While we do not want to dwell on COVID-19 and the past few months, as more than enough has been written about it, there have been some valuable lessons learnt.
As we are now settling into, dare I say it, ‘the new norm’; we can start to take a step back and assess what has changed exactly and has it been a positive for our day-to-day operations? In the following article, we discuss how we have tweaked our offering to fit with the changing times and how this shift has been a positive move that is now here to stay, as a permanent option for our clients.
Back in March when lockdown measures were put in place, businesses across the country found themselves having to change their processes almost overnight and figure out new ways of operating. For many, this meant remote working and overcoming technology challenges to support employees working from home. What have become key questions to many customers during this period are ‘Do we have the right systems in place? Can we easily communicate internally and externally to our customers? How efficient are our processes? Can we access our data from anywhere, at any time?’
As well as this, many businesses and industries found themselves needing to do more, for less. Never has it been so imperative that organisations’ technology stack is plugging that gap and helping with the heavy lifting.
Don’t be mistaken, we understand that we are not the only business to adapt this framework, nor the first to come up with a remote delivery model. However, the positive shifts we made to our work processes have proved successful and many of our clients now prefer this new offering; so we wanted to share our learnings.
Prior to lockdown and the outbreak of COVID-19, we operated with a cloud-first approach. This allowed many elements of our projects to be delivered off-site. This is not only more efficient, it allows the projects to move forward more smoothly, avoiding delays and is less costly for customers. There were, however, key elements that would be delivered on site, such as Scoping/Requirements Gathering, Design Sessions and User Training. For both the customer and ourselves, these were areas that felt more comfortable to be delivered in-person.
Traditionally in the business world, there has been a perception that client interactions were more productive face to face and that often meant the outcome would be improved. For example, in sales, if you were having a meeting it was often in person; in projects, service delivery to be done on site; in the workplace, employees would be more productive in the office. However, COVID-19 has forced us to challenge our pre-conceived notions and recognise this is not always the case; the same outcomes can be achieved remotely.
Managing Director at PragmatiQ Solutions, Stuart Goldwater, said: “It became clear almost immediately, that we would have to tweak our offering. We would not be able to go on site and visit our customers, but when we reviewed the model in more detail, it was apparent that this just wasn’t an essential element to what we do. We could deliver these sessions remotely and not compromise the quality of the delivery in any way.
“It has actually been so successful that for many clients, this is now a preference. There is far more flexibility when it comes to booking in our sessions and it’s much easier to break these up into bite-size chunks. Even when the world gets back to some normality, whatever that will look like, we will continue to lead with this model.”
While at some point this will all come to an end (we hope), we strongly believe that many of the changes that we and other businesses are making will be here to stay and can still achieve the same positive results, as our full remote delivery model is already proving.
Written by PragmatiQ Solutions, who specialise in designing and developing Bespoke CRM Systems and Custom Databases. For more information, visit www.pragmatiqsolutions.co.uk
