BCG - YodaPhone

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The major pieces of work in the digitization piece involve:

• Improving the customer experience
• Improving internal processes
• Leveraging data analytics to drive value

In this phase, the candidate needs to determine that some work is worth doing and other work isn’t worth doing. They need to identify which work pieces should be continued versus dis-continued.

The candidate should clarify what work we are embarking on as part of this digitization program.

Brainstorm how/why we might be gaining benefits from each workstream. A good answer would include the following:

• Customer experience – a better customer experience means more customers will buy our products/services, ultimately providing a revenue uplift
• Process improvements – by improving our internal processes across products (i.e. handling complaints, processing new orders, etc), we can reduce the time taken across activities, thereby requiring a smaller workforce and reducing costs
• Data insights – by leveraging our customer and system data, we can run predictive analytics to improve marketing campaigns, recommend additional products to customers, solve issues before they appear, etc. This provides both a revenue and a cost uplift

Upon reading the exhibit, the candidate should note that some workstreams are worth more than others. Furthermore, benefits don’t necessarily correlate with time remaining.

Key insights:

• Data insights – generally have a lot of effort/time remaining, but don’t provide much value
• Process improvements – do take a lot of time, but they also provide the most benefits
• Customer experience – is somewhere in the middle effort and benefit-wise, but is much more valuable for Mobile Phones than for the Internet

To finish the case, the candidate needs to figure out how many teams we need, and what our ultimate savings and benefits will be.

The candidate should note that we only need 5.5 teams in total. That means 5 full-time teams and 1 half-time (or full-time for first 6 months) team.

An excellent candidate will understand/note the following:

• We could actually keep all 10 teams and allocate them across the 6 work pieces until completion. This would let us:
  • Realize benefits earlier
  • Finish the digitization program early (good for publicity/morale)

It would be beneficial to rank teams by efficiency and profficiency. The teams that have proven to complete work the fastest AND have the skillsets/experience required for the remaining work pieces (i.e. process improvement and CX exptertise), should be retained. Additionally, the teams already allocated to the in-scope work pieces should likely be retained, as they have built up knowledge of what's required and what has been done. Teams already allocated to out-of-scope work pieces would likely need to pass under a brighter light.