Transformation Management Office (TMO)

Fully integrated Energy Logistics business serving the downstream oil and gas industry as a distributor of bulk and packed petroleum, chemical, and industrial products and one of the largest transportation and logistics companies in the world. It has a global presence in more than 29 countries across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas.

Since its founding in 1998, it experienced spectacular expansion up until 2012, when the business started to show evidence of market saturation. Slower growth rates, reduction of margins, and lower customer retention provided signals of a market that was flooded by competition resulting in the commoditization of services and pressure on margins.  In order to regain its earlier competitive advantage and market leadership, The organization needed to respond to the trends and forces of the market by redefining its approach to the growth of the road transport & warehouse business, and redefining its operating model of services. 

The organization established the vision for its transformation and determined the right approach for building a TMO. After gaining the support of the Board of Directors for the vision, the organization embarked on a multi-year transformation program beginning with selecting a CTMO and establishing a TMO, which resulted in benefits such as:

• Continuous double-digit growth rate due to a focus on growth, expansion, and diversification of all business lines
• Creating greater internal synergies and ways of working through a redesigned operating model.
• Evolved to a holistic 4PL service provider from a standard 3PL resulting in growth up the value chain and expanding the customer portfolio.
• Higher loyalty and employee satisfaction by reimagining the employee experience.
• Increased the HSE standards with zero incidence acceptance level through embedding strong enterprise risk management practices to proactively manage risk appetite.
• Significantly increased brand recognition by winning many international awards due to operational excellence. 

By making the Transformation Management Office the dedicated custodian of the organizational change, it was able to steer the transformation efforts from within building alliances and easing adoption. Due to its position, the TMO created transversal collaboration towards sustaining the achieved benefits for the long term, but more importantly, it successfully addressed the market challenges of intense competition and margin pressure head-on, whilst also succeeding with aligning its people towards a common direction and full support towards its efforts.

A government entity that regulates, develops, and promotes its region as an inspired global destination, rich in cultural authenticity, and diverse natural offerings, and supports the region’s evolution into a world-class destination, recognized a disconnect with its’ customer experience leading to low satisfaction. This was a critical problem as the entity, through three primary core business avenues of Tourism, Culture, and National Libraries hoped to diversify the region’s economy by strengthening it as a global destination for business and leisure tourism, while also safeguarding and promoting its cultural heritage.

The organization set out a new transformation vision on services management to ultimately achieve +90% satisfaction having the following key focus areas:

• Align the organization on its ambition and objectives towards being fully customer-centric and how to achieve it together.
• Enable a central unit and put the service area owners at the center of the transformation drive by increasing capabilities in customer-centric service design.
• Map all services provided to externally facing customers, benchmark with leading entities around the world to learn insightful practices and ways of working, and then redesign them based on defined principles of customer and digital centricity.
• Work with the digital section to fully digitize the redesigned services and relaunch them via a central government platform.

The entity leadership struggled with how to transform to achieve this new lofty vision. They recognized that they did not have the needed knowledge, skills, insights, and coaching to be successful within. By securing external transformation help with training, coaching, and augmenting their TMO efforts, the organization, quite significantly, became a leader in customer-centric service delivery in the public sector ecosystem in its region, having achieved among many others:

• Evolved from a department centric to customer-centric organizational culture.
• Transformed from organization-centric service management to customer-centric service design and delivery.
• From being inactive on customer feedback to a proactive drive to operationalize customer insights.
• Disconnected from customer experience to fully linked employee culture to customer outcomes.
• All external customer-facing services are fully redesigned from a customer-centric perspective, digitized, delivered in under 6 minutes, and all from one unified government portal.

Having a transformational vision is a start, but for most organizations, being able to execute to achieve the vision requires a new set of capabilities. Whether this is grown from within or brought in from outside, the skill and knowledge of how to transform are necessary for the TMO to successfully achieve results.  

A financial services company with 600,000 customer contracts and 21.77B euros in investments was embarking on a transformation initiative to redefine the corporate operating model. The PMO was initially tasked with transformation, yet employee sentiment and optimism toward the program were low. After leadership coaching, the executives realized they needed an inspired TMO that could harness the strengths of the traditional PMO alongside the TMO’s strong transformational mobilization and change capability. Once the TMO was created, it was a collaborative effort with the CTMO and the Senior Management Team to develop a prioritized set of initiatives and benefits in alignment with the firm's strategic objectives. Additionally, an overarching change strategy, led by the People and Culture team and supported by Comms and engagement activities was created. This significantly helped to embed the change into the business and build engagement and buy-in. Change impact assessments were used to uncover gaps between the as-is and to-be so that training, knowledge transfers and employee capability uplift could be implemented. 

To help speed up project delivery and change, two agile teams were created. These teams were able to create quick wins to update and improve processes, add functionality for online customers and automate backend processes. The agile teams also developed a sustainable process to conduct as-is and to-be assessments to continuously identify improvements to process, people, organizational structure and systems. 

As a result of the successful transformation initiative, employee engagement increased 13% within one year. Communication between teams greatly increased and the organization was able to deliver on key technology changes enabling their business to operate more effectively. They were well positioned to continuously improve and continue to capture and grow market share in the financial services industry in their market.