the power of partnership before paperwork
Prologue…
“I met an old friend again recently, I think you’d like him!”.
I was enjoying a drink in a south Northamptonshire pub and with those words, I think Mark Dilks was the catalyst for an extraordinary journey; For me personally and for the organisation I’m proud to work for.
Nearly two years later, we’ve just gone live with our own digital transformation. To some people’s surprise, it was:
- On time
- On budget
- And with more scope that I could have hoped for
The details of our new Website, Career Compass and our Case Management system are incredibly important, but not I think, for this story. Yes, they’re driven by ai, yes we love them, but suffice to say the systems are transforming how we are able to provide support to naval veterans and their families at what can be a testing period in their lives.
For this story, I’m focusing on how we built those systems, the importance of trust and how strong values alignment was so important for our success. In fact, I’ve come to believe that trust and alignment matter more than anything else.
I met Peter a few days after that pub conversation and straight away, I could see why Mark wanted to introduce us. After growing and selling a 750 person international software development business, Peter had gone back to basics and was helping serving military people and veterans “learn how to solve hard problems with code”. Why? “Because I love it!” he said.
If you’d like to see the video interview of Mark and Peter, click here.
Let’s Get this party Started!
At first I thought that Peter and his team at dt-squad would be able to help some veterans learn more skills and so improve their chances of finding rewarding career opportunities. I wasn’t very familiar with coding or the more technical side of computing and systems so Peter offered to give me a few lessons. Just so I could “get the idea of what coding is and how people can learn”. I looked forward to those lessons and to my surprise, found that I really enjoyed solving problem with code! It was amazing and I started to discuss with Peter how systems and ai might be able to transform our processes at White Ensign.
Peter offered to build some Proofs of Concept to crystallise some of the ideas.
Over time I met the rest of the team at dt-squad (all military veterans trained by Peter – free of charge) and they were totally aligned with the idea of helping more veterans and their families by leveraging the power of systems and ai.
As with all charities, we have to justify our costs very carefully and we are, by our nature, risk averse. The team at dt-squad helped us overcome that by accepting a huge amount of risk on their side. They were so confident that the new approach would work for us that they developed the hardest parts of the application without any contractual cover, putting in hundreds of man hours of development time. This gave us enormous confidence to source funding and commit our own funds and reassure our board of trustees that we could embark on a project that would be truly transformational. By the time we actually came to sign the contract, significantly more than 50% of the application was already built and we’re grateful to the team for having faith that the commercials would eventually be agreed and a contract put in place. Peter and the team were not phased by this approach and told me that their other clients had gone through a similar journey.
Their approach appears to be consistent across all their clients – from one of the largest automotive companies in the world to specialist legal consultancies and small charities helping amputees. Whether building AI-driven business simulations or analysing vast quantities of medical records, their “sales process” (if you can call it that!) always followed the same principle: prove value by tackling the hardest challenges first, without waiting for contractual cover.
This approach is what ultimately secured the rubber stamp of the board of trustees who had all had bitter experience of dreadful IT projects that had run over budget and were delivered late, and often where no real work is done before contracts are signed.
To bring the story up to date…
To bring the story up to date…Even after the contract was signed, the “surprise and delight” (Peter’s stated aim as part of contract delivery) didn’t stop. The team explained to me one day that if anyone says they can “write down the entire unambiguous specification for a new and complex system that will change the way employees work and clients receive the service” then they are lying or deluded! So it was in our project that:
- Some things that we thought would be important, turned out not to be.
- Some things were missed that were completely necessary.
How Peter and the team responded to this was not a surprise to me and as we were so cost sensitive dt-squad understood and worked to ensure that the familiar process of: “when the client introduces change, then our margin goes up!”, didn’t happen.
There were many changes to how things worked that were silently incorporated with no additional charge.
There were many, many small additions that were silently incorporated with no additional charge.
And there was one pretty chunky addition that we needed to bring into scope. It was too big to avoid an additional charge but the team at dt-squad dropped into their normal pattern:
- With no contractual cover, analyse our loose requirements, crystallise them into a narrative vignette that everyone could understand and agree on
- With no contractual cover, build the hardest parts of the actual system and demonstrate to us what the vignette would look like and how it would work
- Continue to build it while we debated internally and sought funding
- Actually deployed it before the contract amendment was signed
They solved a massive problem for us, and made no attempt to exploit the urgency of the situation for their own gain.
When the team first came in to our offices on the Belfast, Peter told our CEO (Stuart Wright) that it was their strategy to:
- Create value from day one of our engagement
- Do it at a cost that his competitors could not match
- Deliver “delight and surprise” along the way
- And all whilst tirelessly living their values of “Win Win, Integrity, Innovation and Agility”
I checked with Stuart this morning and we both agreed it’s full marks across the board!
And Finally…
Even though two of the team, Stuart and John, now have new roles our heartfelt thanks to all the team who worked tirelessly for us navigating our transformation with shared values: