If you’ve never worked in a consultancy, you might wonder what it’s like to work in a project for a client company. Or perhaps you’re curious to see what it’s like to work in a Columbia Road project specifically.

In this blog, I want to give you a more detailed example of what it was like for me to be part of a project that Columbia Road did for the city of Helsinki. I’ll go through the different stages of the project, how we approached questions that needed solving, and how we implemented our solution. …

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“A purchase on the horizon, a panoply of temptation. Can a curious soul desist?”

The tall, imperious shop associate played by Fatma Mohamed delivers one of her cryptic-alluring lines as her customer (Marianne-Jean Baptiste) regards the red dress with hushed-breath fascination. The setting is a quaintly unsettling department store sometime in the 70s in England, one of those places where mannequins reveal sinister glances and the air is unmistakable with its sense of place.

In Fabric, director Peter Strickland’s darkly satirical ode to the charms and morbidity of consumerism is filled with such surreal moments but it was the department store ritual that caught my attention. The almost hypnotic effect conjured forth by a combination of atmosphere and etiquette; how the mere act of vague-minded browsing about for a dress can be constructed as an elevated experience in the retail environment. …

Sales is the backbone of any organisation. Salesforce is a tool that makes selling things easier. It’s a software-as-a-service that makes converting those sweet opportunities into leads a piece of cake! So it’s no wonder that more and more companies are choosing Salesforce as their digital sales platform. This means more and more companies are thinking “Hmm, this Salesforce seems quite useful, but we really need to have this [specific feature that doesn’t exist and will never exist in Salesforce]”.

While implementing and customising Salesforce is simpler than ever with the growing number of developer tools, creating modern and sleek experiences is still a bit of a struggle. Yes, the Lightning Web Components are very similar to React.js, but it’s not React.js. …

It’s a hard fact that digital sales are bringing in ever more revenue for most companies — either directly or as an enabler. This makes the role of IT increasingly crucial for business success. But what is the role of IT as a sales enabler in future companies? Can new ways of working make IT an active driver for digital sales instead of being just a back-office function?

To understand what kinds of challenges different types of companies are facing currently and what solutions they’ve found, we decided to have a panel discussion on the topic of IT being an enabler for digital sales. …

It is understandable that many people who are responsible for digital services want the absolute bare minimum of downtime. Why would you want anything less than perfect? If your webshop isn’t working, you aren’t making money. This is completely true — but at what cost? The most stable service is the one that never changes: it must be built perfectly at the first time of asking, and it must never change from then onwards. The business-driven among us understand that this isn’t an option; If you are sitting still, you are being left behind. So how do you balance development speed vs service stability? How do you ensure that your digital service stability isn’t a bottleneck for the rest of your business operations? …

Are you still grappling to find success in your digital sales efforts? The digitalisation of sales has of course been a hot topic for many years, but due to its surge in the past year, the subject has become even more pressing. Many companies are struggling with it, expressing that digital sales is not easily adopted in their industry. However, global players like Amazon and Alibaba have proved that there is hardly anything that cannot be sold online. This means that it is not only the digitally native companies that need to focus on digital sales to provide the ultimate customer experience. …

Your company is using a traditional, fully-featured CMS that promises to provide an all-rounded digital customer experience, but teams continuously need to work around it in order to deliver? Licensing and hosting costs are high, and in addition, you also need developers just to maintain the product and assist content creation teams? You hear complaints regarding the CMS from different parts of the organisation, saying it’s limiting capabilities in digital marketing and new service development? …

Organisations already know agile product development is the way to go, and have their DevOps team working in sprints. As design is tightly coupled with development work, even designers have design ops frameworks. But what about marketing? Sometimes it feels like marketing is the last corner of the organisation that refuses to let go of old processes.

Agile marketing in a multi-vendor environment

It is very typical that marketing is a joint effort of several specialised vendors. There is an analytics agency managing tracking and reporting, a PR agency managing press and official communications, a branding agency managing the overall look and feel, a graphic design agency creating banners and other graphic assets, a trafficking agency managing all the different marketing channels, and a separate performance marketing agency managing search engine visibility. …