Cloudwerx Commercial Director Andy Pattinson understands more than most the correlation between a healthy culture and commercial success in today’s dynamic business world. But it’s the lessons of yesterday that helped him arrive where he is now.

While much has changed since Andy and Toby Wilcock (CEO Cloudwerx) first met at a tech services start-up over a decade ago, one thing has remained constant: the importance of fostering a good company culture.

“Culture is the sum of who we are, not just what we do,” says Andy. “And maintaining that culture is important as Cloudwerx continues to develop.”

We’re not just talking about an active social committee or a fun Christmas party here — good culture drives everything from technical processes through to stakeholder engagement and project outcomes.

The challenge though is to effectively transform sentiment into real-world applications. It’s almost like a philosophy in practice, and once you’ve cracked the code, everything else falls into place.

So, how did we do it?

Improve. Integrate. Automate.

Right from the outset we knew we had to do things differently. While global systems integrators (GSI) are large and cumbersome to do business with, we’ve focused on being lean and nimble. We placed a premium on collaboration and delivering a level of service that the big GSIs just can’t match..

We built our offering around the three pillars of people, process, and technology and have used this foundation to consistently deliver the best outcomes for our customers ever since. 

Looking at this through another lens, from our customers perspective, Improve, Integrate, Automate are the three actions that taken together ensure tangible benefits are delivered quickly for our customers.

Applying the philosophy

It’s one thing to live by a philosophy, but it’s an entirely different thing to kick it into action.

That’s why we chose our premier tech partners to make it happen. In practice, Salesforce allows us to improve processes, Mulesoft covers the integration and connectivity and UiPath enables us to automate everything else. 

Our recent partnership with Australia’s leading NDIS plan manager, My Plan Manager (MPM), was the personification of improve, integrate, automate. The systems implemented saved thousands of hours internally, improved data capture and conversion, and delivered a more seamless experience for their clients.

“We found efficiencies through automation that gave over 5000 hours per year back to MPM. It’s hard to quantify how valuable that is for an organisation, both now and into the future.” 

“Think about all those hours being put to better use on value add activities rather than repetitive error prone tasks that don’t need human intervention, this is just the beginning” Andy points out.

And at the genesis of it all was to improve, integrate, automate.

The right kind of growth

If we distill it down further, much of what we do is based around servicing growth. 

“Think of this way — businesses are essentially a set of interconnected processes, and all businesses want to grow. But they need to service this growth in a way that works best for them,” says Andy.  

It’s also about coming in at the right time and adapting or automating systems to match the growth. 

“The rule of 3 or 10 is a good one,” says Andy.

That’s the theory from Hiroshi Mikitani, the CEO of Japenese retailer Rakuten, that everything changes at roughly every third or tenth step. When you go from one person to three people it’s different. But when you reach 10 it’s going to change again, the same with 30, and the same when you reach 100. 

Having the knowledge to manage that growth across your departments be it payroll, accounting, customer support or others is where improve, integrate, automate really proves its worth.

Big picture thinking, boutique service

No two projects are ever the same, so we never paint our customers into a corner. We trade off of our agility, clarity and communication to uncover new directions, not predetermined outcomes. 

“Projects don’t have to be long and drawn out. Sometimes it’s simple when you know where to start,” claims Andy. “Automation projects can be implemented in a matter of weeks.”

The world of business and technical services projects can be a complex beast, but if you take a step back and look at the bigger picture, you’ll know where to look for the patterns that will emerge to fill in the blanks. 

The vision from leaders like Andy Pattinson is pivotal in guiding our customers and their projects through culture-driven digital transformation. 

And what’s more, it ensures our culture continues to grow in the right direction well into the future.