BBC 2017 Speaker Series – Practitioner: Kiki Plytas, Vice President, Business Transformation & Customer Enablement at Moneris

In anticipation of her presentation at Building Business Capability in Orlando, Nov. 6-10, 2017, we asked Kiki Plytas, Vice President, Business Transformation & Customer Enablement at Moneris, a few questions about transforming the business. Check out this interview in relation to her BBC presentation entitled, Transforming the ‘Time to First Transaction’.

Q: In what ways do you see your group helping your organization handle business transformation?

A: My team assists the organization in formulating a strategy, roadmap and guiding principles for collaborative, transformational conversations to take place. As a group, we make sure to adopt a holistic view of the organization and customer-first approach to ensure that business transformation activities are carried out in a thoughtful and meaningful way.  We ultimately support transformational change across the organization through the development of a shared framework of activities, responsibilities and accountabilities.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing more robust business transformation capabilities for your organization?

A: The business transformation group is still relatively new to the organization, so the initial challenge was in communicating the value of an internal business transformation team to other parts of the business. We overcame this by regularly educating other teams on our findings and the research that went into our business transformation recommendations. We also made it a point to include these teams in the implementation process from start to finish. This helped our group gain credibility within the organization and gave other business teams a reason to be interested in the initiatives that were underway.

Q: What are your short-term goals for becoming more agile?

A: One of our most important short-term goals is to develop a more iterative collaboration process to build on and deliver recommendations and business requirements.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in the past year?

A: Never underestimate the value of developing strong partnerships with everyone involved in the process.  Engage people at different points in the journey so that you can benefit from their knowledge, rather than go for the “big reveal” in the end and risk missing out on their added expertise.

Q: What do you see as the most important goal or trend for business analysts and other professionals to keep in mind?

A: It’s becoming extremely important for business analysts and project managers to incorporate elements of UX design and end user input into their roles. They need to move away from the more traditional elements of their jobs to help drive successful outcomes in today’s business environment.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you’ve implemented to help your business operate more effectively? Have you seen any results yet?

A: We recently introduced the organization to design thinking methodology which has allowed us to be more effective in implementing change. Since the methodology is still fairly new, the results are not measurable as of yet. We expect that internal users will certainly benefit from this process.

Q: If you could go back 5 years in time and give some professional insight or advice to yourself, what would it be?

A: I would tell myself that clear ownership of each engagement is critical but not always possible, especially when it comes to large, cross-functional transformation projects. In these cases, it’s more important to find an approach that meets the needs of all stakeholders involved.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference this year?

A: During the session “Transforming the ‘Time to First Transaction,’” Jaime Bruhn and I will speak to the approach used in our transformation journey and how we created a high sense of urgency around the business problem we identified. It won’t so much be a discussion of the problem, but a description of the enterprise methodology used and the lessons learned along the way.

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Don’t miss Kiki’s presentation, Transforming the ‘Time to First Transaction’, at Building Business Capability on Wednesday, November 8, 2017 from 11:35 am to 12:35 pm. Click here to register for attendance.