Delivering value through IT at Village Roadshow

More is expected of a CIO these days, and it’s debatable whether that’s a change for the better or not. But according to Michael Fagan, chief transformation officer of Australian cinema and theme park company Village Roadshow, the positive change of the role is about being less focused on cost and more around value-added delivery.

Village Roadshow owns and operates, on one hand, theme parks on the Gold Coast, like Warner Brothers Movie World, SeaWorld, and Wet and Wild, among others, and on the other, cinemas in Victoria and Tasmania, where, together with its partners, it’s the largest cinema exhibitor in Australia.

Fagan has held many senior IT leadership roles for well known brands in Australia, Europe, USA and Asia. But when it comes to leadership, a key attribute of a successful modern day CIO at any organization is having a good business focus. “You need to be as comfortable in the business sphere as you are in the IT sphere,” he says. “And you’re always playing a translation role between the two worlds. I know as chief transformation officer, I also have several business functions. But whenever somebody says they need an IT system to do something, I wonder if they do. The first question is not about how do I have an IT solution, but how do I have the best solution.”

Efficiency and value are always at the center of the best solution, but getting a consensus isn’t always straightforward. So collaborating and influencing the rest of the C-suite and board to agree is another necessary skill to the role.

“In most organizations, it’s the leadership team that has the answers, but they don’t have the questions,” he says. “So they’re looking for someone to help them provide the right questions, and then help them deliver on that. Strategy is cheap but execution is expensive and difficult to do, and that’s where my role comes in because I’m able to combine playing in the supply chain role, reviewing payroll, and so on. I’m equally adept in all of those spaces looking at network transformations or cybersecurity, and I can help get value out of each one of those areas.”

But transformation can be difficult with people agitating for change on one end and people who are resistant on the other. Overcoming those challenges is a combination of culture, legacy, and communication and Fagan’s approach is ultimately to provide the tools necessary to innovate.

“By innovate, I mean doing things differently, so I always encourage the team and ask them what and how they’re doing, and have they considered a different way of delivering,” he says. “It’s also about trying to have as much diversity in hiring as well, so getting people in from different industries. We’ve created cross functional teams, resulting in collaboration and great cross pollination of ideas. And to a certain extent, a celebration of small failures. After all, if everything is going right, you’re probably not innovating or trying enough.”

Fagan recently spoke with O’Sullivan about pushing the innovation envelope, keeping the customer central, and the value of a good mentor. Here are some edited excerpts of that conversation. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On the approach to transformation: It’s about large pieces of change rather than continuous improvement, where you’re trying to get those one percenters every day. Transformation is about big breakthroughs, and today’s breakthroughs become tomorrow’s standard. So what we do is try and figure out a massive, chunky problem that can become a day-to-day, business as usual operation. Change is hard. Even good change can be tough for lots of people. There are plenty of people within organizations who are agitating for change and significant transformation. And if you appoint a chief transformation officer, and that change doesn’t happen, you risk alienating the people who want to change, as well as the people who don’t. So it’s tough. It can be a lonely role when there’s not many chief transformation officers as well. I think the main characteristic of this type of role is resilience, that you need to be able to push through roadblocks. And that’s something that can be difficult within organizations. It’s a continuous improvement roll.

On new ownership: We came under private equity ownership from BGH Capital in 2020, but we didn’t just have the need to transform, or a platform to transform. We had new owners who wanted things to run a certain way with a very short horizon for seeing significant change. So you pretty much took the P&L and went from top to bottom, and looked at every piece of the business. So we we’ve had significant personnel change. We’re a much smaller and leaner organization from a head office or central office point of view, as we’re about half the size of what we were three years ago. We’ve completely changed our partnership structure, too, so we have about 40% fewer partners we work with. So we’re much more meaningful to them and they’re more meaningful to us, and that has flow on impacts and the value we can extract from those partnerships, and what it costs us to extract that value. So the biggest thing is about speed, which is very important in a transformation role.

On delivering value: Barriers vary depending on the organization. Then you have different strategies for each company or the types of resistance you come up against. The biggest thing is actually delivering. When you start to deliver, you get a reputation for it and greater trust, particularly if it’s done quickly. Then it’s less scary. So getting people to believe in change and deliver quickly is the best thing in your toolkit. It builds goodwill with company owners, and trust with the leadership team that things can and will change. It also gives an example or a new paradigm for the people in the organization. So speed and then transparency, communication, and bringing the rest of the leadership team along for that journey. If you’re stuck sitting around debating whether there’s actually value to be had, or finding ways to extract that value, then that’s not a good place to be.

On simplifying: The concept of kill your darlings is about saying no to good ideas. You can say yes to great ideas, and there’s an infinite amount of work to do in any organization if you look at the big list of things that could be done — a list that’s bigger than what your resources can deliver on. So you need to be able to say no to certain things. That’s the concept, so you can do a smaller number of really important things. And even within organizations, there’s the Pareto rule where there’s a small number of things we do to deliver an outsize benefit. What gets in the way is all the noise that prevents us from focusing on and delivering those important things for our customers. I can think of plenty of examples like this, but in every IT team I’ve worked in the last 10 years, when I walk in, I ask what are we working on. And I’ve helped coach many different business where there are more projects than people. So it’s just not possible to deliver on all that stuff.

On leadership: One of the things I see with middle managers now or younger managers is that the biggest barriers to their success is themselves. Solving that is listening to feedback through acting on the advice you get through having strong mentoring relationships. When I was younger, a lot of my success was down to me personally doing stuff. So I look at it as a work ethic. I put in a lot of hours to get things done. But if you want to be a leader of 1,000 people, you can’t do all the work. I don’t think I really believed that when I was younger. So what I’ve learned as I’ve gone through my career is that the person who can get the best out of other people is going to be more valuable to your organization.