At InnovX, providing a better experience is engrained in our day-to-day way of life. We have taken this simple statement and made it part of our core way of carrying ourselves, starting with our team, extending to our clients, and equally incorporating a better experience to our community.
What is a better experience and how do we define it? This is not a simple question. Much like success, talk to most people and they want to have “it”, but what does “it” mean?
A better experience for our team members
A better experience starts with our amazing team because InnovX simply would not be what it is without them. InnovX is dedicated to supporting and nurturing the individuals who are responsible for delivering top tier services, ensuring that they have the tools, time, training, and guidance from other members of our group. This enables the empowerment of the team to lead our clients through the delivery of forward-thinking consultative services.
This level of support is key for the team to know that they are safe to push the status quo and invest their brainpower into creative, innovative, and high-quality solutions for our clients. Because we believe that a better experience for our team members also requires a healthy life-work balance, we ensure that the team has time to focus on personal interests, their families, and their passions outside of the “9 to 5”. In fact, there is no “9 to 5” per se as we offer flexible work schedules to best meet everyone’s needs. To help find that balance, we have unlimited personal time off, paired with ample vacation time to give people the time necessary to unplug and recharge.
Time off is nice, but we knew that more could be done to truly provide a better experience. InnovX took this one step further by introducing the InnovX Experience Fund, something where we contribute, both financially and with additional time off. Simply put, this experience fund is in place to help our team members do something special, something that they are passionate about. Whether that is going to see a concert in a neighboring city, a hockey game with friends or family, or jumping out of a perfectly working plane, we want our team to get out, and enjoy themselves and we will do what we can to make sure these experiences become a reality.
Do the team members have at their disposal what they need to maintain balance and accomplish their day-to-day tasks in the best way possible? Are they respected? Recognized for their efforts? We constantly ask ourselves this, creating subsequent actionable items to help implement continuous improvement for the team.
A better experience for our clients
We consistently try to put ourselves in our client’s shoes, ensuring that we think about opportunities to improve their experience. We want to ensure that they receive the best services possible, and that any assumptions are mitigated. To accomplish this, we walk our clients through the applicable processes of their respective project, while maintaining our staunch advocacy for them and their needs. By following this approach and communicating in a clear and concise manner, we introduce and maintain comfort and confidence, preventing our clients from becoming overwhelmed while still meeting their project needs.
We have witnessed many projects go through phases where information is fed to the client teams at an overwhelming rate, seemingly channeled through a firehose, with the expectation that the client representatives will be able to digest and comprehend what is being thrown at them. We know this is not an approach that anyone would be excited to embark upon. We are mindful in our delivery of information, delivering it at a rate that is in line with what the client needs, while carefully communicating and managing expectations along the way. This means having open discussions, setting achievable goals, and measuring the related advancement through the life of the engagement.
We make sure to take the time to thoroughly go through journey mapping of the different types of client engagements to ensure we maintain visibility to the challenging areas, preparing our clients ahead of time. This provides our clients with a strong understanding of the project state and related dependencies, bringing the level of visibility they need to make the right decisions at the right time, all while solidifying the confidence they require to bring projects comfortably and successfully to a close.
We leverage the extensive consulting experience we have collectively acquired to drive experienced-based services, which when paired with open and proactive communication, allows for our clients to have a better experience.
“Keeping client interests at the center of our decisions is the best policy.” – Our Team
A better experience for our community
The final piece of our three-pillar approach to providing a better experience is tied to community, where community has multiple interpretations. The physical community that our business operates in, the professional community where peers in our industry reside, and the neighborhood communities where our team members live.
Collectively, we work to find suitable causes to give our time and financial support to, helping share our passion and energy with those that we are surrounded by. We have introduced paid days for our team to go out into the community and give back, from hands on help with non-profits, to active participation in fundraising drives, we strive to act positively where we live. We encourage the team to share their ideas as to where and how they think we should contribute to the community, helping find ways to act in concrete and impactful ways.
We look for ways of sharing our experiences with others to help them on their professional journeys, ensuring that the lessons we have learned are available for others to benefit from. We participate in university level academic events, mentoring and supporting future professionals, all while ensuring we listen and adapt to the ever-changing world, we live in. Better experiences are not fixed, and therefore nor should we. We strive to give consistent and authentic experiences within our community, helping where we can, when we can.
Finally, a better experience what does that mean?
Through many team discussions, we have reviewed what it is that we are striving to do as a group. We’ve decided that providing a better experience across the board, both internally with our team and externally with our clients and our community, is intrinsic to our organization. Once we agreed on what it was is we were working towards, we reviewed how we were going to achieve this goal. We had to engineer how we could leverage our collective knowledge and the available tools at hand. We also reflected on the ever-important mindset we would need to successfully deliver our vision of a better experience.
We worked on agreeing on why we were doing all of this, we asked ourselves the question, challenged each other, and came back to a simple answer, people deserve better. We have collectively lived countless projects, shared in the joy of being part of successes, and witnessed opportunities where the outcome or process could have been better. We all agreed that people deserve to have the type of experience that made those projects better. We are not naïve. We know projects can be hard and that in reality things do not always go how you want them to, however, it’s how we navigate through those experiences that allows us to separate ourselves from the pack.
At the end of it all, what does a better experience mean? Everyone will have their own interpretation but to us, it means being surrounded by wonderful peers, people that we respect and genuinely enjoy working with. It means having the flexibility and support to spend time with family and friends. It means finding the elusive life work balance that is full of stimulus, challenges, and rewards. It means building a company the way we have always felt it could be done.
Scott McGrail M.Sc. PMP
Chief Operations Officer (COO) at InnovX Solutions
Scott McGrail is a seasoned veteran in software development, implementation, and validation projects and is well-versed across multiple industries, including the regulated space that houses pharmaceutical, medical device, and cosmetic manufacturing and distribution. He is passionate about operations and process improvement, facilitating change, and empowering teams' knowledge transfer.