Training-based mobilisations

Empowering our clients… Why our new training-based approach for Synapse mobilisations is proving to be a win-win!

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At Zinc, we see our job as not only building and providing a world leading Critical Event Management software platform, but also ensuring our clients are best placed to make it work most effectively for them. That’s why we’ve invested in our Professional Services team of highly knowledgeable project and implementation managers and our aftercare service specialists.

But alongside all this, we’ve made a big drive in the last 12 months towards what we call “training-based mobilisations” – where we step away from the ‘doing’ and place a greater emphasis on facilitating and empowering our clients to effectively “mobilise themselves”, giving them the knowledge and the tools to do so. 

Rather than our implementation team configuring the client’s workflows, notifications, and automations into the system, we show the client how this is done and then set them tasks for configuring these aspects into their instance themselves; checking-in at regular, structured points; and guiding them further as and where required.

Why do we do this?
Is it not just passing the buck?? – some might ask…

Well, firstly, research would say that doing is a better way of learning than telling and listening.
According to Duncan Collins, Zinc’s Head of Projects:

Historically, we’ve set a client’s instance up ourselves, then attempted to train the client on how to do this retrospectively. This is a little counter-productive – without that immediate need to get hands on and do something meaningful and take ownership of it, only a small proportion of the knowledge passed across in that training will be retained. This leads to there being a return to dependency on us down the line for things the client should be able to do themselves on their instance of the system.

Now, with our training-based approach, our clients are given the confidence of having “got hands on” in a meaningful way much earlier on, and are therefore far more likely to remember this for the future. It solidifies their understanding of how Synapse works and ensures they are much more familiar with it by the time it goes live in their organisation, giving an increased state of readiness and confidence from the date of launch.

This in turn leads to three things… 

1) A smoother launch – through having a naturally more thorough checking process because the client is more familiar with the system by this point and can therefore spot intricacies in the ways of working that may need small system adjustments to be made ahead of launch, rather than discovering these post launch. 

2) A quicker way of making changes and adjustments – because the client can do this themselves rather than needing Zinc team members to do it for them. 

3) Less reliance on Zinc’s aftercare support service – as this can be handled themselves, therefore reducing the ongoing costs and change request costs.

Importantly, this approach enhances ownership as well. It puts in place a ‘champion’ of the system from within the client’s business, leading to better engagement with the system across the client’s wider user base. It’s a much more powerful message if someone has an issue or a query that they voice and this can be answered quickly and easily by somebody within the business itself, than if it has to be raised externally and await a response from the system provider. If something can be addressed there and then internally, it further heightens the confidence and engagement with the system.

There is a further significant benefit to the client for adopting this approach. Doing so gives them much greater scope for seeing other use-cases for operational, automation, and efficiency-driving capabilities of Synapse within their business. Because they have a better, more granular understanding of what the system can do and the flexibility it has, they will be able to translate this into their organisation’s processes much better and identify where else the system can help their business.

According to Lloyd Bayliss, Technical Project Manager at Zinc:

A regular line I hear from my clients is “Now that I understand how the platform truly works, I can see how else we can use it!” – this leads to a much better breadth of use of the system, ultimately giving the client more value from it.

It’s been fantastic seeing how Synapse has grown and expanded within those clients that have adopted this approach and taken on the ownership in delivering it. Doing a mobilisation and launching the system for a client is great, but actually what we love most is when the client comes to us and says “I’ve just identified something else we can do through the system that would save us so much time here!” or “I’ve just built this new workflow and this means the system can now be used in this other part of our business as well!”.

A case in point has been in the City of London where Robert Kelly, Security Site Manager for Walbrook Wharf, part of the City of London Corporation’s estate that has had Synapse deployed to it, has become the internal ‘champion’ of the system.

I built the full Shift Handover process for Walbrook Wharf as a workflow in Synapse, having identified early on that this would save our team time each day as well as being a good way of generating early engagement with the platform.

Since then, I’ve gone on to build in our Planned Works process for capturing all the details of contractors coming on to site and the work that they will be doing; our Building Service/Check process to capture tasks and things that staff need to do alongside their patrols so that details can be more efficiently provided to building managers and to the end client; and our Key Logging process. The great thing is, whenever another City of London Corporation site comes on board with the platform and has processes that need digitising, I can now do this without needing to go back to Zinc.

This leads on to another key benefit of this approach – the ability to scale. Large, ‘blue chip’ organisations that use Synapse and have adopted this approach have been able to scale the application across their business extremely well. One of the largest global facilities management firms – adopted Synapse in 2023 within its security operations centre (SOC) in the UK. Now in 2024, the platform is being deployed wider across the business, according to them:

Since being assigned this objective and being empowered to take this on it’s been fantastic! Over the past 6 months I’ve been able to roll Synapse out to key contracts single-handedly myself, enabling the system to scale at pace across our operations. I no longer need to rely on Zinc’s input to help the delivery, and by combining my operational knowledge with the now ingrained understanding of Synapse, I can tailor and adjust the system to handle the strategic requirements of each contract.

So as you can see, the benefits this training-based approach and the empowerment of clients bring are significant. Of course, there are some considerations with it though. 

Firstly

The approach has to be committed to. Time will need to be allocated by the person being assigned from the client’s end, as they will have to get hands-on with the system from an early stage and carry out the tasks and actions they’ve been shown. Zinc’s implementation team will need to have time with this person – to show them how something is achieved in the system, which they then replicate and take it forward. 

There is a greater investment of time required initially in this approach. Sometimes this can lead to the mobilisation appearing to be slightly slower at the beginning. Senior management and stakeholders need to buy into this. Although it pays dividends later in the process and sets the basis for much more effective use of the system (as has been highlighted earlier in this article), if there is a very tight deadline for setting up and launching the system this approach may have to be revised in order to achieve that deadline. 

Secondly

Although this approach doesn’t require a “techie” (someone with a technical background), it will require someone who is competent enough in using software/systems, and is open minded and willing to learn.

It is also preferable to have someone who is knowledgeable enough in the organisation to be able to make decisions and judgment calls. We appreciate the highest-level decision makers are less likely to get ‘hands on’ with setting up a system, however it certainly helps if the person charged with this is able to make the more granular decisions themselves (ie. what questions should this workflow contain, how should this notification be worded, who would need to know about this incident type, etc). If the person doing the learning and configuring can make these sorts of decisions there and then when they’re faced with them, there isn’t the ‘stop-start’ situation happening – which tends to be a big hindrance to how well someone can engage with and learn something new.

Keeping these considerations in mind and planning for them in the initial project ‘kick-off’ is important and something Zinc’s implementation team covers as part of the commencement process.

As Paul Coverdale, COO, says when commenting on this delivery method:

It’s important to remember that through this approach we are not “leaving the client to it” – quite the opposite in fact. We are investing time right at the beginning of the process which would historically have come more towards the end, because we have learned that this achieves a much better foundation for the platform within that client organisation. It future-proofs it in the sense that it can be better adapted to the client’s changing requirements going forwards, and it sets up the ability for the system to scale for that client. This is a win-win for everyone involved, and it goes back to what one of Zinc’s core values is – ensuring that our clients are best placed to make Synapse work most effectively for them.

• Critical events/incidents
• Dashboards & analysis
• Infrastructure