As many organizations transition to a long-term Work From Anywhere (WFA) environment, there’s an increased focus on the importance of End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM). With highly distributed workforces, most I&O (Infrastructure and Operations) teams recognize that they need better and more measurable insight into the employee experience to ensure workforce productivity and competitive advantage. However, despite this acknowledgment, many I&O teams struggle to find the time to implement and manage EUEM tools.
Time as an obstacle
According to our recent survey of 400 US and UK I&O leaders, 40% of respondents said they lack the time required to implement and manage new tools. This is a stark statistic when considering the enormous pressures placed upon I&O leaders to make their business operational in the WFA environment and accelerate innovation.
As I&O leaders get busier and divide their time further between day-to-day business demands and other digital transformation objectives, it can be challenging to find the time to implement and manage required visibility tools.
Talent shortages, siloed teams, and tool proliferation
Such time pressures are exacerbated by talent shortages, siloed teams, and tool proliferation. Where new technologies are required to support the Work From Anywhere environment, there often comes the need for a new set of knowledge, skills, and experience. We’ve typically seen this be the case to support EUEM implementation and ongoing management. Choosing between buying in skills from outside the organization, or upskilling your in-house team, isn’t easy.
Buying in skills takes time, whether recruiting new team members or coordinating in-house teams with resources from outside the business. It all takes up extra management overhead. Meanwhile, upskilling your in-house team through training can pose a challenge due to how swamped you and your staff may already be. Introducing EUEM with limited resources, skills and experience brings pressure and stress and will likely limit your ability to meet objectives.
Deriving true value from EUEM also requires collaboration across the I&O team to pool use cases, for example the Service Desk team and the End User Computing Infrastructure team will both benefit but should work together to ensure best results. I&O leaders must therefore proactively encourage close co-operation across disciplines.
Further, most organizations are already suffering from visibility tool proliferation, so agreeing on a rationalized standard that serves multiple teams isn’t easy. Therefore, spending time on a thorough assessment of gaps and overlaps is recommended before any new decisions are made. Staying competitive requires you to explore the latest EUEM technologies, and all tools take time to integrate and learn before you see value.
The value of developing a resourcing strategy
I&O leaders seeking to scale their operations are often frustrated when encountering limits based on resource availability or how quickly they can get their in-house teams to learn and change.
Many I&O leaders run lean teams and often overlook their resourcing strategy at the beginning of their EUEM project. Only after purchasing the enterprise software do they realize the time, effort, and skills needed to implement and manage the technology. This includes ensuring that they have knowledgeable and available resource for system set up, dashboard configuration, interpretation of insights, measurement and adjustments.
It’s not uncommon for I&O teams to invest millions of dollars in market-leading tools that no one in the team knows how to utilize properly. Those tools soon become ‘set and forget’ as they aren’t updated and can even become ‘shelfware’. Some teams don’t even make it to technology deployment.
It’s clear that implementing EUEM without sufficient resource is simply not an option; while some argue that it’s a ‘nice to have’, we’d argue that it should be thought of as a business-critical solution to ensure the greatest user experience, ROI, and time to value.
A Better Way Forward With Teneo
With Teneo’s WFA: Visible, EUEM service, successful I&O teams are planning and training for long-term critical skills. But they’re doing so in such a way that allows them to balance their workforce strategy between onboarding external experts that can help them deliver across more complex projects and utilizing knowledge transfer to help enable their inhouse teams.
Teneo empowers organizations to prioritize their resourcing strategy from the outset. Without the need to scale in-house teams, our experts can support technology implementation and management. While enabling in-house teams through knowledge transfer, we can help organizations stay up to speed with the solution deployment should they wish to manage the technology in-house in the future. By investing in talent in the most effective areas and outsourcing highly specialized or one-off tasks, they’re able to focus on delivering maximum customer and business value.
Progressive I&O leaders are also making smarter choices that save time and leverage existing resources. Working with Teneo, they’re taking a step back to understand business processes and policies before building out an agile roadmap. Such an approach is helping them to think more clearly with input from our team of experts on best practices and leading technology. We’ll validate your ideas, align resources, help you with unknown unknowns, and ultimately save time, reduce risk and transform faster.
Could resource limitations impact your End User Experience Monitoring project? Find out more about Teneo’s WFA: Visible, End User Experience Monitoring service today.
