence and strong governance on handoffs between teams. Since agile delivery in sprint cycles necessitates a number of handoffs between teams especially in projects where we are doing all three—Creative (Design), Product Management (Requirements/ Functionality) and Delivery (Technology), the need to have a strong governance and clear metrics for handoffs between teams is even greater.

Enterprise PMO

From an Enterprise PMO perspective, it is important to get the timelines for the synchronization between the waterfall and agile models right, and hence important to not wait for the waterfall delivery to be complete before collaboration begins as it causes gaps to be found too late in the process. Story mapping can be potentially used as a sync point with the waterfall high level design team.

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To make this office most effective, it is critical to have leadership participation in team meetings to increase accountability. Having executive/ director participation in core team meetings will increase accountability of all the players and help produce maximum results.This team must also be empowered to leverage various avenues to escalate issues and remove roadblocks (Leadership, RAID log, Program level PMO, Reporting,

etc.). This helps to increase accountability and faster delivery of work products. As a function, Enterprise PMO should look to foster a culture of collaboration and open communication among teams. It is important to make sure people are talking so that issues and dependencies are addressed in a more natural and efficient manner.

ConclusionWhile the nature, scale, scope and environment of each omnichannel digital interaction project varies, the added complexities to IT and business must not be underestimated. Many of these “Activities to Get Right” can be customized and incorporated in your implementation philosophy, helping you to sort through the complexity and undertake both “preventive” and “curative” actions to help enable a successful delivery—saving cost, time and delivery effort and helping reach the North Star of delivering a cohesive, connected and continuous omni-experience across all channels.

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Copyright © 2016 Accenture All rights reserved.

Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

About the AuthorsInés GuzmánInés Guzmán is the lead for Accenture Digital Customer Interaction Services. Inés Guzmán is also the global lead for Digital Customer Service. She is based out of our Madrid office.ines.guzman@accenture.com

Josie SpenceJosie Spence is the Offering Development lead for Accenture Digital Customer Interaction Services based out of our San Francisco office.josephine.l.spence@accenture.com

Astha BhardwajAstha Bhardwaj is the Offering Development Manager for Accenture Digital Customer Interaction Services based out of our Gurgaon office.astha.bhardwaj@accenture.com

About AccentureAccenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions—underpinned by the world’s largest delivery network—Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With more than 375,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at www.accenture.com.