Tom Morgan: 0:02

Welcome to ACP, the Amazon Connect podcast. This is the show that focuses on Amazon Connect and related technologies. I'm your host, Tom Morgan, and I'm joined as usual by my co host, AWS Solution Architect and Contact Center Consultant, Alex Baker. We are also joined today by Saffron Archer and Veronica Lorena. Both delivery leads at Cloud Interact to talk about the successful project management of your Amazon Connect deployment. Find out more about Cloud Interact by visiting us at cloudinteract. io. It's time for another ACP. Hello, Alex. Hi, Tom. How are you doing? I'm very well. Thank you. Very good. It's a good episode today because we're joined by not one, but two project managers. So this is why this episode starts on time and we'll almost certainly run for time as well. So we're joined by both Saffron Archer and Vero Larina. Is that right? If I got that sound right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's fine. Excellent. Hello to you

Saffron Archer: 1:02

both. Hello. Hello. Thanks for having us.

Tom Morgan: 1:05

So let's go ladies first, Vero. Can you just in a few words, tell us about yourself.

Veronia Larena: 1:11

Sure. Well, hi, I'm Vero, Veronica. I'm originally from Argentina and actually UK company. So I think it's a really good opportunity. I've been in the technology industry for over eight years now in different roles from business operations to program project management, product management data and customer success. Basically, I think I always think about this and I think the common denominator throughout the industry. All those roles has been a project delivery and a customer experience. I've always had like a focus on delivering successful projects that are meaningful for, for our customers and end users. So yeah, I think that's me.

Saffron Archer: 1:56

Super excellent.

Alex Baker: 1:57

Have you been working for a mixture of big companies and smaller companies?

Veronia Larena: 2:03

Is that right? Yes. Yes. So I started my career in. EY, one of the big four, then I'm moving to Accenture. And from there, I moved to a medium sized startups. I was in Auth0, which was acquired by Okta. Then I moved on to Zapier. And well, here, Cloud Interact is the smallest company I've been so far, which is awesome. As I mentioned before, a great challenge and, and always fun.

Alex Baker: 2:33

I think it's quite nice to get the experience of the really big global GSIs, but also the, the smaller startups as well. It's quite interesting seeing how the two

Tom Morgan: 2:43

differ. Yeah, absolutely. And I want to dig into how that, how they play differently between big and small in a minute. But before I do I'd like to say hello to Saf. And. Saff, can you introduce yourself a little bit as

Saffron Archer: 2:54

well, please? Yeah, sure, Tom. Yeah. Good morning. And for, for welcoming us to the call and giving us a chance to speak. And it's just great actually to hear Vero's intro there and the duration of her career. Mine is much different and I'll explain that in a second. But I think in, in lots of ways, that's why we work so well together. Fresh new ideas, ones that are perhaps a bit longer, kind of a longer burn. Experience, Saff. Experience, experience, but they all kind of, the proof of the pudding is that, you know, methodology or style or approach, they are cyclical from my experience. And we have different names for things, but they, we do go around those sort of big, big circles across many years. So so yeah, sorry, it's just great to hear that intro Vera. So yeah, I've had 37 years actually all in technology across a range of roles. So I started my, my life in a bank. I started writing job control language, so, or JCL, which is the language that supports the mainframe programs like Assembler and COBOL. And which there is still quite

Tom Morgan: 3:50

a lot. You should, you should go into that. There's like, that's a, no one can find COBOL programs anymore. Anyway,

Saffron Archer: 3:55

sorry. The backbone of UK financial services, particularly banks is pretty much an overnight batch still running. And there's always been a talk about stopping a batch and having real time. But anyway, that's probably enough. That's a podcast I mentioned, but yeah,, , Lots of it spent in financial services or in kind of software development. So move forward to visual basics, SQL server, Microsoft C plus plus. And I, and I found in Microsoft C plus plus, which might make you snigger, I found my ceiling of technical ability there. It became complicated and I couldn't really go that much further. But during that time of being a dev, being a technician, I always really enjoyed working with people. I always really enjoyed being part of a team and that's, I've got a bit of a sporting sort of background. And I always really enjoyed being a captain, actually, of a team and trying to get the best results. So falling into team leadership, project leadership, project management, program management, head of platform, all those kind of classics was very kind of natural to me and something I've really, really enjoyed. So the majority of time in financial services with one employer, which was wonderful. And then spent a number of years with several consultancies sort of working on the other side of, of the fence, if you like. And in the very sort of recent assignment that I'm working on with you guys in cloud indirect, I'm operating in a freelance capacity, which is also fantastic. So I kind of feel like I'm, I'm gonna make a footer analogy here, that the perfect Patrick is left foot, right foot and header. I feel like, you know, permanent role for many years in a, in a leading UK bank, many or several years in consultancy. And now thirdly as a freelance. So yeah, so that's my background or tech or software delivery.

Tom Morgan: 5:23

Hmm. That's really interesting. Yeah. It's a rare thing to find a really good people person come that comes out of those technical roles. I think it's, it's quite often technologist or technically minded people get promoted into management positions and it doesn't always work out. So it's really good. Yeah, pretty good that it did. So we do a lot of contact center deployments. This is a podcast about Amazon connect. And so you've had experience, you know, at cloud interact of several different contact center deployments. I'm going to probably ask both of you the same question because I think it will be. It's based on kind of your experiences, really, but I'm interested to know how contact center deployments are different from other it deployments, like, and what's different because, you know, they are, they are different. Contact centers are a slightly different beast to a standard it delivery. I think. So there it is. Come to you first. That's okay. How do you see them differently? Like, based on the other, some of the other deployments you've done you know, are they the same? I guess. Are they different? Like, how do you, how do you think of them?

Veronia Larena: 6:27

I think they are. I can split the answer into basically in terms of similarities. I think there are aspects that are common across Different projects, right? Like and I'm going to summarize it in the three more important for me. At least the first one would be the continuous improvement aspect of the contact center deployments. Basically, we want to ensure all the time that our customer and the customers and users are always, kept in the loop and like that. We are always like iteratively improving the project itself, right? Like this is common to across every project, but also particularly in contact centers. Another common aspect between projects, I would say is the communication and collaboration aspect. Basically what I see in contact centers that sometimes it's not so visible in other projects. Within technology is that the amount of stakeholders that we deal with is exponentially bigger than others, right? Like you are dealing with it teams, you are dealing with customer support with operations, we manage management and other critical functions that are also there. As I said, This is common in every project. But I personally feel that the amount of stakeholders that I've been dealing with since working with contact centers is much higher. And then another aspect is the adaptability. We know that things change towards the life cycle of a project. And this is related to what I was saying before, right? We need to be mindful of that change. We need to always be conscious of what our customer and their customers are needing and being flexible towards that. And again, this is also common in every project. But contact centers change faster, in a way, because our, the They got the customer is always there. The customer is always needed something new and something different. Yeah.

Tom Morgan: 8:27

That's interesting what you said about continuous improvement and contact centers being a place of continuous improvement, and that's not always something customers buy into, right? Like I think customers like to close a project and move on. Is that as a project management person, is that frustrating? Like where you, you kind of get into one, to a place. And I've never really thought about this before as On technical engineering side, but as a project manager, is it frustrating to get to a project where it's, it's, you've met everyone's needs, but then you have to walk away because like the customers has stopped now. And like, right, we're done. Even though, you know, that really like, as soon as you walk away, it's out of date.

Veronia Larena: 9:06

Yeah, , I think particularly for me is an interesting aspect, right? Right now we are offering professional services to our customers. And. Obviously, we want the customer to have like the best solution in the market with all the best, like a customer experience instruments that we can provide, but ultimately, it's up to the customer, right? Like the customer is the one that decides until how far they want to take these and how far they want to go. They want to like change the way they do things. I think there are the customer experience is such an interesting aspect of of how you can improve what you do. How can you leverage the customer needs? How you can always grow in that aspect? And I'm not sure every customer is aware of how powerful is this? And we try as delivery leads to to share this with them. But yeah, ultimately, not everyone is ready, I think. Yeah, of

Saffron Archer: 10:07

course. And Saf,

Tom Morgan: 10:09

with your. Sort of experience in, in banking like quite a lot of those projects I imagine are customer facing, like how, how similar are those projects to like today's, or how similar are today's contact centers to those projects? Is there a lot of commonness or is it really shifted? I'm kind of thinking like the shift to the cloud and the pace of change and all that sort of stuff. Yeah.

Saffron Archer: 10:29

You know? Yeah, no, it's a really interesting observation that Vero's made there. I mean, to my take very much is that. We are finding that contact centers are often fairly sort of, how do I phrase this correctly? They've got a team of technicians. They've got a kind of a business support function. They've got kind of the change advocates. These people will have been aligned to that contact center and that particular technology very often for a long period of time. So you've got some very well set teams who have got a lot of experience looking after and probably building up that platform from scratch. So my experience in banking and in financial services that you need to be really respectful of these long term platforms of the things they've done and how they've done it., so in cloud interact, we have that complete sort of, I think, understanding that it's really important to define a vision and to explain the why. You know, why would it be that a transformation to a kind of pay as you go situation like Amazon Connect is a good thing? So we're at pains to really kind of do our discovery phase with that vision and bring in those people on board. And we really want advocates. We don't want people to feel done to because, as I say, the contact center platforms I've been involved with are all sort of multi multi year things. And people are quite proud, understandably, of the work they have done. They have done. And we don't want to be seen as people that then just kind of dismisses that and transforms that just because someone above has said that's the thing to do. So I think it's really important to be respectful of that, that sort of size of duration of these platforms. And also we have to remember. Often you will find a contact center is, set up as an on prem, an on premise. It has a data center that it's linking through to. So often the whole journey of, we're going to bring a new product to the table. We're going to optimize some of your, your functions and features. Here's some new things you can think about. Oh, and also, by the way, we're going to take you to a thing called the cloud. So it's like a multi faceted journey and a transformation that's a big deal. And I, I just think my, my learnings in the contact center space and, you know, in financial services are, there's some really great things out there that do need to be transformed, but let's be careful as to how we sort of deliver that change and bring people onto the journey.

Tom Morgan: 12:40

Yeah, definitely. It's people are very passionate about content centers in a way I didn't really appreciate, but yes. Yeah, no, they really are.

Alex Baker: 12:47

Some, some great points by both of you. I was gonna. It kind of made me think about one of the, the other things that we'd noted down to talk about, which was around delivery methodologies. And it was that, the point about continuous improvement that sort of triggered that in my mind, because we SAF or Vero, perhaps you can give us a bit more detail about agile versus waterfall. But what I was thinking is the continuous improvement thing maybe lends itself more to an agile way of working where you, you've not got sort of set in stone project end date, you can kind of put. Put a whole load of things into a backlog and just sort of continue to work on them and iterate on them. But yeah, over to you guys for a bit more detail.

Saffron Archer: 13:27

Yeah, it's a great question. And it's funny across the more recent years, people will start to throw terms around like Agile and waterfall and DevOps and kind of people get hung up and, and there would be a demand. We are running the project in this way, so you must come and adopt that way. But I don't think people really know what that way is. So I, I tend to think agile or waterfall, water, agile, these are often terms that can hinder rather than help. So in cloud interact, what we think of, we think of customer value. We think of flexibility and adaptability. So by that, I mean, we think about working with someone in the customer space, who knows what the priorities are, who knows what the important points are that we need to deliver first. So we'd very much encouraged the sort of phase, the initial phase discovery, the kickoff to talk a bit about building out a high level backlog of things that are valuable. We then talk a bit about the kind of opportunities to make even more kind of value out of those, those user stories, if you will. So we break those down. And then we help our customers think about how we deliver. Value early. So we very much have a, an approach where we look to have environments, technical environments set up that allow us to do some proof of concepts that are not throw away. These are things that show what can be done, but are at production strength. So that in that pre production environment, the proof of concept can be turned quite quickly into production solution. And there you go within a couple of weeks, a couple of months, you've got some value. And then all of a sudden you have more advocates in the business. People understand the power of the solution and start to want to be part of growing that product backlog. So we start to learn more about what are the needs and we show a method of timeboxing the deliveries so we can deliver value early. So for me, it's all about doing the right things at the right time. It's all about the priority. And it's all about understanding when things haven't worked. Okay. So if we misunderstand or we go wrong, we correct early.. And we, therefore deliver the change early, which is much cheaper to do as opposed to waiting further down the line. So again, you know, another big, big push on that adaptability.

Veronia Larena: 15:28

Basically, what we're trying to do here at Cloud Interact is deliver value to our customers as quickly as possible. And also, we are very open to adapt and change if the circumstances change too. So that's something that we are very proud of and that we are happy to work with our customers to see this through basically.

Tom Morgan: 15:53

So I've got a kind of a tricky question. I'm so I'm a developer by background. So I, I naturally lean more towards the agile methodology. That's kind of, I can see the value in that. The technology changes quickly. People change their minds when they see stuff, they then realize what they actually wanted, but they need to have seen it first and all those things. So I, I can, I totally see the value of working in a completely agile way. Quite often the business doesn't necessarily want to contract in that way. And what I mean by that is like, it's very rare to find a project where people would be like, yeah, we're going to pay you sprint by sprint. And we'll tell you when we're done, you know, that that isn't how it works. So yeah. But by the way, here are our key requirements and here's the deadline and it's fixed price go, you know, and so how, how do you work it? Like, cause I don't have to worry about that as a problem because. You know, that's what you guys do and that's why you're really good at it because I don't have to worry about it. So how, how do you square that circle?

Saffron Archer: 16:51

Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think you're right. I mean, there's never going to be an endless approved budget to just burn every two weeks and, and say, is that what you wanted to carry on? So you're absolutely right. So the way we would do it in in cloud interact, we would obviously look at the totality of the ask. We would start to understand that. And we often have an inception stroke discovery phase, and that can be from 2 to 8 to 12 weeks. It can be depending on the size of the ask. So we would look to size the ask. We would look to understand the complexity. We would then consider how we would make those changes happen. What is the resource mix? We need to bring them. to bear on that. And across that kind of skill set and across the complexity, we would build out a delivery schedule. If you like, we'd look at the effort required to achieve that. Now, it isn't really purely agile, but if you think of and some of the listeners may know a bit, a bit about safe and the scaled agile agile framework, what we try and do is we try and do almost some PI planning, some program increment planning. We will look at a 12 week chunk And we will look at what can we do in that. And there may be two lots of 12 week chunks. And all of a sudden, that visualization of what we think are important things to do in the first increments, that nod from our customer in discovery as, yep, that's what we think would work, that Advocacy that buying as we build out our contract, our statement of work with the customer for the full delivery is something that we can then actually pin ourself to. So it's almost like having so I mentioned PR planning and some people call that big room planning. Yeah, these are two day events where traditionally 20 teams plus would be in a room. You'd be on a massive board in the corner and you'd put. A swim lane of your activities as a team, and you'd literally draw those dependencies with string and blue tack. We try and build that visualization up, and that gives us confidence and certainty that we can deliver within the budget and the time scale. And we use it as a really powerful communication tool as well, so that our customer can believe in what we say and how we'll do it. And obviously there's a fixed shape to that cost and time, but we then work in an iterative fashion, in a more agile scrum type fashion to achieve the end game. As part of that, meaning we can adapt and be flexible during that time period to, to pivot based on priorities that change or things that need to be considered sort of more deeply if a use case has been proven to be quite exciting. So that's sort of 10, that's how we tend to do it. At the moment,.

Tom Morgan: 19:10

So you sort of almost like meeting halfway. It's like, yeah, here are some guardrails. Here's some rough lines in the sands of. These different phases. Okay. That makes sense.

Saffron Archer: 19:20

Okay. You're always going to have a, to me, from my experience, you're always really going to have a customer that wants to know how much this is going to cost. It will not be open. And that's a fair shout from them. They have budgets and budget approval cycle. So we need to be cognizant of that and work to that, which we do. Yeah,

Tom Morgan: 19:35

no, definitely. I'm just thinking about sort of Amazon connect because one of its, one of its key sort of USPS, if you like, is that it's out of the box, you know, you can sign up with just a credit card and get going. And that's absolutely true. And so there's a kind of a spectrum of people, right? There's the. If you're a two person , flower shop, then you could probably could turn on Amazon connect and you probably don't need project management to do that, you know, but scale it up to giant multinational enterprise replacing a system. There's a whole bunch of things to think about. I guess the question I've got is how do you know when you need , project management around and surrounding what you've got. How do you know when you need that and what are some of the things you should think about?

Veronia Larena: 20:20

I think I think you you you put it well, right? Like if you're a flower shop with two employees, maybe you don't need it but And depending on on on the complexity and and how i'm measuring complexity here, for example If it's an existing contact center that has a lot of flows that that Is in a currently an on prem solution and you're trying to migrate it to Amazon connect I would recommend probably to have someone Either if you don't want to have a project manager because your organization doesn't have them Have someone that take that role that oversees the entire like migration and and make sure that Every stakeholder is listen that every input is taken into account while you're doing that migration. So, yeah, I basically would think in that type of scenarios, or even if it's a new implementation and You are planning to implement a lot of scripts, flows, a lot of instances. In that scenario, I would also take into account, like, having someone overseeing the entire project, I think.

Alex Baker: 21:25

I guess there are, there are potentially so many different moving parts and things to consider, it would be quite easy to, To kind of drop the ball if you don't have everything really carefully documented and keeping track of everything. So that makes sense.

Veronia Larena: 21:40

Yeah. And I also think that independently, right? Like having someone that once the solution is up and running, that can have like ownership of how is a structure, how it looks like. I also think like, for example, in a nutshell, from a national point of view, having this product owner figure or product manager that knows. Where the solution is heading towards right? Like I think that that's also really important because we have we can see it in with our customers that is very easily for the for a contact center to grow bigger than than what it was ambition, right? Like so you can have like ideas here, ideas there and nobody actually So having someone overseeing the entire thing, I think is really important for a successful contact center.

Tom Morgan: 22:31

Yeah, because in a lot of businesses, it might be more than one. There's lots of different, as you say, different stakeholders, different people, and it's IT often want to get involved, but actually the contact center doesn't. experience is probably run from a different team, and it's probably a different set of considerations from IT as well. Not saying IT shouldn't be in the picture, it's just, I'm highlighting what you're saying really is, is yeah, it's, it's lots of different people. And I guess, again, you've got other things to think about. Depending on who you are, if you've got compliance or governance or all those things to worry about, a thing we often hear, and I'm, I'm kind of curious about is, do people kind of present with when you're going from one contact center to another contact center well, I, I just want everything exactly as it is, , but just running on the new thing. Versus like you know, taking it as an opportunity to really change how we were. I was kind of kind of thinking about a slightly unrelated story, but in a previous life, I was implementing a, warehouse management system and the guys in the warehouse they just wanted it to work exactly the same. So we had this company in , which was the system we're moving to. And they were like, well, actually that process is weird. Like, you know, you've built it up over decades and it works because it works. Our software is based on this industry process. And I'm super confident that you are not doing anything weird and special, that you shouldn't be using this industry leading process. So go and have a look at it. This, this person really like pre sales guy really challenged us to think about the price. And he was absolutely right. Like, you know, the, the ways of working had built up over time and become entrenched, but it needed somebody to be like, no, you're wrong. Is that a thing you come up against? Is that our place to kind of gently challenge people? Or should we just kind of bring over, you know, do what they say, bring over there. They're sort of

Saffron Archer: 24:21

things they haven't before. I think it's really important that, and we do this in cloud interact, I think it's really important we bring some thought leadership to the conversation. Sure, the customer might say, we just want like for like, and that's absolutely, you know, fine and good. I still think, and whilst we respect that, and we can kind of talk in detail about that, I still think it's important we show them the art of the possible, we show them what is there. We do that by looking at the general availability of new componentry in AWS. We do that by looking at our past kind of activities and some of the kind of componentry and functions we've created. So I think it's really important to show a product roadmap if you like. Of where you can go and at what points would be sensible to sort of drop these things in. And I think it's, it's really important to bring that challenge to the table because, you know, we know that an on prem data center and going to the cloud, they're different things, but they're still data centers. So we want to give, I think our customers are a real sort of transformative change. We need to weigh into that though. Obviously the more that is changed, the more that our customer needs to understand the impact. So if you change the way a function or a feature works, there's probably some training, some comms, there's going to be some kind of maybe UI changes. So there's all that kind of ripple effect of change needing to be baked in and sort of tiling into project managers and what they do. You know, that's where we sort of come into the conversation quite crucially, I think, and we talk about the value. So I think, I think it's a really great shout, but I think it's incumbent upon us to, to share some thought leadership just to kind of demonstrate what's out there whilst always respecting the real requirement. Yeah,

Tom Morgan: 25:57

especially these days where, you know, AI is changing up so much and changing how people work already, you know, even from to, even if you, let's say, randomly. Installed a contact center two or three years ago and you want to move again, like even from two, three years ago, there's, there's big changes. Yeah. That's interesting.

Alex Baker: 26:16

Thinking a bit more about the, the people side of thing, which is the side of things, which we've touched on a little bit. How important is it to involve everyone from sort of all aspects of the business? So I, I'm thinking we're going to be talking to maybe some, some C level CTO type. Personas to start with, there's probably going to be project managers involved from the customer side of things, but also I think it could be quite valuable to get the input of your agents and your supervisors, right? So they're the people that they have. The most insight on what it's like to, to use the system day in, day out. It, I think it's probably really important to, to get their thoughts. What do you guys think? And how, how do you go about doing that?

Veronia Larena: 27:02

I totally agree with you, Alex. I think that from the C level, obviously normally, they are the ones driving the, change, right? Like they are ones because there is a business decision and something needs to happen, right? But. From there, we need to be involving everyone that is part of, the contact center work, right? And not even the contact center work, because there might be key stakeholders in, I don't know, marketing areas or sales areas that are not actively using the contact center, but would be impacted if we change something because they wouldn't receive the voicemail that they were receiving normally. So, I think, the agents part of this also is, is critical because they are the ones that are, as you were saying, in contact day to day with the customer, they understand the pain points, they understand the things that the customer might be experiencing and, and having their input is critical for a successful Implementation. I think they are the ones that know the most.

Saffron Archer: 28:02

I think. Yeah, it's an interesting point. I'm just reflecting on what I think is some of the hardest parts of the journey for us in the project management space. And it's kicking things off can be really quite tough. And what I mean by that is organizing that. Kind of initial set of workshops. And currently we have a customer where we have 13 workshops looking at different disciplines, different personas, different outcomes quite hard to interrupt a customer's day to get their time, to ask them to prepare, to ask them to be part of something, to ask them to follow up on actions. When they've all got day jobs, you know, and we're, we're a project coming in. That's an addition to that. So I think, I think Vero spot on, I think acknowledging the fact that advocates are absolutely required and that whole adoption thing is all about speaking to each and every person taking. Effort and time to prepare for that conversation and building that into into our priorities. So yeah, that, that kickoff workshopping is something we use frequently and it works well, but it can be the hardest to do because of the availability of our customers. Yeah,

Tom Morgan: 29:01

absolutely. There's a lot of different people to keep happy. There's a lot of different people to talk to and consult on. And it's, yeah, no, it's a, it's, it's a big deal changing contact centers. You know, it really is. It's the front end of. The customer experience for lots and lots of different companies. And so it's important to get it right

Alex Baker: 29:19

I've been involved in a few contact center migrations and a while back now, some of them took me to some quite interesting places. Do you think that there is a need? Nowadays for that kind of having boots on the ground, what was the advent of so much remote work? Or is it something that you think can be done completely adequately, fully remote?

Veronia Larena: 29:41

In our experience, I think we embrace fully remote and we obviously have seen, we can see the benefits of why like FaceTime is important. But for. These particular implementations. I don't think you need to be in a room anymore. No.

Tom Morgan: 29:58

I think when we land that contract in Hawaii, I might ask you again.

Veronia Larena: 30:01

Maybe, maybe I will change my mind, but

Tom Morgan: 30:04

yeah, no, it's, it's interesting. Cool. We could chat all day and we probably will carry on chatting after we finish recording, but it's time to bring this episode to an end. Thank you very much. Saf, thank you very much, Vero. Thank you very much, Alex. Thank you all for listening. Today we talked all about project management and how to successfully run an Amazon Connect project. Next time on ACP, we're talking with Ari Hazekamp, Senior Partner Solutions Architect for Amazon Connect. So be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you won't miss it. Whilst you're there, we'd love it if you would rate and review us. And as a new podcast, if you have colleagues that you think would benefit from this content, please let them know. To find out more about how Cloud Interact can help you on your contact center journey, visit cloudinteract. io. We're wrapping this call up now and we'll connect with you next time.