Keys to success for new Private Blockchain consulting opportunities

Designing a new private Blockchain solution for enterprises can be very challenging. I had the pleasure of attempting this multiple times, from inception of new ideas to the delivery of Lygon — Blockchain bank guarantees. I wanted to share some of the lessons I had learnt on what had seemed to have worked or did not work.

The goal for private Blockchain is to build a trusted, private and secure way to share information between organisations, which often requires going through a difficult process of transformation of an existing process and way of doing things and to challenge the status qui. There could be a lot of resistance in the organisation, lack of motivation to change or difficulty with collecting sufficient information to understand the range of the problem to apply a solution to it.

The journey taken to evolve a Blockchain use case is critical for its success. I found that there’s a few key recipes that contribute greatly.

Design thinking workshops

Design thinking workshop is a great way to bring everyone together into the same room, problem solve and create. Connecting the gaps across knowledge and decision making that are spread across multiple people in different departments and organisations in separate individual sessions can take months, and in my experience I had found myself running in circles trying, depending on the complexity of the problem it could be nearly impossible.

Also when discussing the ‘art of the possible’ there is tendency to push back and default to ‘no’ or ‘it’s impossible’ without setting the right context and sufficient authority and knowledge to challenge it.

Politics may come into play and then things really drift sideways where the conversations become unproductive.

“Consulting is, in its very nature, the ability to introduce new ideas with perspective.”

A good design thinking workshop can cut through all of that and become an incredibly productive use of time and a lot of fun. I try to bring all the right people in a room. Using a design thinking led approach brings knowledge (business, operational and technical), decision making and creativity together. I start with setting a base level understanding of the existing state, using stickies to map the process and visually represent it. I then identify and highlight critical points in the process that can be changed, or design a new process and compare. Sometimes this exercise may take several sessions.

My recent workshop was with about 30 people (engineers, designers and executives) and ran in person, both remote and in person have different challenges, I won’t go too much into the difference, but I suggest and prefer in person, unless logistically it is easier to do so remotely. Running the workshop is an art that requires excellent facilitators. In our case it required multiple facilitators, who are all highly experienced excellent facilitators, great listeners, capturing information, critical thinking and results driven.

Normally the first workshop there’s a lot of giving on the client side, and less contribution on the consulting side. That is okay, I normally explain that to set the expectation early that we don’t necessarily have to leave the room with a solution. If the workshop runs long enough, solutions or approaches may be discussed, otherwise it’s more likely after the first workshop to come out with offline actions to continue work and get back together at a later stage. A well facilitated workshop is pivotal in client sentiment and can earn trust, which is very useful along the journey of innovation.

Qualify Blockchain

Private Blockchain is like a shared immutable database (aka distributed decentralised ledger), highly resilient and cryptographically secure, that can be managed by multiple organisations by invite only.

I think the Blockchain buzz has faded and organisations are not running to pick up Blockchain projects or opportunities for the sake of saying that they are innovating with the latest technology trends. That I believe is a good thing, because I don’t want to invest and build in to something that doesn’t make sense.

A few qualifying Blockchain question that come to mind as I explore and qualify Blockchain opportunities. It requires looking at both technology and business. I think it doesn’t have to hit all the marks, but it still has to make sense because it cannot be achieved without Blockchain, or it requires vision to see how it can grow into using the technology and benefiting from it.

• Organisations — will only 1 or many organisations host and manage a node? therefore is there shared ownership of this platform?
• Governance — how do you reach an agreement to apply new policies? will this be a new entity?
• Trust — is there an issue of trust between organisations?
• Data — where does data come from? and is there more than 1 organisation that contributes
• Immutability — is there a risk of data being manipulated? (is there ever? 🙂 )
• Double spend problem — how does it affect it?
• Smart contracts / programmable transactions — how could it be used?
• Data privacy — what could data privacy look like between users and organisations vs resiliency?
• Decentralised — what does resiliency look like? does increased resiliency add value?
• Immutable database — can this be solved with a simple immutable database?
• Public / Private Blockchain — can this be hosted on Public Blockchain?
• Complexity — does it need to be Blockchain now to produce the same value? or can it be migrated to Blockchain later when the ecosystem is there and ready for it to move quicker?
• Future proofing — will it grow into using more of the Blockchain features?

Agile project management

Agile is a project management approach popular with software development that allows to continuously respond to change. It allows us to accelerate by repeatedly measure progress, success and pivot quickly if necessary. It is loose on time estimation which most of us are incredibly bad at.

Blockchain projects are big, complex and expensive, and even building a PoC can take a significant amount of effort. When starting the project the team may not even be certain what the end result or success criteria could look like, and so it allows to take a dynamic approach to asses throughout the journey if the delivery is on track or not. A traditional waterfall project for comparison, would have required to continue to invest more time to define and plan, but slow pace may kill a project for many reasons, for example missed budget, lost momentum or loss of interest.

Cadences, such as stand-ups, planning and retro, are important to continue to connect with the team and stakeholders. I like having management included to ensure decisions can be made quickly with no delays and to avoid to any surprises of a building a white elephant.

Once again, the cadences is another opportunity to build chemistry and trust with the team, client.

Hopefully the team had gone on the journey in ideation and have a good understanding of our goals and what we set out to do, to use critical thinking in repeatedly measuring and setting accurate success criteria.

In our discussions and cadences we may ask:

• Are we on track with our goals and success criteria?
• Is what we are doing meaningful?
• Can we do less? What would a lean approach look like? Anything we can deprioritise and park for now? — MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
• Do we need to do more? If we did more, will it change the outcome? — MLP (Minimum Loveable Product)
• How will I share what I have been doing (team and/or client)? How am I documenting and archiving?
• Is there anything we should stop doing?
• Have we learnt anything new that requires adjustment to priorities?
• etc

Reason to act

Reason to act becomes complex when dealing with many people and organisations. A few examples:

• An organisation that finds its product market fit has a reduced desire to take risks and it is designed to keep the direction of business steady.
• Funding or competing priorities.
• The complexity and challenge is significant, and requires motivation to solve the puzzle or get through the hurdles.
• etc

The value built in the new process has to be greater than the risk taken and the effort required to implement it, to drive sufficient reason to act.

Once we define the value, our goal should be to communicate it in the best most efficient and effective way.

Buy-in and ownership from the client is the true measurement of NPS. Jocko Willink talks about leadership credits. A leader that uses his authority to make decisions uses his leadership credits, instead of allowing the team to suggest and unless there is anything terribly wrong with it, then you go with the team’s idea. In today’s age, smart people don’t like to be told what to do, and clients don’t like to be sold. Allowing the team to contribute and feel ownership then helps drive it forward.

Information that is provided alongside our MVP or PoC is as important, as the technical asset itself. I believe our decks should be beautifully designed and communicate the right messages. It is an art and an experience that is carefully designed.

I often see design templates being misused, and even beautifully designed slides may not communicate messages effectively. This is something that in the big consulting firms like McKinsey treat like a religion. They are so strict with design principles, layout and how to craft the messages. They may even test their consultants to ensure they learn PowerPoint hotkeys to produce slides using keyboard (without the mouse), to ensure they create them at record speed.

Good communication in different mediums is I believe an investment to culture, and it comes from the belief that ideas are worth effectively communicating to others about, documenting and archiving.

Summary

For conclusion inclusivity, agility and creativity are all essential when qualifying private blockchain opportunities. I found the challenge to make it more fun and interesting for me. I hope the above is helpful when exploring new opportunities and help make it a success.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any interesting complex challenges that you’d like to explore if Blockchain is suitable, test and develop innovative ideas with design thinking or build a culture towards innovation and business building. I welcome your questions and comments.

Thank you to the amazing team that had supported the engagement.

• Designers: Leon Gouletsas, Jeff Ginsburg.
• Engineers: Nick Merrett, Wilson Wang, Tony Kha, Sam Paisley.
• Architects: Iwan Winoto, Craig Spiteri, Rohit Nikhal.
• and to the other IBMers involved.

Many thanks to Matthew Goes for the help with writing and editing.