The Right Model: Joined-Up Decision Making
Joined-up –or collaborative-- decisions get to the heart of what is needed to align the many moving parts of a complex organization. Connecting across organizational boundaries, linking strategic choices and tactical actions, and integrating long-, medium- and short-term horizons are critical to this alignment.
But now clockspeeds of different decisions are changing – challenging the typical annual, quarterly and monthly planning calendars. As a result, the conversations need to be different to integrate existing and new portfolios, sense for weak signals of change, and simultaneously execute strategy and inform an ongoing strategic dialogue – changing the players, the questions we need to ask, the information required and the way decisions are made.
MetroPCS, a company launched in 1994 in the chaotic telecommunications market, uses joined-up decision making to keep agile. MetroPCS created a niche of the “anti-contract” in a market that extracted a heavy premium of 200+% cost for the hottest new phones unless customers were willing to sign up for two-year, lock-in contracts. Its competitive play made MetroPCS even more vulnerable to the biggest volatility of all: the fleeting fashion of consumer trend. In the smart phone business over the past few years, the average length of use of a smart phone deflated from 18 months to seven.
MetroPCS, driven by a need to better match its bottom-up with its top-down forecasting, used a cloud-based integrated business planning software solution to bring together six systems, dozens of spreadsheets, and hundreds of details across its multiple SKUs to power a necessary nimbleness.
MetroPCS knew from experience it needed enough insight on trade-off scenario planning to respond on a Friday to a new competitive model on the market—and deliver on a Monday a promotional campaign to avoid “islanded” handsets, that would quickly fall out of favor. Its strategy was all about joined up – fast moving – decision-making, but MetroPCS got a bonus in the process.
Their integrated business planning automation ensured a rigor in cross-company data quality and collection that resulted in, for the first time, a look at the most granular feature and function level of every SKU imaginable across all of their handsets. In this case, MetroPCS’ strategy for business agility has the serendipitous results of generating a central SKU item master database that is now used by the entire organization as the product “go to” resource.
