Fragility to agility: Tecnotree’s historic journey

Who: Tecnotree Corporation

What: Transformed to an agile-first culture that empowers employees to innovate and deliver for customers.

How: Powered a “One-Tecnotree” initiative to ensure employee well-being, improve customer support, and create digital and emotional connections with the Tecnotree brand; introduced an internal framework for innovation, problem solving and most importantly ensured the lock-in of the customers trust in the products and services by embracing TM Forum standards while ensuring employees across tech as well as non-tech functions are TM Forum-certified

Results:

• 10 consecutive quarters of positive returns, despite pandemic’s economic disruption
• Recognized as returning the most value to shareholders on the Finnish Stock Exchange in 2020 with 131% share price growth after the pandemic’s Black Monday crash
• Named in top 80 for Diversity and Inclusivity by Financial Times among 850 companies across 16 countries in Europe
• Sustained a 30% gender inclusivity standard globally
• More than 75% of business teams are TM Forum-certified including knowledge and career certifications

Tecnotree, from Finland, has a 40-year history of serving more than 100 communications and digital service providers (CSP/DSPs) worldwide. A long-time TM Forum member, Tecnotree was the first company to achieve the TM Forum Gold Badge for Open API adoption. But 2016 was the start of a turbulent period for the company; having to defend itself against a hostile acquisition attempt, it struggled to sustain both research and development (R&D) investment and customer and employee confidence. Just as Tecnotree’s determined leadership faced these challenges and began to deliver positive results again in 2018, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Despite lockdowns and economic disruptions, however, Tecnotree remained focused on becoming an agile-first company. Their efforts clearly paid off as by 2020, Tecnotree was recognized as the top stock in terms of shareholder value by the Helsinki Stock Exchange, as well as one of its most diverse and inclusive member companies.

Staying agile in a turbulent time

Worldwide pandemic lockdowns had severe impacts across the industry, creating an atmosphere of unprecedented uncertainty. Recognizing that a recovery would require a concerted effort to rebuild confidence among prospects, customers and employees, the company’s leadership team launched a digitally connected campaign, called One-Tecnotree, to create an emotional attachment with the brand. The aim of the campaign was to enhance employee motivation as well as to bring out Tecnotree’s diverse and inclusive corporate values as the guiding principles in everything that company does. The four most important challenges that the company faced in these unprecedented times were:

• Ensuring employee wellbeing and empowerment
• Delivering outstanding customer support with zero escalations and ensuring that not a single customer relationship is lost
• Changing company culture to align customer experience goals with employee training and well-being
• Sustaining an uninterrupted focus in R&D

Focusing on core principles

• The confidence to take up new challenges
• The freedom to streamline existing operations and IT infrastructure and align them with organizational goals
• The incentives and resources to believe in these values through various initiatives

The key goal in rebranding was to a establish an organized, results-driven mindset across the company that would promote a winning spirit and culture. It aimed to encourage achievement of outstanding results in day-to-day work, but also urged employees to be futuristic by always looking for ways to cultivate innovation continuously across teams.

The campaign was rooted in four key corporate values: Futuristic, Winning, Organized, and Results-Driven, and was nicknamed #FORWard. The purpose of these four values was to establish a truly agile work culture and deliver uninterrupted, superior customer experience. The #FORWard spirit provided a guide for Tecnotree’s transformation, underpinning all initiatives and activities across the company, from customer acquisition, product innovation, engineering and delivery to managed services and support.

Futuristic: Applied principles of being visionary to the entire product ideation and creation process from inception to the delivery of a new, state-of-the-art digital stack that is cloud and mobile-native, uses low-code composable frameworks and microservices, 5G-ready and leverages TM Forum’s Open APIs across the entire digital stack.

Organized: Agile teams applied customer- and market-first principles to build adaptive, proactive, and credible solutions on the Tecnotree platform to serve multiple customer segments and markets across the globe in an Agile-first approach.

Results-driven: The entire organization committed to an empowered, accountable, and passionate work culture that empowers teams to make decisions based on customer-first principles.

Winning: Teams adopted a collaborative customer engagement approach to ensure realistic but innovative digital designs were embraced to create winning themes for customers and partners in different markets.

Employee skills training was provided across different areas including:

• TM Forum certifications (both knowledge and career certifications)
• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), training on various evolving technologies like containerized, open-source technologies
• Improving employee product knowledge on various domains
• Soft-skill training and more.

Employee engagement activities were also created to help teams feel connected across geographies. Delivery teams who were accustomed to working together in-person were now having to perform zero-touch deployment remotely from each other and from clients.

To foster a sense of team and collaboration, a set of HR and marketing-driven activities were rolled out including online wellness programs with Yoga, Zumba and doctor’s session; games, online competitions, work-from-home stories and cooking classes; and internal communications ranging from monthly company newsletters with updates, employee stories and industry news.

“These concerted efforts across our teams and organizations delivered a 360-degree transformation of our business,” says Ravichander. “This transformation includes a new, cutting-edge product stack with new DiWa (Digital Wallet) and Tecnotree Moments (B2B2X marketplace platform) solutions launched; an empowered and engaged workforce; delighted customers; and outstanding business results. Most importantly, employees applied the One-Tecnotree principles in everything they did in their daily lives to help transform the company into a truly global leader.”

TM Forum assets played key roles

TM Forum courses were instrumental in certifying 75% of Tecnotree’s business teams, including knowledge and career certified individuals. TM Forum case studies and publications have also educated teams with best practices and use cases.

Tecnotree invested in attaining Open API certifications. While the company was the first in the world to receive the TM Forum Gold badge for Open APIs, it recently earned Platinum Badge for Open APIs,

with conformance to 32 Open APIs

. “Aligning with TM Forum specifications lowers costs for our customers by enabling industry-standard integrations based on the TM Forum Open API framework,” says Ravichander.

Tecnotree’s new digital products are also TM Forum Business Process Framework (eTOM) certified, resulting in better product performance and global acceptance. Having a Business Process Framework Conformance Certification ensures that the processes Tecnotree implements are consistent with TM Forum’s globally-recognized standards and best practices.

For its new digital BSS suite, Tecnotree built an open digital architecture with a standard set of business processes from the Business Process Framework, a TM Forum Open API stack, and conformance with the TM Forum Information Framework (SID) to ensure its products are standards-driven yet still extensible for customer needs.

Producing tangible results

Within two years of its massive internal transformation, Tecnotree delivered a range of strong results that reflect improvement in many different facets of its business, such as:

• A healthy order book with new customers in expanded geographies
• Positive financial results for 10 straight quarters in challenging economicconditions
• Despite economic pressure, a more than 600% increase in market cap and share price growth sinceJan 2020
• Company won several new logos across geogprahies while deepening the engagement with existing customers
• A new cloud ready, open-source, TM Forum-compliant TecnotreeDigital BSS suite
• Awards for diversity and inclusivity from The Financial Times and Nordic Business Diversity Index
• Reduced employee attrition by nearly 50% companywide and sustained a 30% gender inclusivity standard
• Biggest R&D center of the company, in India, is certified as a “Great Place to Work”
• Tecnotree’s CEO, Padma Ravichander, is recognized as one of the top CEOs among all companies listed on the Nasdaq-Helsinki Stock Exchange

Tecnotree also heavily invested in its training program for both employees and customers as well as the future-proofing of its TM Forum-compliant technology. More than 75% of its employees were trained in TM Forum certifications and despite serving customers remotely, Tecnotree’s teams experienced no customer escalations on delivery schedules; no SLA violations on managed services; and were honored by MTN Group with its Commercial Excellence Award for 2020.

“We knew we had to chart a clear path to support our customers, nurture our employees, and prepare our business for 21st

century market realities,” said Ravichander. “Our transformative turnaround from ‘fragile to agile’ as a company has been a tremendous victory.”