Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance and we are getting deep into. The individual trends that all came out of our trends report. This is the third trend, and it's all about the single source of truth. And for those of you who are new to the world of a single source of truth idea, it's essential.

It's really simple. It's essentially. One place one destination, which has all the information for a product. Be it tech, the it design be the business rules that drive it. It's all there in one place. Now we might often use tools like confluence and JIRA, or maybe Simplicit, it might be like a [00:01:00] great, uh, Word document that has everything in it doesn't have to be too flashy.

It can be quite simple, but if you're working in a larger product organization, you'll find the need to have pretty robust tool as a single source of truth. And what we've discovered is that, Hey, This single source of truth idea is essential to get everybody on the same page, but it's actually comes with a few challenges.

So the fun really starts when you start not only getting people to the two, but then you start asking questions about what they find. There is everything they need to go on with their project. Is it there? Is it adequate in order for them to be autonomous? And the answer is it's red, that the entire package is delivered.

So let's dive into the world of a single source of truth. It was quite interesting, uh, for this part of the report, it was a very strong message. [00:02:00] We asked over a hundred product and business experts around the world, which of the following activities is the most challenging for your business when trying to produce work with teammates.

So right now we're in that sort of producing mode, not so much learning, it's more about the producing. We've got to make a thing. And what was really interesting is. We asked all sorts of, uh, different, uh, activities to right. The one that was the easiest is making an inventory of the worker to be done. So, you know, you've got your to do you know what your individual role is now interesting when you compare how big an issue, finding the critical information for a product or a new service?

A single source of truth said different. This was over 30% of respondents. Nominated. This is the hardest thing about producing work. It is more than double the next option and it is I'm looking at it right now. And I [00:03:00] think it's like 10 times, uh, an issue than that, of making an inventory. So this is a big issue, so let's, let's break it down.

And then there's, there's really two key concepts. We discovered the report that make up this single source of truth idea. The first of which, now it's again saying sound insanely easy, and you got to be thinking, Mike, that's so simple, but actually it's not. And I've got a reason why the first concept is access to this single source of truth.

The problem with the access thing is a lot of organizations have geared if they have a single source of truth. They've gained their access to everyone being in the office. So here's the thing. A lot more people are working from home and significantly we've found. And it would suggest in the data that I think it is unlikely to go back to five days a week in the office.

I think everybody has found the flexibility and the time-saving quite good. That being said, I think everybody does [00:04:00] want to have a little bit more social interaction. So it's not going to be five days a week from home, but it's certainly going to be a hard hybrid way of working. So access is actually a little bit harder.

It might be simply the VAP VPN can't handle the load of users, or maybe it's that the product is, is geared for our local area network, whatever the issue is. Access to the single source of truth is actually really fundamentally important. So making a work from home, mobile friendly access to your single source of truth, I mean, that is your to-do list already.

And we haven't even got to the big, the big bit yet. Okay. So that's access. But as I said earlier, that the fun and games kind of really start to happen here. When we think about the idea of quality. And when you think of a single source of truth, the quality of it is really judged by whether [00:05:00] someone can go to your internet, your, your JIRA, your confluence, your Google docs, and can they find all the information there?

So a good test is if somebody is working from home and let's say, it's an unusual time, let's say it's, I don't know, six in the morning, and they're already standing to work. We know the thing is. A great single source of truth, right. With all the critical information would be. So well-managed that, that person could good.

Come on at six in the morning. They're a little espresso coffee next to them. Yeah. They could log in and find all the information they need to continue with their work. That's good. Here's what's bad. Let's assume they got access, but they get there and. Not everything has been saved to the repository. Not everything is in the single source of truth.

So what do they do? The crime of all crimes? They send an email. Yeah. They send an email. And the problem with that is, first of all, it creates more [00:06:00] email traffic to, they can't continue with their work. And three, what could have been posted once properly to the single source of the truth now? In the future, this person is emailing and sending it to all sorts of different people.

But then what happens is if you ask about the quality of this, what happens when there's version control, and then they forget to share the updated version with everyone via email, and you can start to see how things unravel. Pretty quickly when we talk about single source of truth. So my strong advice to you, what we learned is that it really comes down to attention to not only the access, but the quality of your single source of truth.

We have a saying, um, in our company at quad tense, then if it's not in the single source of truth, then it didn't happen. So if it's not there, if it's not self-service, then it doesn't exist. And it's really takes a lot of time to [00:07:00] get people into that space, but we must as a rule live and die by that single source of truth.

Great access, great quality. And you might be thinking, Oh geez, Mike, it sounds like a lot of work or the good news is I've given, I'm able to give you some incentive. And that incentive comes in the form of, we found out from some of the successful projects, uh, from some of the respondents to our survey, is that there's some things you can do.

And there's some, um, most important thing is that when you have great access and quality to a single source of truth, two things happen. One. You're able to provide a better customer experience. And number two, your employees behave with more autonomy. They take more ownership, they feel empowered. They have the information that they need.

To continue their work. So let's [00:08:00] unpack each of these better customer experience. We found that BCI ouster, one of the leading banks in Romania were able to give better advisory advice to their customers because no matter what touchpoint. They engage with the customer, no matter who had that engagement, they have centralized a single source of truth for all customer experience.

So you can avoid that terrible situation where you talk to the bank yesterday, you call them back the next day you talk to a different person and you h...