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As my colleague, Kevin, recently discussed, we have changed our What at Kenway. That is, we have rebranded our Capabilities and Services in order to provide clarity into the areas where we provide the most value to our clients.

With this change came the need to update some of our messaging — updated elevator speeches, realignment of project summaries, and new ways to describe what we do on a day-to-day basis as a Kenway Consultant.

Starting with our elevator speeches, I worked with some of my teammates to begin updating the ways we informed clients and prospects about Kenway’s value proposition. Unfortunately, we got stuck. We did all the things you assume would be valuable: we reviewed the organizational changes, we looked at introductory messages that other companies presented, we tried switching out the Capabilities and Services in our old messaging with the new ones. Unfortunately, none of it worked.  It all felt over-rehearsed and unauthentic.

At this point, one of my teammates (probably out of frustration), asked aloud, “What is the story we are trying to tell here?” This completely reframed the conversation. Instead of trying to simply describe our new Capabilities and Services, we began discussing the journey on which we wanted to take the listener, what we wanted them to take away from the interaction.

Some of this is reflected in Kevin’s article when he articulates that:

• Technology Solution Delivery is how you run your business,
• Information Insight is how you understand your business, and
• Enterprise Program Leadership is the glue that aligns these two to your corporate strategies.

What we learned from this elevator speech exercise was that the important pieces to telling a compelling story were:

• Collecting relevant examples and experiences
• Indexing and contextualizing the important background and lessons learned from each of them
• Connecting and sequencing them based on the story I am trying to tell
• Presenting them to the audience in a way they can relate and understand the true message

These learnings also translate well into how Kenway approaches our Information Insight Capability. More importantly, it allows us to factor in some key missteps such as:

• Simply grabbing as many examples as possible with the belief that they will serve as proper evidence
• Providing anecdotes or examples without the right context
• Using the wrong messages or lessons from experiences

At Kenway, Information Insight entails our Data Management, Data Governance, and Business Intelligence (BI) & Analytics Services. Similar to how people shape an effective story, Data Management helps you collect and index data; Data Governance ensures that the right context in terms of data origination and refinement are used; and BI & Analytics ensure that your data is presented in such a way that it provides actionable information.

Furthermore, we take an iterative, collaborative, and cross-functional approach to our engagements. This helps to avoid the missteps mentioned above. Through iteratively addressing high-impact issues or opportunities, we focus our efforts on key projects and avoid situations where teams gather data for the sake of gathering data — often expending high effort for small problems. We augment this approach with frequent client interaction to ensure that our teams are answering the right questions and optimally focusing their time to deliver value.

Finally, Kenway ensures that, regardless of the core Service driving a project, we bring the right skills, at the right time, in the right volume, for the right duration. This allows us to provide more holistic solutions to meet our clients’ needs. For example, a BI & Analytics project will not only benefit from our ability to model data and create data visualization applications, but it will also leverage Kenway’s knowledge to integrate external data sources through Data Management, and understand the quality and definitions of the data through Data Governance.

By combining our knowledge and technical skills around our Services with an approach that ensures alignment to our clients’ goals, Kenway helps companies to tell their stories. Working together, we help to understand past performance, view what is driving the business today, and gain insight into what opportunities and risks could arise in the future.

We would love to help your organization tell its story! Send us a note at info@kenwayconsulting.com or check out the Information Insight page of our website HERE to learn more.