At no other point in our living memory have we as a species been rudely awakened to the limits to our power, cognitive capability, or influence. A zoonotic virus described by scientists as being ‘barely alive’ has precipitated a global crisis that continues to impact human lives, health, learning, work, and trade.

Plans, whether made by governments, organizations, healthcare facilities, or vaccine manufacturers, have all had to be revisited, altered, or thrown out of the window because the reality on the ground has been changing too fast.

It doesn’t mean that planning is suddenly irrelevant. Whether in our individual or professional lives, all of us continue to require a structure to work, but the plans themselves are…frankly useless.

Apply this to organizations in the technology industry, and nothing could be truer. Let me explain how.

Founding plans in an iterative frame

The customer’s needs are ever-changing. Choices around what services to provide a client will have to be founded in an iterative framework so that what is always in focus is the customer’s pain points, and by extension, the ultimate user’s pain points, too. 

Increasingly, in a fast-paced world, the question every organization, particularly in the services industry, must ask itself is this: how can it resolve the challenges the customer is facing with a design-led approach, rather than what it, as a service provider, has set out or planned to deliver? 

Consider, for example, a situation where a company has been engaged by a customer, a bank, to implement and undergo digital transformation. As a first step, to switch up from executing the ‘plan’ mode to the more flexible and responsive ‘planning’ mode, the vendor company must understand its customers’ needs. Only then can it chalk out a series of steps that can be executed.   

Among the first of these steps would be considering how to structure the vendor company’s client-facing team. It includes decisions around how many people should be kept close to the client, how many should be dedicated to being available in the client’s time zone, how many should be located in the same geography of the client or alternatively in some other part of the world. 

Planning for change 

Underlying all of this will be decisions regarding where the best talent lies and how to leverage it so that a team that intuitively understands the customer’s issues is created. This team will be tasked with resolving the customer’s pain points by translating them into deliverables, enabling customer delight. 

To do all of this well the three pillars of People, Process, and Technologies will have to be planned thoroughly with speed and agility to deliver well. No customer, no matter how committed, will be willing to wait for too long. It is imperative for vendor organizations to up their game and cater to early wins through cross-sales so that their customer and their end users have something of value, quickly. 

This is where efficient planning (not a, or THE plan) becomes significant. If the first step toward iterative planning is how the vendor organization orchestrates its teams, the second step is how it goes about organizing its financial structuring. The customer should be able to see a business case in investing in a vendor organization. And see it clearly so that it proceeds to establish a partnership.

All of these steps undoubtedly require a plan. However, the plan needs to be created while knowing that everything can change and most likely will change. The customer may decide to initiate a merger or acquisition. Or they may divest one of their units or stop catering to a region they have so far made a name for themselves in catering to. 

Making peace with ambiguity

The entire business context in which a client may have been operating for years can and most probably will change. Planning by the vendor will therefore also have to change. Not only will the vendor organization have to prepare for a transformation in business content, but it will also have to deal with changes in volume and growth. Moreover, if the customer is in the tech space, it will mean getting accustomed to a world of hyper-growth: 10x growth, 100x growth. 

Vendor organizations, here on, will have to be supremely flexible and yet have strong unshakeable governance at its core to withstand and thrive in the new operating environment. Companies wanting to attract and keep customers will have to make the transition from being vendors to partners. 

Interestingly enough, the pandemic is providing all of us with an opportunity to learn to function in new ways, with some degree of ambiguity. This is why I say that although planning is vital, plans are useless.