A strategic digitalization project, an agile approach, resources – all the ingredients are there for success.
However, the teams gradually find themselves lost in the execution by the complexity of the actors, the tasks and the organization.
The software quality made it possible to get the project back on track with its end-to-end and holistic perspective of customer requirements.
Johann Gaggero shares with us his experience in the luxury sector, recounted during the round table “Software quality, the new strategic challenge for companies?”
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About Johann Gaggero
Experienced Test Manager with a proven track record of working in the luxury and cosmetics industry. Proficient in e-commerce, digital, project management, test automation, and web technologies. EPSI graduate.
A strategic digitalization project in the luxury sector
When you asked me to think about a subject, I always base myself on the concrete experience of things to learn and take a step back.
The theme immediately made me think of a transformation project in which I was involved in IT at LVMH, which works for all the group’s perfume and cosmetics entities, around 12.
10 years ago, the group asked the question of IT for its different brands, that’s when this entity was created.
I, therefore, work for this entity, which is a silo over the various brands, in the “Digital, Retail & E-commerce” domain.
Within the strategic initiatives, we had that of accelerating and rapidly deploying the share of e-commerce turnover.
In view of the context and the good performance, the convergence towards a Salesforce platform is one of the projects identified.
This migration project has become all the more strategic with the COVID context where our stores have had to close.
Our first pilot was on the Dior house on the French market, consisting of transforming the front and back office on the headless integration of Salesforce.
Execution drifts to budget red flags
The subject was complicated to tackle for several reasons.
We had to deal with a high turnover in the Business and IT teams causing us to lose key knowledge.
The only most stable team was mine, there for the last 5 years.
The approach had wanted to be agile but with a few quirks: iterations making one lose sight of launch dates.
The forecast of budget overruns quickly raised the alert, for teams who had lost sight of the deliverables, the rest to be done, the framework, the trajectory.
Our quality approach refocuses on the customer experience
We have set up a very business and customer-oriented test approach, which we had initiated cross-wise.
We have co-created with the CRM, Digital, and e-commerce team the different personas and associated user journeys.
Modeling started with e-commerce journeys, which are more easily accessible to different players. They were then supplemented by the end-to-end experience.
These paths have become our overall project metrics, containing both functional and technical indicators of the various requirements.
This approach allowed us to clearly refocus the expected deliverables, while allowing several analysis grids: by personas, by feature, by page, etc.
E-commerce is not just the tip of the iceberg
To complete our end-to-end approach, I pushed my teams to go as close as possible to the field such as logistics, finance, call-center.
We can easily want to summarize e-commerce in the website, losing sight of the entire customer experience as a whole.
Even with a very attractive site, a 2 week delayed delivery will clearly impact the customer experience.
A business-oriented and rigorous vision were fundamental to me.
Our metrics had in fact become the only way to understand the progress of the project, for all the actors.
The holistic customer quality perspective was most relevant. It was very easy to lose sight of the progress between the different sprints.
Quality allowing a focus on the customer and the risks
The quality vision was therefore a strategic issue for the company, making it possible to steer by the quality of the customer experience and risk management.
We always want to deliver faster with better results, what better than a quality perspective with more height to follow its achievement?
What to learn from this story?
Various key points emerge during this experience, considered key factors for the success of a quality approach.
- The need for the company to take the wall to react: in this case, it is the budget alert and loss of visibility and control of the project
- A focus on the customer experience and its perception of value to manage deliverables of the project and of the different teams
- A holistic and end-to-end perspective, in particular on an e-commerce project to guarantee the customer experience
- The definition and sharing of a common repository of requirements integrating the different perspectives of the journey, functionalities, pages, but also technical
- The inclusion of stakeholders in transverse, business, IT and operational involved in all the value chains of the processes impacted
- The confrontation with the reality on the ground to provide the expected quality of the actors, up to warehouse, finance and call-center
- Animation of an iterative and incremental approach to limit complexity, which started with e-commerce more affordable to all players
Quality has therefore made it possible to secure a large-scale strategic project, not only to avoid losing any at the end of the chain.
It has been able to be a real contributor of value through its transversality, from the customer to operations, and aligning project efforts with the right priorities.
So is quality the new challenge for companies?
In any case, it seems to us to be a fundamental part of improving digital transformation initiatives that bring value to customers.