DTWS: Transformation starts with people at VEON

It’s not typical for digital transformation to start with the human resources (HR) organization within a company, but that’s exactly what happened at Dutch operator group VEON. At Digital Transformation World Series (DTWS) on 22 October, the company’s Group Chief People Officer, Jelena Šutić, explained how its Ukrainian operating company, Kyivstar, pioneered use of the TM Forum Digital Maturity Model (DMM) to reorganize skills and talent to meet disruption head on. This will be the subject of a more detailed case study to be published on Inform later this month. Šutić's talk was part of a session, sponsored by Hansen, called 'The art of business transformation' which is available to watch on-demand now and falls under TM Forum's The Human Factor theme.

VEON group has operations that support more than 200 million subscribers in 10 countries. In 2019, the company’s HR team recognized that culture, skills and talent are critical to “strategic-purpose planning” and can provide foundational transformation, on top of which technology and processes can also be transformed.

The team used the DMM to conduct a self-assessment of the Kyivstar operating company to discover how to close critical gaps in several areas, or as the DMM refers to them, “dimensions”.

Šutić explained that her team identified 60 leaders within Kyivstar to complete the assessment asking questions such as:

• What are the critical gaps in technology, processes and people to focus on in order to deliver on our strategy?


• Do we have the skills and competencies that are needed for the future, and if not how will we get them?


• Is the organization equipped to meet the challenges and change?

Narrowing the focus

“In order to answer all these questions, we have really looked into strategic-purpose planning as a process and tried to design it in the best way that would fit VEON and its future,” Šutić said, adding that she had wrestled with a similar challenge in her previous job.

“I came to a conclusion that we cannot really be boiling the ocean,” she said. “We needed to focus...and understand: Where do we need to change in order to get to the future that we want?”

The transformation journey includes several steps, according to Šutić, the first of which is making sure everyone knows what the external challenges are and why change is necessary.

“You need leaders on top to be role models for this change,” she said. “And then you…also need to get the enablers in the organization: If your processes are not simple enough and you don’t have internal enablers for the transformation, it’s not going to work.”

Skills are key

A critical area of focus is getting the right skills that will be needed to run the business, whether they are hired from outside the company or through identifying employees who can be trained to do something new if their role is being eliminated (reskilling) or trained to advance in an existing role (upskilling).

“In some of our locations we don’t have that luxury of having the talent available in the market, so we cannot rely only on hiring from outside,” Šutić noted.

Research from McKinsey suggests that over 50% of the workforce globally is at risk of losing their jobs to automation, while the World Economic Forum finds that 42% of skills that are required today will change substantially by 2022. This means that it is important for operators like VEON to prepare people to leave the company as well, Šutić said.

“The truth is that some jobs will disappear, and some people will not be able to be reskilled or upskilled,” she said. “The whole [reskilling and upskilling] journey is so much about learning, but also for some of our employees that might not be staying with us, it can also be about future employability.”

Seeing HR as strategic

Šutić noted that even though VEON’s transformation is being driven from the HR organization, it is critical for the entire business to buy in. She added: “I would like to quote the CEO of Kyivstar operations in Ukraine, Aleksandr Komarov, who said that at the end of this process, he never expected that something that started as an HR process could be so strategic and so much touching every part of the business.”

In this case, HR acted as “the connector” facilitating collaborative work at all levels and layers of the company, Šutić said, adding that she hopes Kyivstar' success in approaching digital transformation from the human perspective and using the DMM as a tool can inspire other VEON companies as well as other CSPs.

“I would really like this to be the inspiration for the others out there as well, because I’ve always believed that HR should be strategic.”

Watch for our full case study of the Kyivstar transformation later this month. You can watch Šutić’s DTWS presentation on demand. Not registered yet? There’s still time. Join 12,000 of your peers online through November 12. CSPs receive complimentary passes. Sign up here.