Andy Bird Founder & CEO of Inoapps Awarded as Most Successful CEOs of 2021 by C Level Focus

Andy Bird, CEO of Inoapps, is a strong leader who is passionate and cares about the company’s success. He is not a micromanager, but likes to understand what is happening in enough detail to support and influence decisions. His focus on cultivating people and being able to delegate has improved and matured as the company has grown. When the company started, Andy hired people who could do the job at that time. He soon realized the company was growing so quickly that it was growing faster than the people he hired could grow with it. Andy soon looked to adopt a policy of hiring someone who is, perhaps overqualified for the job they start with, but as the company maintained its growth rate, the business grew into the people rather than outgrew them.

The pandemic has changed how Inoapps delivers projects and many of the changes made necessary by social distancing and lockdowns will influence how they operate going forward. Before COVID, they never envisioned undertaking a significant project without ever meeting with the client team in person. “It seems the technical side of a project would be relatively simple to handle virtually, but one of our big growth areas is the human and psychological side of change management. How would we do the high-touch work of getting people to take responsibility for the changes required to the operations if we could not even meet them?” says Andy. “Yet, that is what we did. We won the contract to handle strategic consulting for a major Oracle Cloud implementation for a collaboration between the London Boroughs of Newham and Havering and their shared services partner oneSource.” Their contract was to ensure the people working for these two Boroughs would actively adopt the system, driving return on investment. While many Oracle Systems Integrators could handle the technical side of moving customers onto the Oracle Cloud application, Inoapps had a unique service offering to encourage user adoption, supported by a dedicated team of change management experts.

Naturally, Inoapps leveraged online collaboration tools such as Zoom, Teams, Klaxoon, and Vimeo and tapped into the concept of game-based learning with gameshow-themed engagement sessions. The gameshow format helped Inoapps share information and gauge how well customer personnel retained what they were taught while making it interesting and fun for the user to take part. The team also created cartoons reminiscent of a popular office-based comic strip to illustrate processes in an accessible fashion.

“While many Oracle systems integrators could handle the technical side of moving customers onto these solutions on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Inoapps had a unique service offering with change management supported by a dedicated team of psychologists and change management experts.”

The Inoapps team engaged 8,000 people across the joint client organization through these remote means, canvassing local government management teams, users, and line managers. “Our change team is also developing personality typing algorithms to determine the traits of how individual program participants feel, enabling us to assign them to optimal roles in a project.”

Offering value upfront

Galliford Try, a major construction contractor, ran Oracle E-Business Suite in a hosted infrastructure environment, but the system was underperforming with frequent outages. This was disruptive to the business, and they were prevented from using the more innovative features of the software. Inoapps worked with the customer to determine that it would be beneficial for Galliford Try to stay on Oracle E-Business Suite for the time being rather than move straight away to a SaaS application. Inoapps believes in providing value upfront to build rapport with its customers and performed a free six-week-long proof of concept to see what performance enhancements they could deliver by moving the on-premises application to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The benefits were seen instantly, and this proof of concept very quickly satisfied all of the customer’s success criteria. Five months later, Inoapps had successfully migrated all of Galliford Try’s environments, and they were live on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) platform—the first Oracle E-Business Suite customer in the UK running on OCI. With this new arrangement, Galliford Try was able to reduce costs by 51% versus running on-premise and improve efficiencies by 76%.

Inoapps used the transition to OCI as a stepping-stone for Galliford Try to move to Oracle SaaS. Over the last 18 months, Inoapps assisted the customer with strategic consulting, evaluating their cloud application readiness, their business case and the return on investment they could see from a move to enhanced business processes in a SaaS environment. Inoapps has recently embarked on this journey with Galliford Try to move their HCM, Payroll, ERP and construction processes into an Oracle Cloud Application.

Andy is constantly refining the Inoapps OneTeam methodology, which is built on three core pillars—People, Projects and Technology. Many aspects of this methodology are tried and tested, like the Prince2 based Project Management Methodology and the use of technological tools to support communication and improve project quality and speed. Inoapps confidently focuses more on people than its competitors, expanding this pillar by building out its strategic consulting team, staffed with changeologists with backgrounds in psychology and behavioral economics. “And we have strengthened the technology pillar by deepening our relationship with Rapid4Cloud, which provides hyperautomation solution using robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) based tools to automate the most time-consuming elements of implementing and managing an instance of Oracle Cloud Applications,” says Andy. “Technology can make projects less burdensome, faster and less risk-intensive, while freeing up people for more interesting work. Technology should serve people, not the other way around. At least that is our position at Inoapps.”

Posted in CLF | Successful CEOs Magazine 2021, Andy Bird, Founder & CEO of  Inoapps Profile