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History, we’re told, doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes. In my experience, this rings just as true for business.
Most – if not all – of the challenges organisations face in the here and now would be just as recognisable to the business leaders of 20, 50, or even 100 years ago. How to do more with less. How to respond nimbly to change. How to maintain and improve customer satisfaction.
What has changed is the technology we use, and all of the attendant challenges. Increased complexity. Amplified risk. Deeper fragmentation.
But while technology offers powerful solutions, I’d argue that true progress requires something more profound: a rethink of how we operate at a strategic, cultural, and procedural level.
This is where Operational Innovation comes in. Unlike traditional digital transformation, which often focuses on implementing new technologies, Operational Innovation addresses the deeper, less visible changes that make technology work, ensuring that businesses achieve the outcomes they’re aiming for, not just technical milestones.
Drawing on real-world examples, I’ll explore how businesses can embed Operational Innovation into their DNA and unpack what it takes to balance ambition with practical execution to deliver tangible, measurable results.
At its core, every business is a collection of projects—whether it’s migrating a CRM to the cloud, implementing AI, or optimising IT infrastructure. But too often, project outcomes fall short due to poor prioritisation, unclear objectives, or misaligned execution. Operational Innovation tackles these challenges head-on, creating the conditions for long-term efficiency, cost optimisation, and sustainable growth.
One of the biggest barriers to Operational Innovation success is project misalignment. Too often, projects that hit their technical milestones—like system installations or feature launches—are considered done. But if the intended business outcome hasn’t been realised, is the project truly complete?
At Brennan, we measure success based on outcomes. For example, a systems upgrade isn’t finished until we’ve seen the data to confirm it’s delivering the promised benefits—whether that’s increased productivity, reduced downtime, or higher customer satisfaction.
But even with this outcome-driven approach, projects can still stumble without effective scope control.
A few years ago, we inherited a project that had spiralled out of control. Originally scoped as a six-month, $500,000 IT project, it had ballooned into a multi-year saga costing millions, with no clear path to completion.
The problem? Scope creep. The original project team had failed to push back on expanding requirements, neglected to document scope changes, and lost sight of the original objectives.
By the time we intervened, the project was stuck in endless User Acceptance Testing cycles, with no clear criteria for what “success” looked like.
We paused, redefined the scope, and established measurable success criteria. Within months, the application went live, and the customer finally saw the benefits they’d been waiting years for.
The lesson? Scope control isn’t about being rigid—it’s about maintaining alignment, ensuring that projects stay on track and deliver the outcomes they were designed for.
Operational Innovation doesn’t mean tackling every challenge at once. In fact, prioritisation is often the difference between success and stagnation.
We've all got 100 projects on our plate, or in our backlog. Deciding which ones to take out of the backlog and do this quarter or month is crucial.
““I keep my strategic plan close and interrogate the backlog to determine which projects will make the biggest impact on my objectives. These are the projects I prioritise.”
The only projects that trump these are those related to quality risks. For example, if a system issue affects service quality and impacts our NPS, or if customers are complaining, these go straight to the top of the list. We handle hygiene factors first and then move on to operational improvements. The same applies to cyber risks. If we find a new cyber risk, that project goes straight to the top, gets delivered, and then we move on to the strategic ones.
Not all innovation needs to be large-scale. Sometimes, the most effective improvements come from solving small but persistent problems – a process we call microinnovation.
We experienced this six or seven years ago when expiring SSL certificates were bringing down customer environments daily, with multiple outages a week. Often these SSL certificates were not acquired by us but by the customers' marketing teams. Yet the task to fix the lapsed certificates fell to us.
To address this, we undertook a microinnovation initiative. We gathered information about our customer’s SSL certificates, and then implemented a workflow to ensure expiring certificates were managed proactively. As expiration approached, we sent customers links to renew their certificates. If the certificate was not renewed a week out, out went another reminder. And if a certificate still hadn’t been renewed on the day of expiration? We renewed it on our own dime, upfront, then added the charge to the client’s regular invoice. This process reduced outages from multiples per week to virtually one or two per year.
““This wasn’t a stroke of genius, but a continuous improvement to address an ongoing issue affecting both us and our customers.”
Operational Innovation often comes from the details. Having a system to constantly take the pulse of customer satisfaction, quality, and outages allows us to group and understand issues like SSL outages. We then perform root cause analysis and develop projects to eliminate these issues.
We have hundreds of such opportunities in our queue. We prioritise which micro-innovations to tackle next based on the number of customers affected, the severity of incidents, inefficiencies caused, and other metrics. These are graded and selected from a backlog of hundreds. Each month, we address several of these issues, continually refining our operations.
One challenge we see repeatedly is what I call “dream selling” — the tendency for project proposals to focus on aspirational outcomes without a clear, practical plan for achieving them.
To avoid falling into this trap, business leaders should ask critical questions when evaluating new project proposals:
By asking these questions upfront, leaders can avoid costly detours and ensure that every project is aligned with their broader strategic goals.
Technology alone can’t deliver Operational Innovation. Success also depends on your people—and your culture.
One of the biggest barriers to innovation is human adoption. Even the best-designed tool or process will fail if employees don’t use it. We’ve seen this firsthand.
Having implemented an automated password reset process that allows customers to self-serve, it was designed to reduce the burden on our support team. But over time, we noticed that some engineers were bypassing the automation and performing manual resets instead.
Why? Because the process hadn’t been adapted to meet the requirements of new customers. As a result, usage dropped, and engineers resorted to manual methods, undoing the intended changes and benefits.
““Technology alone can’t deliver Operational Innovation. Success also depends on your people – and your culture.”
Human adoption is critical and often the last phase of most projects. Unfortunately, it is probably the least well-funded – and the most frequently descoped – from proposals.
One method to enforce adoption might be to turn off the old system or remove the engineers' ability to make manual changes. But we find a “carrot and stick approach” more persuasive, especially when paired with change champions.
And it's essential to share why the business is implementing the change and what the expected business outcome is early in the process. We're not just doing it to get a new system; we're driving towards a specific business outcome. Sharing this with everyone increases the likelihood of buy in and adoption.
Operational Innovation isn’t a one-time effort. It’s an ongoing journey. As we look ahead to the next 12–24 months, two areas stand out as critical for business leaders:
1. AI-Driven Solutions
AI is reshaping the business landscape at an unprecedented pace. Before rushing to implement AI solutions, leaders need to ask the right questions: What’s the tangible benefit? What problem are we solving? How can we implement this to achieve real value?
2. Cybersecurity
The cybersecurity threat landscape is evolving rapidly. Attack cycles are getting shorter, with vulnerabilities being exploited within days rather than months. To stay ahead, businesses must continue to fight the good fight by investing in advanced security tools, training, and processes.
At the heart of Operational Innovation is data. Once the obvious issues have been addressed, the real opportunities come from analysing the details.
For example, our CX team of 50 spends much of their time performing root cause analysis, looking for patterns in customer feedback, incident data, and performance metrics. This “true performance” process has become a cornerstone of our approach, helping us continuously refine our products and services and deliver long-term value to our customers.
Operational Innovation isn’t about chasing the latest trends—it’s about solving real problems, improving efficiency, and driving sustainable growth. By taking a pragmatic, outcome-driven approach, businesses can unlock new opportunities, adapt to change, and build a foundation for long-term success. Do that well and the rest is history.
Partner with us for reliable IT support. Contact us now and find out how we can streamline your IT needs!