Three Ireland has just undergone the most significant change to its structure and way of working in its history with the move to an “enterprise agile” model. “Enterprise agile is a move away from a top-down, hierarchical way of working to a more open, collaborative approach where people are more empowered to innovate and try new ideas,” explains Three Ireland chief executive Elaine Carey. “Fundamentally it’s about delivering a better experience to our customers.”
According to global management consulting firm McKinsey, in some organisations this model has been shown to deliver as much as a 30 percentage point improvement in customer satisfaction, 30 per cent improvement in financial performance and 50 per cent improvement in operational performance.
“The idea is to empower employees, making it easier to achieve positive outcomes for customers and the business, as well as allowing them to grow into new areas and have an enjoyable and exciting workplace experience,” says Carey.
At its most basic, the “new way of Three”, as it has become known within the organisation, sees the majority of the company’s 1,200 employees in Ireland assigned to new cross-functional, multidisciplinary teams, which are designed to deliver faster and better outcomes for customers, the organisation and its people.
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“In essence, enterprise agile is about the ability to create and respond to change,” says Carey. “It’s about how you as an organisation structure yourself to encourage change and creativity and have the ability to deliver. It’s about empowering and enabling your people to deliver. It’s about having teams of people with a clear view of what they want to achieve and of the value they are creating for customers and the organisation.”
The new cross-functional teams, known as tribes, focus on particular goals and objectives and are further broken down into squads of around eight people from different departments who bring expertise in areas such as IT, marketing, networking and so on and are focused on tasks within the overall objective.
“It’s about breaking down silos and bringing people together to work together on common goals,” says Carey. “Silos bring complexity to organisations and creating teams with cross-functional capability is a way to deliver outcomes to make our customers’ experience better.”
The big question, of course, is why a highly successful organisation like Three Ireland would want to engage in such a fundamental change process. “We are a very large organisation,” Carey explains. “And like any large organisation, we got more complicated, bureaucratic, and hierarchical over time. That stifles creativity, and innovation becomes difficult. Three is the largest telco in Ireland and if we want to grow and keep up with new waves of technology, we need to be able to adapt to whatever change might lie ahead of us.”
It’s not just a matter of moving people around. “A major part of it is creating the culture for the new operating model to be successful,” she says. “That culture is one of empowerment and psychological safety where people are allowed to fail, fail fast, learn from it, and move on quickly.”
The nature of leadership needs to change as well. “Instead of command and control we now have a servant leadership model. The leadership team, including me as chief executive, leads by example, removes barriers, enables empowerment and supports change. If you don’t have that, it’s just musical chairs. We didn’t embark on this level of change to play musical chairs.”
Indeed, the move to enterprise agile and the new way of Three is the culmination of a two-year process. “We have been working with McKinsey on this,” she says. “We visited other companies that had done it successfully. We took on board all the learnings from their journeys. It’s all about learning and learning and learning and adapting and changing as you go on.”
The next step was to trial the enterprise agile model with two tribes, one focused on broadband and the other on billing and revenue. “We started the trial in January of this year to learn what is involved in practice and to help us see it if delivered value for our customers, the organisation and our people and decide if it was a go or no go. The outcomes were so positive, it was an easy go.
“In one case, we saw an idea that had been around for 18 months being delivered in 90 days. Employee engagement scores went from the early 80s to the early 90s for the people in the trial groups. The new model enables people to be their best selves. People feel a sense of achievement associated with getting things done.”
That was followed by an intensive communication process to explain to everyone in the organisation what enterprise agile meant and what it was going to deliver. “We used the trial tribes as our voice. It wasn’t a question of listening to me. Just look at what they’ve done and achieved. We also had safaris where people could spend a day with a tribe trial team to see what it was all about at first hand.”
Customers are at the centre. “We have designed the tribes and teams around customer outcomes. They might work on something like reducing the customer onboarding process from 10 clicks to five or to improve our net promoter score. The business will gain from those things. We hope success will translate into things like churn going down, increased engagement with customers because we’re easier to do business with, increased EBIT and margin and growth.”
Positive outcomes for Three employees are equally important. “We want to ensure that everyone in the organisation has access to development opportunities. In the old world, being successful meant moving up. When you were a manager success meant having more people to manage. But not everyone wants to be a people leader. Maybe the next step is to be a better me and to make my craft better for me and the organisation. The new way of Three will present really clear development and growth opportunities that everyone can tap into in whatever way they want to.”
Ultimately, the success of the new model will come down to what Carey describes as the five Cs: “Communication, collaboration, continuous improvement, customer focus and courage. The courage to keep going when things go wrong is very important, because things do go wrong.”
She is confident that the enterprise agile model will deliver its objectives: “We’ve been through a lot of major changes in Three Ireland over the years and that stands to our good.”
