Thairung Partners Group

I report to the Group COO, giving me direct input to the board. When we discuss innovation, they want to focus on results like increased revenue, CX improvement, and efficiency savings. I quantify and present business cases in financial terms the board can evaluate.

Each business case depends on accurate forecasting of delivery cost and timescale. I’m proud to say that the board now has great trust in our forecasts. That has been made easier by using a low-code application development platform. Many people talk about the improved speed of software development. But predictability is equally important.

“Communication is essential to the success of the digital transformation.”

Low-code development enables my team to focus on delivering business value—the features for our users and customers. Less effort is needed to develop the “software plumbing,” like UI frameworks, user/permission hierarchies, and suchlike.

Moreover, a platform approach to software development eliminates much of the toil that developers usually have to deal with, like testing different screen sizes and managing environments. Using a low-code platform prioritizes the reuse of components, like UI controls and screen templates, which reduces repetitive software development steps. So, we have much higher confidence in our delivery estimates, and the board shares that confidence.

That said, many of the initiatives we are tackling are disruptive innovations, which require tolerance of uncertainty. In these cases, sometimes you have to develop a new capability and test it with users, or customers, to see what they think. This kind of test-and-learn approach requires courage. This is why trust from the board is so important to my team.

Part of my role is to help the business develop this culture of innovation—this bravery, to try and sometimes fail, but always to learn quickly, so we constantly improve.

Within my team, there are four pillars that I focus on to build this innovation culture: trust, respect, integrity, and passion.

Trust — I have already partly explained, but it’s also a matter of trusting the innovation process. For my development team, adopting a low-code AppDev approach was an act of trust. Why learn new skills? Why change the way we work? But I was able to convince them to trust the process. We had to test and learn to find a more efficient way to develop software. The experiment paid off, and developers now have more fulfilling jobs as a result. After all, nobody wants to toil over non-value-adding work. 

Respect — is about teamwork and team ethic. In a test and learn environment, you have to embrace risk, and when we need to “course-correct,” see those as lessons learned rather than failures. The key is to learn fast and cultivate a learning and supportive culture amongst team members based on mutual respect—especially as we have a diverse team with a broad range of ages, skills, and experiences.

Integrity — involves staying true to these principles and continually improving. What I expect from my team is to strive every day to improve something. These may be tiny steps, learning new things, embracing new technologies, or improving one aspect of a system. But over time, these many small improvements amount to a considerable value.

Passion — involves a commitment to developing as a team and buying into the company’s mission. One of the processes I’ve implemented is a rewards program. Any employee who proposes a digital improvement that will save 100 plus hours of work per year receives a reward. This encourages a grassroots/bottom-up continuous improvement culture, and as you can imagine, there is no shortage of such suggestions from within the technology team.

Communication is essential to the success of the digital transformation. Our mission is to get rid of manual and inefficient tasks. It’s important—particularly for junior administrative staff—not to fear such changes. We are getting rid of inefficient work, not people, and the results should be that they have more time for meaningful work, like serving customers, and spend less time doing what I call “robot work,” which today can be done by technologies such as RPA.   

We frequently share testimonial videos from staff who feel that their work has been enhanced. This helps disperse fear of change and encourages bottom-up improvement suggestions. We hold business team process/design thinking workshops to analyze current processes and investigate opportunities to apply lean thinking and automation.

Good communication also helps reduce the requirements gap between business users and developers. We use agile methods with weekly or bi-weekly business stakeholders meetings, where we demonstrate progress and ensure development is on track to meet actual requirements.

With so many possible communication channels, including Zoom, email, phone, videos, and our project management system, I also invest time to guide team members to use the best communication medium for any given purpose.