Cascading service excellence at a global defence manufacturer

As part of a strategic organisational change, this global defence manufacturing group wanted to shift its business emphasis from a product orientation to a service focus.

Through its commitment to innovation, the group has earned an international reputation for producing state-of-the-art defence equipment and leading-edge technology. However, with growing competition - and with defence budgets in its major markets experiencing reductions - the group has had to evolve its business model beyond the design, development and manufacture of defence systems and equipment. Increasingly, it now provides its customers with on-base support and in-operation maintenance.

This change had practical implications for employees, in terms of how they are deployed around the world and how their time is charged to customers. To communicate this new way of working, we designed and delivered a program on service excellence for leaders, explaining the new reality and how new business structures, people management processes and measurements were now required.

We also created a wider communications and engagement campaign to help the 15,000 staff in the business to better understand how and why the change was happening. Instead of delivering facilitated sessions for these employees, we created a ‘training package’ that line leaders could use to cascade the message of service excellence to their people.

As part of the training package, we produced a series of interactive videos to build awareness of the change and to create buy-in. The aim was to give line leaders an easy-to-use resource that would enable them to deliver a consistent message to their teams. The videos featured client ‘talking heads’ and animations. Producing them involved storyboarding, script writing, location planning, filming, editing and encoding. We also provided step-by-step guidelines for the line leaders explaining how they could use the video content in a facilitated session, with learning exercises and discussion prompts.

Our approach and methodology enabled the client to engage and inspire its employees, to cost effectively and consistently explain the rationale for the business change and to quickly create a common language around the concept of service excellence.