Delivering the opening keynote of this year’s ITSX (Service Desk) Summit, Alex Kantor, director of technology at Edinburgh-based fintech, Modulr, attempted to reframe aspects of leadership, drawing on his own experience to help businesses navigate through a time of change and disruption.

What are the Challenges to Service Delivery?

While there are plenty of metrics that startups and growing companies can look to when it comes to quantifying growth, revenue will always be the “north star” for companies. Kantor’s talk warns that pursuing revenue – which requires “tactical” decisions, while not a bad thing necessarily – can lead to some pitfalls.

Namely, he implores companies to be careful and “intentional” about any growing operational debt, positing that leaders should ask themselves:

“If priority is driven by revenue generators, how do you put a revenue figure on operational debt? How do you make space to be intentional and sure your team don’t drown.”

According to Kantor, it’s up to the leaders in your business to “not be the problem – it’s easy to become frustrated when delivery teams forget about ops.”

In Kantor’s experience, he laments how common it is for companies to “improve solutions that shouldn’t be there.”

He adds: “So often, we try and tweak things and what we find is that it actually exacerbates problems and makes things stickier and harder to remove instead of focusing on what you actually need to do.”

Kantor posits that before you try to change or improve a business processes, ask yourself if it’s really worth the ROI and offers a checklist to ensure any improvement is carried out effectively:

• Collate all your BAU activities.
• Measure the impact to your team (time taken to complete/risk and impact of error).
• Prioritise what you want to tackle.
• Plan some ideas for how to solve your biggest issues.
• Propose a business case for why it will improve things.
• Execute the improvement.
• Measure the impact of your improvements (“this is the important bit to gain the trust and respect needed to do more,” says Kantor).
• Repeat.

Risk & Audit – Your New Besties

From Kantor’s perspective, risk and audit teams are treated with the absolute bear minimum of engagement by many business leaders. “Just enough to get them off their backs so you can carry with what you usually do,” he says.

According to him, this is totally the wrong approach.

He says: “You can get a lot of funding by reducing risk. If you work together collaboratively, what you find is it that it brings some clarity to your roadmap, offering protection to not just you, but the entire company.”

Reflecting on his on experience at Modulr, Kantor says one of his proudest achievements at the company was using this method to change how decision-making is handled within the firm.

“Showing the evidence we had to ensure the decisions we were making were correct. What this led to was questioning the segregation of duties.

“Essentially, we put the power back in the hands of the engineers, we used tooling to show that if you follow all the compliance checks and steps and you can evidence that you’ve had many different people acting in the role of checking to make sure that everything is okay – that engineer can deploy.”

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Kantor rounds with some oft-forgot business wisdom, stating that “processes will enable your team act effectively within the bounds that they need to – intent is the key word. What is the intent behind what you’re trying to achieve?”

Kantor finishes the talk by reminding the audience of technology’s role in this process – use it to speed up the process. Too often, businesses will look at a piece of “shiny new technology” then retroactively try to find a way to use that technology to fix a problem where it isn’t necessary.

So, from Kantor’s point of view. Discipline is key – it’s the responsibility of a leader.