Situation/Problem
Our client is one of the largest telecom service providers globally, determined to deliver results to become a customer-centric and competitive company, in which investors will confidently invest and employees will be proud to work, and most importantly deliver what the customers want, need and expect.
In order to realise its prime objectives, the client continued to carry out field surveys to get feedback from customers on their needs, wishes and requirements. The need to make the telecom sector more advanced necessitates working competitively to withstand and survive through large competing markets. Therefore, the company developed its infrastructure, provided it with the latest technologies and trained its employees to enable them to deal with such technologies efficiently. In addition, it maintains good service provision methods and high standards.
Client Needs
TTM was inspired by the client’s vision to be the ICT LEADER, with a great focus on investing in people capital, as the client was looking for a fresh, new and effective value innovating solution in achieving a competitive advantage.
It became clear that the telecom industry has become overcrowded with companies trying to address limited markets with similar product offerings. It has been witnessing a massive transformation in the structure and the rules of the game for competition: services are converging, market barriers are collapsing, products are becoming standardised and companies are merging and building partnerships and alliances. Competition has become purely based on price, fighting to get a bigger slice of the same pie.
Our client understood that whether an operator can go with the flow and thrive in the new environment depends not only on reformulating strategy but also on its timely and effective implementation of a disruptive strategy. This is when they partnered with TTM to help in creating a customised solution for capturing uncontested marketspace by making the competition irrelevant, targeting the general managers and directors layers, who are considered the vehicle for the success of the digitalization strategy and maximising productivity.
TTM Solution
Ever since strategic management was introduced to the economic field, its main purpose has been in pursuing competitive advantage in the existing market.
TTM, through the thorough analysis of the client’s situation locally and understanding the challenges the telecom industry was facing globally, suggested a different methodology that would disrupt the current operating model and inspire the client leaders to dig deep into the factors that would distinguish and differentiate them from the competition and start a transformative journey that would build a different future for their customers.
The solution relied heavily on an intervention meeting with the GM of strategy to translate the corporate strategy into a departmental innovation path that will make the competition completely irrelevant.
This transformation was achieved through the combination of legacy strategy tools together with disruptive innovative tools focusing on value innovation, redrawing customer journey models and reconstructing market boundaries.
In order for the client to sustain the learning and to execute actions, TTM offered a hybrid learning mechanism through synchronous and asynchronous activities for the total of 300 directors, which culminated into a 4-phased approach as shown in image below:
An important step in designing the solution was to dig deep and understand pain areas in the lead strategy formulation and execution. TTM conducted a handful of interviews and focus groups to prompt the key challenges and objectives the client would like to achieve.
This was followed by back-office work in compiling the challenges and pain areas into a design that would take all the above into consideration.
The solution was implemented in a way that would challenge current existing conditions and open up the possibilities that the client can achieve under a safe environment through group brainstorming sessions, based on design thinking thought provocations, with the use of indispensable legacy models in strategy combined with value innovative tools borrowed from the Blue Ocean Strategy book.
It was also imperative that the directors anchor the learning and get exposed to disruptive strategies in other sectors, done through multiple learning tools such as videos, mobile applications and case studies that triggered a reformulation strategy that moved them from red ocean thinking into embracing a blue ocean full of innovative ideas.
Outcome
The programme focused on different aspects of how GMs and directors can develop their knowledge and process in the way strategy is formulated and executed. They were able to differentiate between the competitive strategies (playing in a competitive market) and the creation of a value innovative disruptive strategy (singing on their own) to achieve a competitive advantage to the company over its competitors in the market (build execution into strategy). The client was successful in achieving a strong impact in value creation where it defined one of the most commonly accepted beliefs of competition-based strategy, and made proactive changes that led them to develop their own market rather than trying to beat competitors to reach the top in the market.
