Case Study
Communications
Marlink, a global satellite communications company with 1500 employees globally, had just been purchased by private equity firm, Providence and was embarking on a series of transformations and investments that encompassed the entire company, and multiple different business divisions. As the most significant investment in the history of the company and one that they had to get right in the planning stage, as there would not have been time to course correct.
Like most firms purchased by private equity, there is a high level of excitement and expectation; Marlink was no expectation. Marlink Programme Team, led by Jane Logie, needed to find a way of prioritising the proposed items on the change roadmap (strategic roadmap), cutting through the noise and only focusing on what is important. Then it has to be communicated to the investors to get their approval and then something that was easy to keep them informed. Jane knew from previous experience that an over-reliance on tools like PowerPoint for something this important was far from ideal.
To drive this programme and to secure the investment needed from Providence, Erik Ceuppens, CEO, needed a clear and complete picture across the whole business so he could be fully aware of the problems, risks and issues that such a complicated business and transformation would bring. He had previously raised a concern that the information that was being presented to him was in silos, and different areas of the business were not aware of the impact their programmes would have on others. Without a clear page view of how this was joining up, Erik was concerned that the investment would not be secured or it would be spent in the wrong areas. For some time, he had been asking for more clarity on this.
While most of his executive leadership team were happy to continue with the traditional route of endless PowerPoint slides, Erik, and Jane, wanted something that could help him assimilate information quicker and, therefore, ask more pointed questions. He was finding it hard to focus on the right areas when so much information was presented at once. In deciding which initiatives would receive funding and what could be delayed the information to be presented as simply as possible but in a way that showed the interdependencies of the different programmes as nothing was operating in isolation.
Jane Logie, the Transformation Programme Manager who worked with Konexis’s sister company Konvergent, understood that Konexis could give Erik the clarity he sought through a Konexis strategic roadmap.
What drew both Jane and, ultimately, Erik to Konexis was the simplicity of the user interface. The tool’s nature forces the roadmap creators to simplify the roadmap, making decisions easier to make, as a correctly applied filtering system removes the white noise found when hundreds of items are simultaneously presented on a screen.
This was a key factor in Jane being a key sponsor in purchasing Konexis. As Jane said, “This is the first tool I have ever seen, in my career, where the CEO can see the entirety of the transformation programme from his roadmap.”
Interim CIO Mike Fox is also a fan. “I have lost count of the hours I have wasted over the years trying to put together board-level roadmaps in PowerPoint. You know you have limited opportunities to get it right, and I want to focus on the wording, numbers and overall story, not the design. Konexis takes care of that for me.
Konexis has been used in two key ways since Marlink bought it.
The first was to drive decisions and shape the consensus on initiatives were going to receive funding. Like every organisation, whether the company is 50 people or 50,000 people, there is not enough time, budget, or resources to do everything on the strategic plan. Jane and her team could load everything proposed into Konexis and then the dependency and filter system to work out what could be done and what could not be postponed. One key programme relating to data cleansing had to be given the highest level of priority due to the fact that over 10 other projects were reliant on this. Before using Konexis, this was unclear and some of the board felt he could be postponed.
When the Marlink board presented back to Providence in April 2024, they were looking to secure $30 million in funding for digital transformation across all of their core businesses. Konexis helped show how this was all linked together and helped secure this.
The second is part of the monthly pack sent out by the senior leadership team. It forms part of the presentation to Providence, as they can easily see what initiatives are going well and which are not due to the unique progress view. Like all senior decision-makers, they are not interested in what is working; they want to know where the risks and issues are, which can be highlighted instantly and drive more productive board meetings. However, as everything can still be shown (but greyed out), it is very easy to show how well the overall programme is going.
Working with Marlink, we have found that they are one of our clients who truly understand the power of publishing different versions of the data. When publishing a version to Providence, the focus is on the investment spent, progress, risk and issues. When published to the engineering team, one focuses on key technologies, integration points, product and business owners, etc. These areas are not needed for conversations with private equity. However, instead of having to create different versions, duplicating data and wasting hours, the simple cases of selecting what fields and filters you want to show for each group means that you have other versions within a few minutes for information that is focused on specific stakeholders, not a one size fits all approach. This has been made easier and more secure with single sign-on for our enterprise customers.
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