Streamlining Success: Helping Outfund enhance their activation process
Introduction
I recently had the opportunity to work with an awesome startup called Outfund. Their main goal is to provide companies with faster and more cost-effective funding, while also offering greater flexibility than ever before. Essentially, their aim is to make funding easily accessible and affordable.
Problem
As you can imagine, this can be a complicated process. Not only do they provide funding for companies in the United Kingdom, but also in Germany, Spain, Australia, the Netherlands, Ireland, and the United States. With so many different systems to check, these processes are not always straightforward, which can cause delays in approval and activation. They brought me on to assist with one of the items they have been struggling with: their activation process. This involves verifying the companies that ask for funding to ensure that they are legitimate. These checks are mandatory regarding money laundering and other regulatory laws. Without a smooth process, they have lost a potential client or two due to a lack of efficient communication or other reasons.
Background
There are several teams involved in this process, and certain information is not always available to all team members involved. This has nothing to do with the team’s ability but rather the expertise and knowledge people possess due to their roles and responsibilities. In this case, it had to do with Risk Operations, which people in Sales or Product may not necessarily have. The information pertains to knowledge involving the Legal and Regulatory framework around money laundering and other illicit acts. Their roles need to work together but at different stages to ensure that the customers applying are verified and not breaking any laws.
After having several conversations with the COO, we were able to narrow down the part of the process that needed the most attention, which was the Activation Process (after a company has been approved and needs to be checked over). Through our calls, I was able to understand more about the product space they worked in, which gave me some insights into how to create this workshop.
Outfund’s internal approval journey
Timings
I had 5 hours, split between two 2.5-hour sessions on separate days, to help them pinpoint parts of the activation process in which they could improve.
Testimonial
“Katrina expertly guided us through discovery, ideation, prioritisation and action generation phases of an extremely complicated set of business process problems. Katrina's calm, considered supervision of each session and capacity to quickly absorb complex conversations and offer measured guidance was vital in helping us arrive collaboratively at a set of valuable conclusions and actions. The time spent here has rapidly progressed our mutual understanding of these problems and create a roadmap that will help dramatically improve our customer journey and reduce internal effort. Thank you Katrina.”
- Henry Knight, Product Manager
Action board exercise, where teams are able to decide and impact and effort each task will have.
Exercises
Based on what was discussed in our discovery calls, I thought it would be important for the team to reflect on how they have been currently working to identify any issues upfront. This also helped them consider the current ways of working that are helping them move forward. We also uncovered areas in the teams that need more attention, like the lack of resources and concentration of knowledge.
Sailboat Retrospective - Help the team understand the current ways of working, including all positive and negative aspects.
Internal Journey Map - Identify how this process works in a visual way.
HMW - Allowed us to reframe the insights into opportunity areas and innovate on problems found throughout the journey map.
Idea Generation - Solutions brainstormed based on all the problems that are faced in the internal journey map.
Action Board - Evaluating the difficulty and impact of each solution and assigning tasks with details and timings to ensure they are completed with someone responsible.
Outcomes
By the end of the session, we were able to create:
An internal journey map for the process (beginning to end) of a company applying for funding into receiving funding (or being declined).
Highlight the parts of the company internally that are doing well and the parts that need better synergy.
Identify the areas that needed the most attention (to focus on now and in future sprints).
Generate over 30 new ideas to improve the process.
Assign tasks to specific team members, with timings, details, and due dates.
What I learned:
It’s important to emphasize the aspects of “working alone together”.
There were times I had to encourage the participants to write out their thoughts while they were having discussions to ensure that the conversations were visualized and items discussed were not forgotten.
The participants were able to easily identify parts of the internal approval journey that needed attention, but I realized it would have been more beneficial to reframe the problems they selected before creating “How Might We” questions.
Have all materials prepared and arrive with spare time to put up any posters or anything else that needs to be ready for the workshop
Overall, the feedback was very positive, and now Outfund has some tangible tasks they are able to implement within their team immediately.
Voting exercise to decide which solutions the team wants to focus on.
