Real Life Insights Into Professional Services Strategy and Operations Roles
Melissa Korzun, the Managing Director of Client Transformation, Strategy and Operations at TeleTracking recently joined host Matt Finch on The Professional Services Pursuit podcast from Kantata. This episode sheds light on Melissa’s approach to transforming TeleTracking’s operational imperatives and how that has helped to define the business’s organizational direction and culture.
Melissa opens by pointing out a key contradiction: “When you’re in a professional services organization, your number one focus is always the client and on transformation for [your] clients. We talk about organizational change. We give them our best project managers that we have to drive things forward for them. Yet internally, we weren’t giving ourselves that same discipline.”
Melissa goes in depth on why TeleTracking needed to understand their operational imperatives. “Once we distilled down, specifically, this is our strategy and these are the operational imperatives that are really critical to us. We started to evaluate all of the work and projects that we had going on against that and said does it contribute to this or does it not. And it allowed us to look at these various initiatives, and say this isn’t advancing the direction that we’re trying to go. So if it’s not driving directly towards that, then we’re gonna spin that work down and we’re gonna say it’s not critical right now.”
Melissa mentions an insight she gleaned from a book she recently read, Indistractable by Nir Eyal. “In [the book] he talks about what distraction is, and really defined it as any action that moves you away from what you really want. And if you don’t have [what you want] clearly defined, then you don’t know if it’s traction, getting you towards that or distraction, pulling you away from it.”
Melissa also shared that one of the biggest aspects behind their business transformation was a focus on strategic communication, stating, “I think sometimes we think putting in the time and effort to communicate with the organization is a distraction. It takes too much time to write it. People don’t want to read it, they don’t want to take the time to do it. But we knew that we had to align our organization on all the work that was happening on our goals, our objectives, our projects, all of those things. And we had to have that communication piece in there. So we actually took something that previously was coined as a distraction and said it’s critical to get us to where we want to go, but we were very specific about how we did it.”
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