Secret Formulas of Implementation Success

As someone who’s been doing project work for decades, I must admit, it’s always cool and rewarding when you implement something. Shipping your work and having it exposed to reality instead of theory is the essence of innovation – taking an idea, or a design, and making it real.

But implementation work is hard, especially for a business process like Flowcasting since it touches, interacts and changes a large part of a retail business and extended eco-system.

I’ve been very lucky over my career to have either led, or co-led, three successful implementations in retail of Flowcasting or major elements of the concept. As an implementer at heart, over the years, what’s emerged are some mechanisms I’ve used that I believe are instrumental in success.

What I’d call my secret formulas.

For a key one, we’ll turn the clocks back to the mid-to-late 1990s. At the time I was the leader of a team for a national, Canadian hardgoods retailer, who’s mandate was to design and implement new processes and supporting technology to improve the planning and flow of inventory from supplier to store shelf.

The team had essentially designed what we now call Flowcasting and had selected technology to support the process. While we all understood that planning from the store level back was technically infeasible, we decided to forecast DC-level demand, and calculate and share forward looking supply projections with our merchandise vendors – in the process instilling the concept of supplier scheduling in retail. I won’t bore you with the details, but the project was quite successful and helped cement some of the principles of Flowcasting in retail, including supplier scheduling and working to a single set of numbers.

For a project of this size, like most larger scale transformations, we had a cross-functional governance team established – essentially like a steering committee – that would help guide the project and provide advice and suggestions to the implementation team. And to be honest, they did a good job.

However, inevitably, when a group of that size and functional diversity is tasked with guiding and asking questions of the leader (in this case me), there are bound to be some dumb asks and even dumber suggestions.

That was the input for me to develop my “Rule of 3”, which I/we used successfully on this implementation, and I’ve used ever since.

It works like this. If the ask/suggestion from the steering committee or large governance group sounded mental to me, I’d note it down and tell everyone I’d think about it. Then, I’d go back to the team and see what they thought. If they agreed it was mental, I’d ignore the ask/suggestion. And I’d continue to ignore it until the group had asked a third time – at which time I/we’d develop a response.

The beautiful thing about this approach is that seldom does the request ever get asked again, let alone a third time. It’s forgotten and therefore requires no cycles of thought or response from me and the team. I’m not exactly sure why but my thinking is that in larger groups people tend to like to hear themselves talk – they want to make suggestions/contributions, so they can’t help themselves and sometimes make a dumb suggestion or ask. Then, by the time the next session comes around, they completely forget about their initial request.

As an example, when I was working with our Winnipeg-based retail client designing and ultimately implementing Flowcasting, me and the team leader had to regularly present to a large cross functional group about Flowcasting – how it would work, the benefits, the implementation approach, etc.

I remember at one large, cross-project session a participant asking something like “How will the new process factor in social media sentiment into the demand planning process, to potentially revise the forecast of that item and others?” My response was, “Not sure yet, but we’ll think about it”.

I remember the team leader asking me after, “what are we going to do?”. My answer was simple: “Nothing. We’re going to ignore that and see if it’s ever asked again”. It wasn’t and the rest is history.

Now, not to brag or anything, but this client was able to improve daily in-stock from about 92% to 98%, while reducing both DC and store inventories, all while completely ignoring social media sentiment (whatever that is). Thanks to the Rule of 3.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that most of the suggestions from steering committees and cross functional groups are/were dumb – they’re not. I’m saying that a certain percentage will be and you, as an implementer, need a mechanism to ignore them and/or say “No” nicely, so you can stay focused on what matters.

For me, it’s The Rule of 3. It has been a loyal friend to me, over many years and implementations, and I hope you can use it – or something like it – as well.

It’s one of my secret formulas of implementation success.