Kainos works with customers in both the private and public sector delivering difficult digital to enable digital transformation that delivers real return on investment, is self-sustaining and ensures customer success. Discover how and why we're leading the way?
Kainos sets out to not only support digital transformation but ensure customer success. For us, customer success is not just having digitally transformed services but also the capability to maintain and enhance them becoming a self-sustaining digital business.
In putting added value for the customer at the top of our agenda, we are championing and pioneering a process of building long-term customer capability. We call this process
'digital enablement'.
What is digital enablement?
Digital Enablement is a structured set of activities that result in a customer having the capability and environment to maintain, support and enhance their digital services themselves with decreasing reliance on suppliers.
The main challenge faced by most organisations in both the private and public sector relates to skills. Attracting, developing and retaining Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) and established professionals in a highly-competitive market is difficult. This is why aspiring digital organisations often have an ongoing reliance on suppliers.
In building our own digital business for 30+ years, Kainos has developed a highly-successful model for building digital skills and capability, and we have helped our customers use this model to advance their own capabilities. The model is grounded in hiring the right people, and supporting them to grow, develop and be the best they can be. We deliver the benefits to customers by working with them, as one team, delivering services and developing people and skills at the same time.
Our enablement model is an iterative cycle, which begins with stimulating interest to ensure the right people are attracted to your digital endeavour, that those people are trained and mentored, they then pass on their skills to others and continue to progress.
The five-stage enablement model we follow has already proven successful across various customer sites. It focuses on two high-level activities: Acquiring Talent and Developing Capability.
- Stimulate Interest
The best people want to do important, meaningful work, but they also need to be excited by their work and the positive impact it brings. Sometimes, not all important work is seen as interesting, exciting or innovative. In delivering contemporary digital services, customers have a significant opportunity to change the perception of what it's like to work on them. Kainos works with organisations to promote their work to the digital native generation, showcase the positive impact that it has and illustrate what it's like to work in a high performing team.
- Select and Recruit the right people
Finding individuals with the right skillset and expertise is vital for organisations to truly achieve and maintain the level of transformation in line with their digital ambitions. Kainos helps our customers establish a leading-edge digital recruitment strategy, advises the recruitment team on the skills and behaviours required, and supports recruitment activities such as hackathons, milkrounds and roadshows.
- Train and Upskill
Equipping the new recruits with the right knowledge and expertise for the job from day one, is essential. We help our customers develop and execute comprehensive training plans specific to their requirements. This training includes the awareness of scrum team roles, research and design, products, techniques, technology-specific training, business domain knowledge, project specific processes, behaviours and relationships. Just by working with our people, our customers find that their digital skills development is accelerated.
- Mentor and Coach
We work with customer organisations to support our new colleagues in the scrum team environment to build their technical experience, develop team-working behaviours and gain confidence in decision-making. We also support them in setting clear career objectives based on individual and project needs and provide access to and oversight from subject matter experts across a range of disciplines.
All organisations invest significantly in recruitment and upskilling, with good people being hard to find. Therefore, retention is key, and continuing to help develop individuals and provide a sense of achievement through great delivery is a fantastic way to keep staff engaged and boost retention rates.
- Continuous Feedback
We also put a clear emphasis on providing real-time feedback to our teams. This drives engagement and continuous improvement. We take the same approach when mentoring individuals from customer organisations, working closely with them to assess their progress against the core competencies and requirements of the role. This gives us the right context to provide regular feedback both formally and informally. Feedback is a critical part of career development. Done well, it helps people learn faster and accelerates their progress towards promotion.
This approach to digital enablement has not only helped many organisations to develop their services in a more efficient and effective way, but also to build internal capability, enabling more self-sufficiency, continuous improvement and reducing reliance on external suppliers.
