The Choreography of Transformational Projects | Ralph Lauren | PI Apparel

Hello, everyone. I'm really excited to be here, and I just put a— what? A cough drop in my mouth, and I'm really embarrassed right now. It's going to crunch really loud. Is this part of the jig? No. Thank you for joining me, and it's going to be a quick conversation to hopefully share some things about product. Project delivery, essentially. This quote is from an author that I'm a fan of from the '60s and '70s, and he writes a lot about Zen and just kind of bringing everything together. And this quote in particular I love because it just reminds me that no matter how much I plan, how much I try to make it perfect, Sometimes you just have to go for it. So keep that in mind in every piece of transformation that you all are involved in. Just a little bit about myself for those of you who I don't know. I've been in the industry a long time, and I've had the opportunity to work with some amazing brands, gone through a lot of change in the industry. In those early days, there wasn't a lot going on from a tech perspective. We implemented PLM, e-com happened, and this is the part of the presentation where I say, oh, I hate to date myself, but I'm really proud to date myself. I've been through a lot. I think everyone in this room has been through a lot too. And what we're about to get up to, buckle up, y'all, because things are about to get crazy. And everything that's coming for us requires data to be clean. And data isn't just little bits and bytes of information. It's the image. It's somebody's body shape. It's so much more. So just keep that in mind. I got into tech and operations. I was in the business for the better half of my career. And then I just got really interested in the how do we make this more fun and interesting and easier? So I moved into the operations. I wanted to solve the problem, solve the puzzles. Did some— my first big tech implementation was an SAP implementation. And it's kind of a weird place to start. But I— we won in that year the best retail implementation, ERP implementation in the country. And it was something I still to this day am incredibly proud of. And SAP will either break you or make you. And I'm currently the senior director of product creation systems at a company that I can't put the logo up of, but if you recognize that guy, you know where I work. So the title of my talk is about the transformation and the choreography of those types of programs and projects. So we all know what projects are. You know, they are delivery timelines and dependencies and risks and an inordinate amount of time spent on creating slide decks. And transformation is about significant change. So the word choreography, where does that come in? Why is that important? It's because it's about the art. And that resonates, I think, with this audience more than anything, because our industry is about art. It's the balance of art and science. It's passion and people. So if you're trying to do a system implementation and you forget that it's people who are behind what that system is— they're using that system, you're missing the heart of the matter. And in our industry, in our brands, in the work we do, if you miss the heart of the matter, the art of the matter, you're not going to be a successful brand, and I promise you, you're not going to have a successful project. In transformation, size does not matter. Perspective does. This is one of the goalposts for any successful program project of any sort. It's about perspective. The executive top line that says we're going to reduce our— we're going to improve X by Y results in 2 strategic initiatives that results in the project that you've been prioritized to deliver that results in the 2 clicks that 20 people have to do 12,000 more times. That's their perspective, and they don't care about that one. But these guys are like, are you kidding me? They're worried about clicks? Yes, they're worried about clicks. Everything that you're doing, if you're able to stand in a certain point and be like, oh, that's their perspective. Now that's their perspective. How do you bring that together? Remember that other piece of the goalpost. I have to understand the perspective of what we're trying to accomplish. The other goalpost is to define success. Does anybody in the room know who this guy is? Anybody? Okay. I see a couple hands. This gentleman's name is Nims. And his goal was to reach the top of all of the major peaks, the 14 tallest peaks in the world, in less than 7 months. He— the— prior to that, it had taken just under 8 years. Let that sink in. His goal was to do it in 7 months, and it had barely been broken, the 8-year mark, to do the same thing. His defined success was pretty straightforward, and he let everybody know, "We're doing it in 7 months." He named his project "Project Possible." It sounds impossible, but that's not what he did. It's not how he marketed it, and it's not how he kept people inspired to keep going at it. And that is a lesson for all of us, whether your transformational project is changing your product line in a quarter, or maybe it's implementing SAP, or a VLC system, or digitizing your line. You have to keep marketing what is going to define success for you, and you're marketing all the time. You're marketing to the executives, you're marketing to the stakeholders, you're marketing to the end users, you're marketing to your developers. Your marketing to your project managers, your marketing to your system owners and your product owners, you're always trying to bring people back to the definition of success. With those two goalposts in mind, what happens in the middle? I've tried to kind of bucket some of the things that I've learned over the years into some three simple categories. So preparation and alignment. Critical, critical piece of it, change skills and team dynamics. So preparation and alignment. The readiness is all. Now, I'm not a giant Shakespeare fan, but somehow that one line has stuck with me since high school. And essentially, in this moment, What's being said is you can only prepare so much. You're ready. You're as ready as you're ever going to be. Now you just got to go for it and make adjustments. I love that, and I think I live by that. And if we're doing any sort of transformational programs, projects, you better live by that, too. So my 4 big points here is first around data. Scrub it now. Start now. I don't care what you're working on. If you're seeing something that there's bad data, there's something that's not right in it, start working on it. You don't even have to have a major project going. Everything on that previous slide about what is happening in our industry all requires your data to be good. So start working on it. It's easy to do. Just start scrubbing it up. Scope. Understand the bookends of what you're trying to accomplish. And it's not just the what, it's also the why. What are we doing and why are we doing it? And those bookends aren't just about the project. They're actually also just about a conversation. How many times have you gone into a meeting and been like, is that even what we're talking about here? Create bookends on your conversations. Create bookends on your project. What and why are we doing this? What are we talking about, and why are we talking about it? And then timing. It's very easy for us to all back up and get in line around, here's when we want the project to go live. But if you forget that that is also tied to a go-to-market calendar, and the reality of the consumer behaviors, and what the rest of the company is doing, How many go-lives have not gone live because, oh, we forgot it was Mother's Day? Things like that happen all the time. So just keep that in mind and keep checking back. Those go-to-market calendars are evolving as well. Your project may be on a strict timeline that's not even right for the business. And documentation. I don't know how many of y'all have done any sort of remodeling. But you can imagine that idea of, like, I'm going to put a bathroom there, and knock that wall out, and the second story falls down. If you have a blueprint, you know that that's a load-bearing wall. Oftentimes, people will say documentation, process documentation, is obsolete as soon as something goes live. Well, yes, it's obsolete if you don't maintain it. But if you take just a little bit of effort and keep up on that documentation, the next time you need to do the next bigger project, you're not going to have to unravel everything that you just unraveled. So just keep a focus on that. And I'll share just one story. At Lululemon, there was a risk assessment, and they came in, and they, you know, we paid a lot of money for a lot of consultants to come in and tell us what the biggest risk to the business was. Was it the competitors? Was it global disaster? Was it our demographic was changing or the cost of our goods? Or was it that we didn't have good internal documentation about the magic of our product process, how we created product? It was our internal process was the biggest risk to the company. Change skills. People kind of give a nod to change management. It comes up. We all talk about it, but oftentimes it's the first thing to get cut in a project, and that's a shame. It's a complete shame. This quote, "They keep moving my cheese," is from a One of the best-selling business books still to this day, and it's a sales book about how to evolve with the market, but the idea is that things keep moving and people are like, "Oh, they moved that. Now I can't keep up with it." So you have to recognize that people are creatures of habit. We like things to be a little consistent, and every time you move somebody's cheese, they're gonna get flustered. So the 4 kind of tenets around change management that I like to focus on is training. It's not just end-user training. It's training inside the project. The people who understand the business process need to train the people who understand the technology. The people who understand the technology need to train the other people who understand the business process. Your first line of defense is to pressure test learning and understanding within your project. If you have a training group who is only training end users and not sharing that same training content with your support team, how do you even know— how does your support team know what the end users are being told? How do you pressure test that what you're telling the end users makes sense? Even to people who are close to it, that's your first opportunity to use your partners on your project to see both sides of what you're doing. And communication. So the math that I have here, 1 times 20 equals not 20. If you think about communication, there's 5 levels that communication is happening on. Verbal, we all know that one. Nonverbal, there's auditory, so the pitch and the pacing and how I'm communicating. There's emotional, and there is energetic. So that's 5 dimensions of communication. And then, there are 4 more dimensions. There's what I think I'm saying, what I actually said, what you heard, and then what you understood. So now you've got 9 dimensions of communication going. So that math is 1 message, 20 people, 9 dimensions. That's assuming that everyone is— only has one message that they're dealing with at that time. How many people— and be honest with yourselves— in every meeting are you purely focused on what's being talked about? Are you getting 6 other pings in your chat? Are you checking an email? Are you canceling something? Are you actually really in it in that moment? So this math? Is actually really understated for the reality of the attention that you have for someone. So when you get to that moment of, "We talked about that," well, they had almost 2,000 times to not get what you talked about, and they probably weren't even paying attention. So you need to give each other grace that there's a lot going on, and focus on real communication with one another to try to minimize the spin that comes because we're actually not engaged in direct communication. Communication with one another. Language. If I said DB, there's people in this room that will be like, database. And there's another group in this room that would be like, double-breasted. So simple. If I said product manager, there would be some people in this room that would say, oh, right, digital product manager. I create software. There would be some people in this room that would be like, "No, I'm a product manager. I make pants." The language, your audience, you have to understand who you're talking to and recognize that in all of our roles, you're talking to all of those people at once. So think about how you're communicating, and some of the things we take for granted, we talk in our slang and our quick talk to each other because we think someone else might know exactly what we're saying. Slow down a little bit, and just be like, oh, right. This is like our language is something that really will connect us or really confuse us. Oh, I thought you meant that? Really? Okay. Now it makes sense because you're talking about a type of coat, not a database. That was a true story with an IT director at Coldwater Creek a long time ago. He— they brought this program manager in to help us work on our go-to-market calendar. And our head designer, he was like, oh, and the DB, I really thought the DB was going to sell. I mean, he just kept saying it. And I'm watching Dave. And the look on his face was just like, I just— I don't know what is being talked about here. Database is not selling? I'm like, he means double-breasted, Dave. It was pretty good. And then handoffs. How often in our project calendars do you say, oh, handoff date is here, and somebody hands off a spreadsheet and goes on their way. The person who just got it is like, I don't know what this is. I don't know how you were thinking about it. I don't know how you organized it. Does your color— what does your color coding mean? You have to actually help somebody receive the information that you've handed off in a way that they can consume it. Because you gave it to them, it doesn't mean they actually are ready to do something with it. So think about handoffs until you're really good at it, you know, the handoffs that you would see in a relay race, until you can get to that type of thing, you actually have to work on making those smooth handoffs so people really know what they just received from you. The last bucket is around team dynamics. So this quote is from Coach Greg, my volleyball coach, and one of those things that he always said, and it just resonates still to this day, "We win together and we lose together." If you're not coming at it as a holistic team, Well, there's no fun in that anyway. So the things to really work through with a team I think are— can kind of be summarized with spin, frustration, fun, and customer service. So spin. How often have you been in meetings that things just spin and spin and spin? I thought we were going to get a decision here today. We're still talking about I'm not sure what because we didn't define our scope. We all can get really tied into these, like, racy models and stuff. We had a moment in a project, an SAP project, as a matter of fact, where it just feels like, you know, wheels just wouldn't stop spinning. And we came up with IDEA. So you investigate, you decide, you execute, and you adjust. And then you do it again. Keep things moving forward. Cut the spin. And then frustration, I'll say the energy in a team, when it starts to go sideways, frustration is happening. Frustration happens for two reasons. Either you don't understand, or you're not being understood. It's just that simple. So when you feel that energy changing in the room, when frustration is coming, step back and recognize that either yourself are feeling like you're not being understood, or you're not understanding, or someone else in the room is not understanding or not being— or not feeling like they're being understood. If you can take that simple nugget away, you can change the dynamic in a room. Like that. Cry or laugh, it's up to you. These are tough things that we're up to. You are doing major things in your organization, and you are changing people's lives. You are making them better and worse, and it's a really tough haul. So have some fun. Make the choice to come at it with a light heart. Bring everybody up. I often go for the laughing, but there have definitely been some tears. And then the last point I'll make here is the first customers you have are inside the project. We often think of the customer, the consumer, or the business as the customer. You are each other's customer inside outside your projects, that level of customer service, if you can deploy that type of kindness and attention to each other, everything, everything flows smoothly from that. Sticking with my choreography statement, I just want to encourage everyone to bring that heart center to everything that we're working on. Whether it's a small— what appears to be a small transformation in your department or the business that you're trying to run, or a complete transformation in your business processes across your organization, whatever you do, do it big, do it right, and do it with style. And thank you so much.