Systematic Innovation

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Business as unusual – innovating professional services – 6

Monday, November 30th, 2015

by Alastair Ross, Director, Codexx Associates Ltd

Part 6. Starting your innovation journey

Introduction

This is the sixth of a series of seven articles on professional service innovation. The objective of the series is to provide a basic introduction to innovation management for managers, partners and change agents working in professional service firms. This article focuses on the approaches for starting or enhancing an innovation programme. To read the first article in the series go here.

Beginning a journey of change

There are a number of ways for a professional service firm to become a measurably more innovative business. There is no one ‘best practice’ way for how a firm should make the journey to realising their own effective innovation system. For that is as much to do with the goals, culture and the leadership of the firm as anything else. However, there are three significantly different approaches that are worth reviewing, as one of them may very well fit with your own firm’s situation and culture. It is important to note that just as an innovation process is drawn as a straight line, but in reality is closer to a lump of spaghetti, so the execution of an innovation programme is rarely clean. Here are three different practical approaches for developing an improved innovation capability in an organisation:

1. Top down strategy

2. Emergent

3. Champion led

1. Top down strategy

This is in many ways the classic consultant-advocated approach to innovation, which is logical and structured, putting in place the required ‘infrastructure’ (i.e. process, training, metrics, resourcing etc.) and the conditions (i.e. leadership, cultural changes and new behaviours) – as described in the previous articles – to enable and sustain innovation.

Strengths: This approach will deliver the conditions required for effective and sustainable innovation.

Weaknesses: This approach requires resourcing and will take time to deliver results – the other approaches can be faster to yield initial benefits.

2. Emergent

The emergent approach offers a pragmatic way to build or enhance a set of innovation capabilities. The trigger will be an existing event (typically external) such as tough business conditions driving the need for efficiency improvements to save cost; or a new requirement from a major client(s) for a dramatic change in a solution(s) value or price; or a business event such as a merger or acquisition.

Strengths: The innovation programme can piggyback on an existing change driver and enable more innovative behaviours and outcomes as a result. The existing change driver helps legitimise the need for innovation, so helps management push through the typical inhibitors to establishing innovation activities in a professional services firm. It can yield faster results than a ‘top down’ approach.

Weaknesses: It is unlikely to be sustainable beyond the short to medium term as the conditions for ongoing innovation have not been put in place and a ‘crisis-driven’ change programme can only run for so long.

3. Champion led

This is an opportunistic approach, which finds potential champions for innovation and then supports and resources them.

Strengths: This can be a fast and effective way for bringing new offerings to market. Individual champions are motivated to make their ideas a success. This can be a low resource approach, with little supporting infrastructure required, and only the matter of budget.

Weaknesses: Success depends on a few key individuals and if they fail to perform or they leave the organisation, then the innovation capability dies with them. This is not a system that leverages the capabilities of all the employees and is not sustainable in the long term. This approach is not uncommon in partner-based organisations when individual partners can be ‘given their head’ to take their ideas forward. Success is mixed however, typically with successes at least equalled by failures. And unless the budget is effectively allocated and controlled, a money-pit can be created….

What does experience tell us?

I’ve worked with a number of professional service (and industrial) firms over the last ten years on innovation programmes and inidividual projects and researched many case studies in the writing of my recent book and other articles. What are the three most important lessons that I have learned?

It is difficult to start (or ramp-up) an innovation programme
It is even more difficult to sustain innovation programmes
You cannot underestimate the importance of committed leadership

As discussed in previous articles in this serious, innovation requires a different paradigm to the dominant one that is prevalent in professional service (and most) businesses – i.e. the focus on delivering today’s business. Establishing an innovation programme requires focus and resources pointed at developing tomorrow’s business. This is why leadership is critical to its success. AXA Insurance (Ireland), IBM, PWC, Allianz Insurance plc and the law firm RPC all provide examples of successful innovation programmes where the senior management personally championed and were active in the programmes.

But the starting of innovation programmes benefits from the ‘excitement of the new’ which can help gain initial support, resourcing and involvement. Existing innovation programmes do not benefit from such enthusiasm, which is typically eroded over time, and it is often a struggle to maintain and progress them. These programmes must be kept fresh – through new focus themes, new champions, innovation competitions and rewards, for example.

But most importantly innovation must be embedded in the fabric of the firm – as part of ‘the way we work here’. This means strategy, budget, good people, time, management, measurement and rewards need to be allocated to innovation on an ongoing basis. In effect, professional service firms need to establish something similar in purpose (though not necessarily in structure) to the Research & Development (R&D) function that exists in industrial firms to enable an ongoing focus on innovation.

So what approach is best for taking innovation forward in your firm? My experience leads me to recommend a pragmatic approach that is the hybrid of the above:

Work to establish the required infrastructure – a system of innovation – whilst building involvement and gaining demonstrable results (thus maintaining management support and increasing employee buy-in).
Employ opportunistic approaches that make use of the energy and capabilities of key personnel acting as innovation champions.
Build on any ‘burning platforms’ that are available and help legitimise the need for the innovation programme.

In the final article of this series I will identify the typical challenges that firms face in seeking to improve their innovation capabilities and the approaches that are helpful in sustaining innovation into the longer term.

References and further reading

This article and the others in the series are based on the approaches, references and case studies detailed in my new book ‘Innovating professional services – transforming value and efficiency’ published by Gower in May 2015. This provides in-depth coverage and case studies of the topics featured in this series. For more information go to: https://www.codexx.com/2015/innovating-professional-services-new-book/

Tags: Innovation, Professional Services
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Business as unusual – innovating professional services – 5

Monday, November 16th, 2015

by Alastair Ross, Director, Codexx Associates Ltd

Part 5. Innovating to increase client value

Introduction

This is the fifth of a series of seven articles on professional service innovation. The objective of the series is to provide a basic introduction to innovation management for managers, partners and change agents working in professional service firms. This article looks at how to enhance client value using innovation. To read the first article in the series go here.

Enhancing value – introducing the value table

In the previous article I discussed the opportunity for cost reduction in a firm’s internal processes or services. In this article I’m focusing on the opportunity to improve value to clients through enhanced or new services. In what ways can we improve value to clients? We can think of value of a table, as shown in Figure 1. Functionality is the surface, as this is what clients/customers wish to buy in the first place – they are buying a service or a product to meet some specific requirements they have. The functionality of the service offered has to at least meet their minimum requirements to be considered. The four legs of the table represent the four attributes of how that functionality is delivered: The price of the service; the time it takes to deliver the service or respond to customer requests; the quality of the service provided (whether corrective actions are needed to address errors or omissions); finally the user experience in the lifecycle of acquiring and using the service. Innovation in any of these five areas will increase value to clients.

Figure 1: The Table of Value (Source: Codexx)

Examples of value enhancement

Functionality

Improving the fit of the service with client needs
This is effectively customization – it reduces the time and cost required by the client to tailor the service deliverables to their needs. This could be as simple as the structuring and format of reports to address different audiences, or to enable them to use reports or information directly with their own customers or suppliers. Much customization is achieved by adding additional cost and time, a better way is to achieve this is by what is called mass customization – using a modular service offering that can be configured to a customer’s requirements, with little additional time or cost.
Improving the functionality of the service
This can be achieved by enhancing the existing functionality (for example by adding additional analysis or reporting) or by broadening the scope of the service offered.

Price

Reducing the price of the service whilst maintaining key value elements
Cost reduction in services (as discussed in the previous article) can enable firms to either increase their margins or improve their competitiveness through keener pricing of their services. Fixed fee service offerings allows firms to make this choice, hourly fee arrangements automatically give clients the benefits of efficiency improvements. Another way to enable price reduction is by removing some existing work elements that clients do not value or by getting clients to perform some of the lower added-value work themselves (an IKEA approach if you like). Thus it is key to understand the elements of value contained within your service and how clients perceive their relative importance.
Providing a new pricing model
Clients are increasingly seeking budget certainty and thus defined price arrangements from firms – for example fixed fees or yearly fees – are increasingly relevant. ‘Performance-based’ pricing is always interesting to discuss, but more difficult to implement (often requiring complex metrics) and will only really succeed if there is the basis of an open and trusting relationship between client and supplier.

Quality

Improving the quality of the work delivered by services
This ensures that clients do not waste time and cost correcting or accommodating errors resulting from the supplied service. Quality means the performance against defined performance metrics (in services these are typically captured in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). It’s key that quality measures reflect what is truly important to clients, as there is a cost to measure, meet and report on these measures. Ongoing process management and innovation is key to good quality – and this is an area many professional service firms are weak in, so the cost of meeting quality targets can be high (i.e. measurement, rework, re-training and reporting).

Time

Improving the speed and responsiveness of services
This provides clients with service deliverables faster and is important for time-sensitive work (e.g. Due Diligence work). Service mapping and Lean approaches can be used to identify opportunities for reducing the elapsed time on activities and reducing any inherent delays. The use of self-service approaches using internet portals can also be effective in enabling clients to work at their own speed (and also reduces the potential for wasted time by fee earners).

Experience

Improving the service experience for clients
This makes the service easier and less stressful for client users. Improvements in experience need to be focused on key service touch points with clients and addressing any issues at these touch points. The overall service goal should be to delight not simply satisfy clients – as merely satisfied clients are always at risk of defection to rivals.

Really understanding client needs

To enable ongoing successful value-based innovation, a firm needs to gain deep insight into its clients’ businesses, to understand how they work, what their customers want and their key challenges. Once the landscape of a client’s business is truly understood, then the firm is well placed to identify opportunities for innovation. Engaging clients in this journey in a collaborative approach is an effective way of identifying and testing new innovations and building a valued and trusted relationship in the process.

In the next article I will show how firms can start or accelerate their innovation programme.

References and further reading

Tags: Innovation, Professional Services
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Business as unusual – innovating professional services – 4

Monday, October 26th, 2015

by Alastair Ross, Director, Codexx Associates Ltd

Part 4. Innovating to reduce process and service costs

Introduction

This is the fourth of a series of seven articles on professional service innovation. The objective of the series is to provide a basic introduction to innovation management for managers, partners and change agents working in professional service firms. This article discusses the opportunities for applying innovation to reduce the cost of operating internal support processes and external processes (i.e. services). To read the first article in the series go here.

The importance of process innovation

Processes and services are the most common opportunity areas for innovation in professional services firms (see reference study here). Business processes are the way work gets done in an organization and services deliver value to clients using internal and external processes. Therefore there are major opportunities for innovation in these areas. Of course process innovation has a long history from the industrial world, emanating in work study and Taylorism in the early 20^th century and being re-energised by the emergence of Lean thinking (based on the Toyota Production System) in the mid-1980s and Business Process Re-engineering in the early 1990s. Some would call such process innovation ‘business improvement’ rather than innovation. I find it more effective to consider this as part of an innovation programme – as it meets the criteria of innovation, i.e. converting ideas to value (e.g. improved efficiency). By including process innovation as part of the firm’s innovation programme, common resources and management methods can be applied.

In my experience in working with professional service firms, there is major opportunity for significant cost reduction through process innovation, because process thinking and management are typically absent in these firms – unlike industrial organisations. The application of process innovation methods such as Lean and Re-engineering can yield significant reductions in the direct costs of operating a process. This is achieved through a combination of the following approaches:

Making services and processes visible, using process mapping
Eliminating waste steps (such as checking and rework)
Defining standard process elements based on best practices to reduce the costs of unnecessary variation from the optimum
Improving adherence to defined processes using procedures and training
Automating process stages or workflow
Perform process stages using lower cost personnel

In my work with professional service firms (particularly law firms) over the last decade on such process innovation, clients have achieved reductions in the direct costs of performing services of between 25-50% (and as high as 75% on one occasion). This level of cost reduction enables a firm to significantly improve its competitiveness. However, there is a challenge. If existing services are charged on an hourly-rate basis, then all the efficiency benefits will be given to clients, either as less hours required per matter and/or lower hourly charges. To avoid this and enable a firm to determine how much to keep (as increased margins) and how much to give away (as price reductions), it needs to introduce fixed fees for the service. This is typically welcomed by clients as improving price certainty at a time of increased budget pressures. But firms then need to apply new disciplines for delivery management to ensure that fee earners can work to the required cost targets to ensure profitability targets for services are met.

In addition to direct cost reduction, there is the opportunity to reduce indirect costs (i.e. overheads) that are applied to fee earner time. There are three major opportunity areas for indirect cost reduction for professional service firms:

Office costs – through reduction in footage costs (lower cost location) or less footage needed (‘hot-desking’ and mobile working).
Purchasing of external services and materials – through good procurement practices and effective commodity management, which have often been weak in professional services in comparison to industry.
Support costs (e.g. IT) – through internal efficiency improvements (using process analysis) or outsourcing.

Overall, professional service firms need to reduce the share of their overheads taken by office costs and increase the share taken by IT. The latter is increasingly core to the effective and efficient delivery of professional services, the former is not.

In the next article I will show how firms can utilize innovation to increase the value provided to clients through enhanced or new services.

References and further reading

Tags: Innovation, Professional Services
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Business as unusual – innovating professional services – 3

Monday, October 5th, 2015

by Alastair Ross, Director, Codexx Associates Ltd

Part 3. Establishing an effective system of innovation

Introduction

This is the third of a series of seven articles on professional service innovation. The objective of the series is to provide a basic introduction to innovation management for managers, partners and change agents working in professional service firms. This article outlines a systematic approach to enable, direct and manage innovation within a professional services firm. To read the first article in the series go here.

Innovation is not easy to do – especially in professional services

The focus of business organizations is to deliver the current value proposition using today’s resources & thinking. Innovation is about developing tomorrow’s business, be it new value propositions, different ways of working, new market positioning or a new business model. This requires new thinking and for people to step out of their current paradigms of working and to be capable of challenging what and how things are done. Doing this needs people and time and thus is a particular challenge in professional service firms where the people who best understand the business are fee earners – and thus not so readily available for (what is non-chargeable) work on innovation. Typical challenges in attempting innovation in professional service firms are illustrated by the quotes below (from past Codexx studies):

“We have ideas but we’re not good at making them happen.” Managing Partner, Law Firm

“Our culture and measures don’t really support innovation.” Manager, Business Services

“People don’t want to take risky ideas to the boss.” Partner, Management Consulting

“Not a coordinated approach to innovation.” Head of Knowledge Management, Law Firm

A system for innovation

Experience and academic research has shown that a systematic approach to innovation improves an organization’s likelihood of delivering successful and sustained innovation. Such an innovation system is built on key practices across 7 areas (see Figure 1) which need to be put in place across the firm:

Leadership – Active support and encouragement from the top is key to establishing a supportive environment for innovation and also to focus the firm’s innovation efforts.
Strategy – A clear strategy is needed to provide context and priorities for innovation. The strategy will define where the firm will focus its innovation efforts with targets and supporting metrics.
Process – A structured and objective ideas management process is required to explore, select and implement the best ideas. This helps ensure that the firm focuses its limited resources on the best ideas, rather than ‘pet projects’.
Climate – A supportive culture and values are needed to establish an environment that promotes innovative behaviours. Key metrics in professional service firms, such as chargeable-time utilization, need to be complemented with other metrics that support innovation. Such metrics encourage employees and partners to make time for innovation and take the risk of proposing and championing new ideas.
Resources – People time, methods and money are needed to fuel innovation. In a professional services firm, making time available for fee earners to develop promising ideas is critical – as is recognizing and rewarding those who deliver innovation.
External Linkages – Effective links to the outside world, especially clients, for ideas and resources, is important for ensuring that the firm is focusing on market-relevant ideas. Engaging clients in innovation co-development also increases the likelihood of success and strengthens client relationships.
Learning – Capturing and sharing learning from innovation across the firm is key to increasing return from innovation activities – looking to where else a similar innovation can be applied and encouraging the ‘re-use’ of ideas. Process-based learning and improvement is also a competency that is fundamental to enabling continuous improvement, but is typically lacking in professional service firms (for more information on applying Knowledge Management to process improvement, see here).

Figure 1: The Innovation System Model (Source: Codexx)

Assessing your firm against the innovation system model

To help firms in establishing and developing their innovation system, Codexx uses an assessment approach called ‘Foundations for Innovation’ (F4i for short) that reviews 60 key practices that make up the 7 areas of the innovation system. Codexx has used F4i with law firms, insurance companies, business consultancies as well as industrial organisations. But as an initial start you can simply consider how effectively your firm supports innovation across the 7 areas defined above and what improvements are needed.

The overall innovation system will only be as strong as its weakest link. I have worked with professional service firms who established innovation processes, defined an innovation strategy and dedicated some personnel time for innovation, but the lack of a supportive innovation climate (non-chargeable time was not valued or rewarded) and indifferent leadership (other than a couple of partner champions, the board was lukewarm in support) meant that few ideas were generated to go into the innovation process and even fewer were progressed along it. A firm’s management needs to be committed to innovation if it is to establish a supportive system that enables effective and sustained innovation – rather than an occasional ‘get lucky’ approach.

In the next article I will show how firms can utilize innovation to reduce the costs of their business processes.

References and further reading

Tags: Innovation, Professional Services
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Business as unusual – innovating professional services – 2

Monday, September 21st, 2015

by Alastair Ross, Director, Codexx Associates Ltd

Part 2. Identifying innovation opportunities

Introduction

This is the second of a series of seven articles on professional service innovation. The objective of the series is to provide a basic introduction to innovation management for managers, partners and change agents working in professional service firms. This article helps answer the question ‘Where should we innovate?’ To read the first article in the series go here.

The need for focus

A key question for a firm’s management team is where to focus its innovation efforts. Far too many firms take an unfocused, unstructured, ‘laissez faire’ approach, resulting in time and money being wasted in projects that have poor value, failing to invest in projects that have much higher potential value and spreading investment and resources too thinly across the firm on too many projects. As a business development director of a major UK law firm put it “In practice we can have a lot of ‘crappy’ projects going on.” To avoid such a wasteful situation, a firm needs to have a systematic approach to framing and then developing innovation opportunities followed by an objective way of evaluating and selecting the resulting proposals. I will tackle the first requirement in this article and the latter in the next article on establishing an innovation system.

Your innovation dimensions

A useful model to help with this focus, based on academic research, is the ‘Dimensions of Innovation’ model. This models all the potential areas that an organisation can innovate in as four major ‘dimensions’ (see Figure 1). The centre of the circle represents the ‘Do Nothing’ state (i.e. no innovation). An organisation can then innovate in any number of the dimensions – the further out the circle is pushed, the higher the degree of innovation. Thus a small radius represents Do Better incremental innovation; the largest radius represents Do Different radical innovation.

I have used model this with legal, insurance, engineering and consulting clients over the past decade and I have found it to be a very useful tool, as it provides a single page view of innovation possibilities within a business. This helps facilitate discussion around existing innovation activities and highlights future opportunity areas that have not been well explored. As such, this provides a useful structure against which existing and proposed innovation activity can be mapped and reviewed.

Figure 1: Dimensions of Innovation (Source: Frances and Bessant, adapted by Codexx)

Let me build on the four dimensions and give some examples of innovation in each dimension:

1. Product innovation

This type of innovation lies in providing a new or enhanced value proposition to clients through the improvement of existing service products or the development of new services. In professional services, this can come from efficiency improvement through process innovation – resulting in ‘Do Better’ innovation of an existing service – improving the client service experience or providing a lower priced offering. It can also come through client-focused innovation, which can result in a new or ‘Do Different’ service – for example a web-based offering or a new pricing model (e.g. fixed fee or risk-sharing). For many professional service sectors, clients increasingly want price certainty and fixed price offerings provide this but also enable firms to keep the benefits of cost reduced services as improved margin.

Example: Mills & Reeve, a major UK law firm, facing significant pricing pressures in its inquest service from budget-constrained public sector clients, developed a web-enabled tailored inquest service for NHS clients offering a menu of pricing options including fixed fees. This new service utilized significant efficiency improvements and was adopted by a number of UK hospital trusts.

2. Process innovation

Process innovation covers the application of new ways of performing work – this can be new methods, new skills, new technology (e.g. IT) or organizational changes. This innovation can be applied to internal administrative processes (such as Bid Management, Billing or Client Inception) or chargeable services (such as Due Diligence, Project Delivery, Accounting Audit or Claims Management). It uses analysis of existing ways of working and the application of improvement techniques, such as Lean, to redesign processes to reduce cost and rework, speed up the service and improve quality. Key improvement opportunities include the application of standard procedures and documents for repetitive work elements, IT applications such as workflow management and internal and external collaboration solutions and the ‘right-skilling’ of work tasks.

This is a major opportunity area in most professional service firms, as processes typically are not well defined, standardized and have simply evolved over time. Employees typically have sufficient know-how to deliver a service but not know-why as to why it is performed in the way it is. This lack of insight is well captured by a manager in a major insurance company discussing current working methods: “A lot of what people are doing they don’t understand why, because it was done in the past.” So true insight is required to develop ‘Do Different’ process innovation – the innovation team need to ‘peel back’ existing services to their fundamentals and identify and challenge requirements and assumptions. There are a number of tools that can be used to help do this, (Codexx utilise a number of them in its Catalyst and Ideation workshops), one of the simplest is the ‘Five Whys?’ method developed in Toyota.

In professional services, the line between product and process innovation is blurred, as the redesign of services typically will require process innovation. However some process innovation, such as in cost reduction, may be opaque to clients as there will be no change in the resulting service value or experience.

Example: Allianz Insurance plc in the UK established weekly/bi-weekly team-based problem-solving to reduce cost and improve efficiency across their business and help to establish a more innovative working culture.

3. Market Position innovation

This is where innovation occurs in the positioning of the firm in the market. This can be achieved by the firm entering an existing market in which the firm had not previously competed; establishing a new market, or by changing the nature of its competitive position in an existing market (for example by significant change in its price/value proposition).

Example: The major international law firm DLA Piper, took advantage of UK deregulation of the legal market to launch a new legal vehicle LawVest. One of its first offerings was RiverView Law, a new business providing fixed price legal services, targeting small businesses and based on a lower cost legal organisation and defined processes. This enabled the firm to take advantage of market changes in a way that did not conflict with its existing ‘large client’ high-value brand.

4. Business Model innovation

A firm’s business model defines how it creates and delivers value to its clients – in essence how it makes money. The business model consists of three fundamental parts:

1. The value proposition
2. How the firm develops and delivers the value proposition
3. The firm’s mechanisms for selecting and serving its clients.

Business model innovation can be in any of these three areas. This is big, often ‘bet the firm’ innovation and is thus the rarest and most challenging type of business innovation. New entrants into existing markets often bring a new business model with them: RocketLawyer provides fixed fee legal ‘products’ via the web to small and mid-sized businesses; Crunch.co.uk provides web-based accounting services, also focusing on small and medium sized businesses; Freelancer.com provides an online market place to link over 16 million freelancers in IT and design services with customers.

Example: In 1991 IBM made a strategic decision to become ‘a world-class services company’ moving away from its hardware focus. At that time less than 10% of its revenue was from non-maintenance services. By 2001, services accounted for 41% of revenue and this was more than 60% by 2011. This transformation in its business model required a 10 year journey involving changes in strategy, culture, resources, organization, processes and offerings.

In the next article I will show how firms can establish a system for innovation that provides the key practices to support and direct innovation activities.

References and further reading

Tags: Innovation, innovation focus areas, Professional Services
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Business as unusual – innovating professional services

Monday, September 7th, 2015

by Alastair Ross, Director, Codexx Associates Ltd

Part 1. Setting the scene – when business as usual is not enough

Introduction

Increasingly in organizations, ‘business as usual’, the amalgam of existing thinking, value propositions and ways of working is not enough. What delivered commercial success in the past is not going to do so in the future, for the competitive environment is becoming more challenging – customers and clients increasingly want more for less, new competitors are arriving and technological advancement offers new forms of competition. The result is that businesses are seeing the need for increased levels of innovation to effectively compete.

All the above is now also true for professional service firms, many of whom have been relatively insulated from such commercial pressures due to their high-value offerings which were not easily replicated or automated and for some professions, such as law, enjoyed regulatory barriers to entry. But this is changing and innovation is moving up the agenda for management teams in these firms. This creates a major challenge for many firms with limited experience or capabilities in effective innovation.

Welcome to the first of a series of seven short articles on innovation in professional service firms. The objective of this series is to provide a foundation for partners, managers, and change leaders working in professional service firms on the opportunities, approaches and challenges for using innovation to improve their firm’s competitiveness. The series is based on my work on innovation and re-engineering projects with major UK and European professional services firms over the past ten years. The series will be published over the next three months with the planned contents as follows:

Part 1: Setting the scene – when business as usual is not enough

Part 2: Identifying innovation opportunities

Part 3: Establishing an effective system for innovation

Part 4: Innovating to reduce costs

Part 5: Innovating to increase value

Part 6: Starting your innovation journey

Part 7: Key challenges and sustaining innovation

So let’s get started:

Professional services – drivers for innovation

Professional service firms, such as lawyers, accountants and management consultants, are facing new challenges driven by fundamental trends, which have been accelerated by the economic weaknesses in western economies triggered by the 2008 financial crisis and resulting business downturn. These trends include:

Price-down pressures from clients seeking to reduce their supplier spend.
Deregulation (such as in the UK and Australian legal sectors) enabling new market entrants.
Service commoditization through the application of standardisation and IT.
Increasing competition from lower cost economies – such as India and China
New internet and mobile technology-enabled business models – such as Freelancer.com in IT and design services, Crunch.co.uk in accountancy and RocketLawyer.com in legal services

In response to these challenges, progressive firms are recognizing the need to innovate the services they provide and their ways of working. Such innovation enables them to reduce costs through more effective and efficient working and increases the value they provide to clients through new and enhanced services.

Let’s be clear on innovation

It’s important to have a clear view of innovation to help in developing the most effective approach to enabling and managing it. Defining innovation can become an almost religious debate for innovation consultants, who often end up excluding ‘normal’ business improvement activities. In my view, a more inclusive definition is of most use when seeking to manage innovation programmes within businesses. With this in mind I find the most effective definition is: ‘Innovation delivers value from ideas’. This definition includes small and large innovations and those conceived in your own business as well as those copied from others, i.e. that is new to you. To consider that innovation is only about ‘radical new ideas’ would lead to incremental improvements receiving insufficient focus within the business – and high engagement incremental improvement is very powerful (just ask Toyota who have built their business success on their Lean business model driving continuous improvement with high engagement of their workforce). A view that innovation only covers things that are ‘new to the world’ would drastically diminish the powerful benefits of adopting best practice methods proven elsewhere (aka ‘copy with pride’).

So innovation is about creating or using an idea and generating value from it (e.g. increased profitability). Successful exploitation of an idea is a key requirement for innovation. This is why innovation is more than just creativity – for many new ideas and inventions fail to deliver value and thus cannot be considered innovative. In the journey to realizing value from ideas, activities such as idea exploration, selection, development, implementation and learning are as important as creativity. And thus successful innovation within your firm needs the developers, the project managers and the trainers as much as the idea generators….

Institutional v Individual Innovation

In developing effective innovation within a firm it is vital to differentiate between ‘individual innovation’ and ‘institutional Innovation’. Many business professionals would claim that they innovate regularly in their work, in their methods or in what they deliver to clients. However, this type of innovation is primarily individual innovation. Such ‘innovation’ is personal, it is not codified or easily scalable (it may not even be valuable) across the wider organisation. Therefore the impact of such individual innovation is very limited in comparison to institutional innovation. Institutional innovation engages other personnel within the firm and outside it through codified, scaled and deployed innovations such as new or enhanced services, new ways of working and new strategies that deliver increased value. Institutional innovation may well start as individual innovation, but the lone innovator creates something that can be used by others and not just themselves, something that can be developed and deployed into an institutional innovation. For a firm to be effective in using innovation to improve its competitiveness, it must master institutional innovation. And in addition it must establish a systematic approach to effectively manage its innovation activities.

Key items for management’s innovation agenda

When a firm is seeking to significantly enhance its innovation capabilities, there are some key questions that need to be answered by the management team such as:

Where should we focus our innovation activities?
What’s slowing or preventing innovation today?
How do we select the best ideas, develop and implement them?
Who should get involved?
How do we resource innovation?
How do we encourage and reward participation?

I intend to guide readers in answering these questions in this series of articles.

In the next article I will show how firms can identify key opportunity areas for innovation in their firm by considering their key ‘dimensions for innovation’ and give examples of this in multiple professional service sectors.

References and further reading

Tags: . service innovation
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Speaking at ‘5 Great Minds’

Monday, June 15th, 2015

Alastair Ross, Director of Codexx, spoke at the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Levitt Group on Friday 12th June 2015 at their ‘5 Great Minds’ event held in Regent’s University in London for senior marketing professionals.

His presentation was entitled ‘Innovating Professional Services – transforming value and efficiency’. His session introduced the ‘Why?’, ‘What?’ and ‘How?’ of improving competitiveness through innovation in professional service firms. The event also introduced Alastair’s new book ‘Innovating professional services’. To see a copy of the event brochure, click.

Tags: Innovating professional services, Marketing
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Why did Google abandon 20% innovation time?

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015

Google has been well known for its unique approach to innovation – from its open culture, its radical work environment in its Googleplex campus to its methods for innovation. This has enabled it to grow meteorically from its formation in 1998 to become a $62 billion turnover company by 2014. One of its best known innovation mechanisms was its policy of ‘20% time’ which allowed its engineers to spend 20% of their time on personal projects.

Read the rest of Alastair Ross’s article at HRzone.

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Innovation in professional services – why, what and how?

Wednesday, May 20th, 2015

There are approximately 450,000 professionals working in businesses that come under the banner of ‘professional services’ in the UK alone. Within this group are lawyers, accountants, management consultants, IT specialists, architects and other professionals who provide services to businesses and individuals based on knowledge, expertise and intellectual property. In the USA there are about 400,000 practising lawyers and over 1 million accountants. Professional Services alone is reported to generate more than US$ 3 trillion in revenue globally and in the UK the sector employs almost 12% of the workforce and accounts for 8% of national output.*

So this is a key business sector and also one that is facing major challenges to both its business model and its operating methods from a combination of globalisation, regulatory changes, client demands and the impact of the internet and Information Technology. These challenges are driving progressive firms to respond through innovation in how they operate and the value they provide to their clients.

Responding with innovation
Many professional service firms would like to improve their innovation capability, but often do not know where to start or how to establish and sustain a culture for innovation. Some sectors such as law have enjoyed long term stability and have not needed to significantly innovate, but this is changing due to the new business pressures. This short article identifies some of the key approaches required for effective innovation in professional services and some of the common challenges encountered. It is based on our consulting experience with professional service firms over the past 10 years, together with insight from our academic partners.

Figure 1: Innovation – the farming of ideas

What is innovation?

Much time and effort can be spent arguing about what is and is not innovation. Whilst there is no ‘correct’ answer, it is key that there is a common definition and understanding across an organisation. In our experience the most effective definition is that innovation is anything that is ‘new to you’. This means that innovation includes incremental improvement as well as radical innovation. It also includes methods already in use elsewhere, (even within other parts of your business) that are adopted in your business. Whilst radical innovation gets the headlines, it is the much less glamorous regular small improvements that make up 95% of innovation ideas and can be massively powerful (witness Toyota’s rise to be the global automotive leader based on 50 years of Lean (i.e. incremental) improvement).

This inclusive definition of innovation is the most useful to business management who wish to establish a culture and system of innovation. Recognising the power of a high number of small ideas is at least as important as seeking the very few ‘game changing’ innovations.

At its simplest, innovation is about generating ideas and converting the best ideas to value for the business. We can consider a farming analogy for innovation (Figure 1), where an effective system and supportive environment are required to grow and harvest the best ideas. It is important to recognise that creativity alone is not innovation. Creative ideas that are not implemented do not result in innovation.

Figure 2: Dimensions of Innovation (Source: ‘Innovating professional services – transforming value and efficiency’ by Alastair Ross, published May 2015, Gower)

Where to innovate?

Firms have finite resources and need to best apply these resources, especially when it comes to innovation. But how should firms apply these resources when it comes to innovation—where should they focus? A useful model for innovation is one of ‘Innovation Dimensions’ as shown in Figure 2. This considers four ’dimensions’ where firms can innovate—where they choose to do so depends on their strategy and current practices. At the centre or ‘zero point’ of the circle a business is not innovating. It can innovate in any of the four dimensions—at a low (incremental) level or a high (radical) level:

Process
A common area for business innovation is innovation in business processes which govern the ways of working. This has much potential in professional service firms where process definition and management can be lacking. Process innovation is an excellent way of engaging employees to come up with ideas for incremental improvements in their working methods. Bigger step change innovation can be driven through a re-engineering approach. Process innovation can involve waste reduction, reorganisation and ‘right-skilling’ of the personnel performing the process and the application of IT. The example in the model is of the insurance company QBE who applied 6-sigma improvement methodologies to process improvements in their business.
Offering
Innovation can also be applied in the services provided to clients, either to improve existing services or create new ones. In the model, the example given is of the law firm Mills & Reeve who developed an iPhone App for their Divorce.co.uk offering. We have worked extensively with major UK law firms to help them re-engineer services such as Due Diligence, Employment Tribunals and Inquests to increase value and service to clients and reduce cost of delivery.
Market position
Another way of innovating can be in the repositioning of the firm’s value proposition in the marketplace. To take advantage of deregulation in the UK legal market, the major UK law firm DLA Piper jointly set up a new vehicle, ‘LawVest’ to enable investments in new fixed price services for mid-sized businesses.
Paradigm
The last innovation dimension is the hardest to exploit as it is quite simply the reinvention of the firm’s business model. The example given is that of IBM, who from the early 1990s, over a decade, transformed their business away from one based primarily on hardware to one based on software and services. The internet provides a powerful vehicle for firms seeking to develop new business models, enabling on-line services, with global reach and at substantially lower cost than personal services. Examples of new internet-enabled professional service businesses include crunch.com for online accountancy and freelancer.com for software and design solutions.

A system for innovation
If you want to have effective and ongoing innovation in your business, you have to proactively establish the conditions for it. Research and experience has shown time and time again that effective and sustainable innovation requires an holistic and systematic approach to innovation. This approach weaves together the threads of a number of key practices to create a strong and rich fabric of innovation capabilities. Exploiting these capabilities leads to long term superior performance. Best practice innovation thus requires an integrated system, (Figure 3) which is comprises seven key practice areas:

Figure 3: The innovation system (Source: Codexx)

Leadership – Active support and encouragement from the top is key to innovation
Strategy – A clear business strategy is required to provide context and priorities for innovation
Process – A structured process to generate, explore, select and implement the best new ideas is key
Climate – The organisation’s culture and values can either energize or emasculate innovation
Resources – People time, methods, money and other resources are needed for innovation
Learning – Capturing and sharing learning across the organisation is key to effective innovation
External Linkages – No organisation is an island – ideas & resources from outside are key ingredients

The ‘Innovation System’ model is an effective way for a business to think about and develop their innovation system. We have helped a number of businesses improve their innovation system by using our ‘Foundations for Innovation’ (F4i) solution to assess their current innovation capabilities against 60 best practices underlying the innovation system model.

Innovation challenges in professional services—the ‘Top 6’
Innovation is difficult —for the simple reason that it is easier for any organization to continue ‘business as usual’ than to change. And innovation is about making change. Organizations that are effective at innovation are able to embed a culture that encourages ongoing change. So, many of the challenges that face professional service firms in innovation, apply to all businesses. But focusing on those common challenges that professional service firms face in our experience, together with comments made by professional service clients:

1. Poor supportive culture for innovation

“There is lip service to innovation at senior levels due to the difficulty of making the required cultural change.” Partner, Law Firm
“People don’t want to take risky ideas to the boss.” Partner, Management Consultancy
Many firms effectively discourage innovation through a combination of leadership behaviours, organisational ‘norms’ (e.g. “more of the same has worked well for us for 20 years so why change?”) and resistance to change dominating the firm’s culture. A key challenge for professional service firms is that fee earners typically only value time that is chargeable, and therefore are disinclined to invest time in other activities (e.g. innovation) which will not be valued in their performance appraisal or bonus.

2. Limited understanding of client needs

“We’ve been in our functional silos too long and they’re too deep.” Manager, Business Services
“Our new offering was less successful as it took too long and had not enough client involvement.” Managing Partner, Law Firm

Engaging clients early in the development of a new product/service is an effective way of increasing the chance that the new offering will bring value to clients. Many new ideas come from firm’s clients or from an insight gained into a client’s business. This is why deep understanding of clients’ businesses is key to effective product/service innovation. However, many firms have a transactional relationship with clients and do not invest enough time and energy to understand their business challenges and so identify innovation opportunities

3. Insufficient resourcing for innovation

“Time is a big issue – we’re a cog of labour.” Partner, Law Firm
“Carving out real time for innovation instead of chargeable work is a major challenge.” Partner, Management Consultancy

The key resource required for innovation in a professional service firm is time – particularly the time of fee earners and key support personnel. Time is needed to reflect on the business, to gain insight from clients, to analyse existing methods and brainstorm new ones, to develop, implement and deploy new solutions. Few professional service firms have established dedicated ‘innovation teams’ armed with methods and budget who can be used to support innovation projects. Once an idea has traction, the other resource barrier that typically emerges is IT resourcing.

4. Poor innovation process

“By the time you get through all the bureaucracy the system will be obsolete or the idea will be dead.” Employee, Insurance
A core foundation for effective innovation is a robust process that links ideas with delivered value (e.g. a new or improved product/service, a new way of working or a new pricing model). This process must guide idea development, selection and investment using appropriate criteria, and monitor and support development and implementation. Whilst an innovation/new product development process is common in the industrial sector, it is less so in professional services. Its absence means that innovation ideas from employees can struggle to be heard and in comparison poor quality ideas can be pushed through if championed by a Partner or senior manager.

5. Ineffective execution
“People want to practice their legal skills. It’s seen as de-skilling them to ask them to be a project manager.”

There is a distinct difference between creativity and innovation. Creativity may be required at the start of the innovation process (even if it is simply to borrow an idea from another sector), but it has no value without execution. Firms can be guilty of under-resourcing implementation – for new products this can include insufficient resourcing for marketing and selling the new offering. The ‘long slog’ of implementation can be less attractive for employees and managers than attending a few brainstorming workshops to generate new ideas…. Implementation needs to be a recognised critical part of a firm’s innovation process and resourced accordingly.

6. Resistance to systemization of work

“Current performance measures penalise efficiency and delegation.” Head of Knowledge Management, Law Firm
“Resistance is from middle management – senior management is supportive.”

A key innovation opportunity for professional service firms is in dramatically improving their cost performance by streamlining services and internal processes and ‘right-skilling’ work – with significant amounts of repetitive work being moved to lower skilled personnel, automated or outsourced. The use of ‘Standard Operating Procedures’ together with IT-enabled workflow means that work can be performed at a similar level of quality as before but at much lower cost. This frees up experienced personnel to take on higher value work and also to have time to spend on innovation and business development.

However, the flip side of this benefit is that these personnel will in the short term lose a significant amount of their work. This can create concerns about their long-term future and short-term compensation. Long-serving employees may also consider that the ‘professionalism’ of their firm is threatened by the use of semi-skilled employees now performing their work. But as I have said a number of times to legal partners – if they decide to buy a Porsche, they will expect high quality and high performance. But they will not expect that it will be built by the CEO of Porsche! They accept that it will be built by a semi-skilled worker on a production line, but following processes and procedures codified from the experience of the firm’s engineers…. This lesson equally applies to professional service firms. A key paradigm change for professionals is in separating their role into the two elements of design and delivery. A professional may bring more value to their firm by using their time to codify their expertise and supporting the design of new working methods) to enable it to be delivered by others or via an automated system) rather than delivering it themselves.

Getting started

Developing an effective capability for innovation is important in professional service firms as they seek to retain their competitiveness in an increasingly challenging global marketplace. Firms can learn from other sectors, but will need to ‘tune’ established methods for the services world.

Codexx has helped professional service firms improve their innovation activities in a number of ways, including:

Assessment of firms’ innovation health against our F4i innovation best practice model and developing an improvement strategy.
Training – of managers and employees in innovation approaches and methods.
Establishing key elements of an innovation system (such as a strategy, processes, resourcing).
Developing department/sector strategies using Strategic Road-Mapping to align innovation activities with market strategies.
Running user/customer/client collaborative studies to determine opportunities for value innovation.
Re-engineering existing services (and internal support processes) to improve efficiency and value.
Supporting the design and development of new service offerings.

We have seen that such approaches can yield major benefits for firms both in terms of increasing service value, reducing cost and giving the organisation increased competencies for subsequent innovation. The reality is that for many (most?) professional service firms, establishing effective innovation will be challenging, yet rewarding and ultimately necessary for growth in the new business environment.

For more information contact Codexx.

*This article draws upon materials in the book ‘Innovating professional services – transforming value and efficiency’ by Alastair Ross, Director of Codexx, published on the 8th May 2015 by Gower. For more information and online discount click here.

Tags: Innovating professional services - transforming value and efficiency
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Product development – ten best practices

Friday, October 17th, 2014

Product development is a critical function for product-based businesses. The ability to develop new products with features and functionality that are valued by users, to bring them to market quickly, cost effectively and at acceptable quality and then to support and enhance them during their lifetime has always been a complex undertaking.

Today’s additional requirements to serve a global market, to exploit new technologies – including the opportunities provided by the internet – to meet ever higher customer expectations and to compete against new low cost, but increasingly high value, rivals from China and other emerging economies simply adds to the challenge.

How do companies ensure that their product development practices are good enough?

Over the past decade Codexx has worked with a number of clients on assessing and improving product development practices, most recently we performed a global R&D benchmarking assessment covering Europe, US and China. In 2010-12 Codexx carried out two major research studies on what we call ‘the innovation journey’ for technology-based product businesses, from new ideas to value (e.g. [products) in the marketplace. This covered 43 technology businesses in the UK and Denmark.*

Figure 1: An end-to-end product innovation process

From our experience, we have put together a ‘top ten’ list of practices that we consider have a key impact on the success of product development. In no particular order:

Become a user. Get the ‘voice of the user’ into R&D and keep it there. This can be done in a number of ways: by ensuring that development engineers and product managers spend time with relevant users, or by nominating a ‘user advocate’ in the development team, or by regularly and systematically bringing field feedback into R&D. A measure of the importance of this practice is that our innovation journey study found that end-user involvement in new product development was the practice with the fourth highest correlation with innovation performance.
Effectively explore new ideas. This means using a rich approach to exploration that involves personnel from development, marketing and production as well as potential users and partners, to determine the potential user and business opportunities and also the risks of new concepts and to identify potential improvements. The use of rough-prototyping is very effective here to help evaluate the concept. This level of exploration ‘shakes up’ the concept to determine whether it has sufficient merits to consider taking it forward. In our innovation journey study of 2012-13, the effective use of rough prototyping for idea exploration was the practice with the second highest correlation with overall innovation performance.
Enhance existing products. It can be easy for R&D to over-focus on new products, at the expense of enhancing existing products – from an engineering perspective it can be seen as less challenging and less exciting. But enhancing an existing product instead of investing in a new one has many advantages – less technical risk, less investment, easier for sales personnel to sell (minimal training required). Enhancements can be through updated technology elements in an existing platform, through accessories (which can be provided by 3rd parties) or through software and services. This does not mean we are ‘anti-new products’, but simply that the development investment portfolio should give sufficient weight to existing product enhancement as well as new products.
Establish an ‘end-to-end’ product innovation process. Whilst most product businesses will have a formal New Product Development (NPD) process, this only covers part of the journey from new ideas to products in the market. The NPD process needs to be complemented by a front-end process for idea generation and exploration (covering the key ‘fuzzy front end’ of product development), a back-end support & enhancement process and a parallel process for capturing learning from the field (as shown in Figure 1). Front-end exploration projects will often “fail” in the sense that the results are disappointing – which is an acceptable outcome as not all new ideas should (or can) proceed. Engineers must be judged on whether they do good, disciplined investigations in this stage, not on whether the ideas work out. Some element of waste is inevitable at the front end. Without such an end-to-end approach, the NPD process will waste resources on weak concepts and deliver sub-optimum products to the market. Product innovation must be guided by a clear stage gate process with an objective Go/No go at all the stage gates, especially, of course in the ‘Fuzzy Front’ end. Few companies are good at biting the bullet and stopping unpromising projects early on. But these processes have tendency to become more onerous with time as extra checks are inserted every time a problem occurs. This can become a bureaucratic nightmare. Beware of making the process any more formal than is absolutely necessary.
Reduce development time and team size. A major proportion of development cost is engineering hours – and this is a function of team size and project duration. So short development times and small teams have many benefits. Small teams are easier to coordinate, require less project management time and thus are able to make faster decisions. Shorter development cycles are less likely to require specification ‘resets’ due to competitive product announcements, new technologies, regulatory changes or delays from resource shortages. Frankly long development cycles and large teams generate waste in lost time, rework and non-value-adding coordination. Philosophies such as ‘Lean Startup’ (see the book by Eric Reis of the same name) support fast development time as this enables products to get to market faster and then user-based learning can start. So the mantra ‘keep it short and keep it small’ should be the guide for product development.

Figure 2: A system for innovation within an organisation

Employ platform thinking. This approach supports fast development time by introducing modular thinking into product design, to create a platform-based architecture. Thus new products become a mix of existing, evolved and new modules – for example a new mobile phone may have the same casing and screen, but updated processor, camera and new version of the operating system. This approach reduces development cost and risk and enables innovation to be focused on the new platform modules (rather than unnecessary re-invention). Platform thinking is well established in sectors such as automotive with cars such as the Volkswagen Golf and Audi A3 sharing much of the floorpan and chassis. Our innovation journey study showed that the separation of technology and product development (which is a key aspect of platform thinking) and the re-use of design or technology elements in new products were both top ten practices for correlation with overall innovation performance.
Ensure development proven practices are deployed. There are some proven practices for the design of new products such as documented user requirements – to provide a firm base for specification, QFD (Quality Function Deployment) – to build a functional specification that is aligned with user requirements, FMEA (Failure Mode Effect Analysis) – to identify potential design weaknesses, Design Peer Reviews – to provide an independent ‘fresh view’ on a design before it is frozen and Post Project reviews – to capture lessons learned and required improvements to working methods. These good practices are well known, so it can be surprising how poorly these are in place in product development teams. We have been in firms where these practices have simply ‘faded away’ or only have ‘lip service’ paid to them. It is the responsibility of development management to ensure that these proven development practices are in place and used effectively.
Establish an innovative culture. We have worked in product development teams where employees have said ‘We don’t have time for innovation, we’re too busy developing products’. Of course incremental product development is indeed one type of innovation. But the point is well made – employees need to have time, management support and encouragement to identify new ideas and concepts. This requires a supportive culture for innovation – a key element of the ‘climate’ for innovation within a firm. This is one of the seven key practice areas required for an effective innovation system (see Figure 2). A key aspect of an innovative culture is a clear and overt tolerance for failure when new ideas don’t work out. Of course, this is not the same as a tolerance for bad work…
Don’t overload! Management ambitions can lead to the commitment of new projects and a development roadmap that simply exceeds development capacity. The result is a climate of project slippage and postponement – which further wastes development resources in re-planning and stop-start activities. Development capacity should not be loaded more than 80% of capacity to avoid short-term overloads of some resources and also to allow personnel time to get involved in new concept exploration work, platform development or other improvements. Overloading inevitably leads to queueing, and extra inefficiency comes if engineers need to swap from project to project.
Have an effective Go/No Go to market. Stage-gate management in product development is a proven and effective way of managing cost and risk exposure. Just as cost and risk exposure significantly increase once a new product concept is accepted for development, so does cost and risk exposure increase significantly once a product is released to be taken to market as large investments in manufacturing and sales are required. This is why the decision to go/no go to market needs to involve all the key functions affected (such as marketing, sales, manufacturing and development) – it is not a decision for development management alone. Indeed marketing involvement in signoff of product release to market was the practice that had the highest correlation with high innovation performance in our innovation journey study.

Thanks to Rick Mitchell, Visiting Professor of Innovation Management at the University of Cambridge for his contribution to this article.

^*‘The Innovation Journey for technology-rich product businesses – Phase 2 – Final study report’, October 2013, Codexx Associates Ltd, The University of Exeter Business School, The University of Aalborg Business School. More information.

For further information on our innovation and product development solutions, contact us at www.codexx.com.

Tags: benchmarking, Innovation, Product development
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New Stuff

Archive for the ‘Systematic Innovation’ Category

Part 6. Starting your innovation journey

Introduction

Beginning a journey of change

1. Top down strategy

2. Emergent

3. Champion led

1. Top down strategy

2. Emergent

3. Champion led

What does experience tell us?

References and further reading

Part 5. Innovating to increase client value

Introduction

Enhancing value – introducing the value table

Examples of value enhancement

Functionality

Price

Quality

Time

Experience

Really understanding client needs

References and further reading

Part 4. Innovating to reduce process and service costs

Introduction

The importance of process innovation

References and further reading

Part 3. Establishing an effective system of innovation

Introduction

Innovation is not easy to do – especially in professional services

A system for innovation

Assessing your firm against the innovation system model

References and further reading

Part 2. Identifying innovation opportunities

Introduction

The need for focus

Your innovation dimensions

1. Product innovation

2. Process innovation

3. Market Position innovation

4. Business Model innovation

References and further reading

Part 1. Setting the scene – when business as usual is not enough

Introduction

Professional services – drivers for innovation

Let’s be clear on innovation

Institutional v Individual Innovation

Key items for management’s innovation agenda

References and further reading

About New Stuff

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