Digital And Strategic Transformation Through The Eyes Of A Project Lead
An expert in the field of digital and strategic transformation, Jason Rungassamy has a wealth of experience in delivering large-scale, end-to-end transformation projects across an array of clients and industries. He previously led initiatives, specializing in management consulting and digital strategy, consulting on IT transformation initiatives, among others.
Raised and educated in the UK, Jason joins us in Singapore, where he recently moved from London. Jason’s drive for creating unique user experiences and his motivation to reshape business models have led him to his new role as Project Management Lead at MING Labs in Singapore. But what initiatives has Jason delivered that have influenced his career? And what does he want to achieve at MING Labs?
Q: A warm welcome to the MING family, Jason. We are happy to have you on board! To start off, tell us a bit about your background and how it led to where you are now.
I studied at Brunel University London, earning my bachelor’s degree in communications. It was a social sciences-based course, with disciplines in researching culture, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and media. I have always seen myself foremost as a communicator. I thrive on client interaction and social situations, they are incredibly important within the consultancy space. I have always played into my strengths, and the course was a way of exploring and developing these characteristics. It really set the tone for what I wanted to achieve personally and professionally.
I believe we should all, as self-starters, play to our strengths to positively charge our professional life. As we should in business, design, and development.
Part of what we do in developing unique and innovative user experiences stems from who we are as individuals: drawing on who we are, what we want, and how we consume. We should leverage these parts of human thinking to develop a solution that is thoughtful and impactful.
Q: Prior to joining MING Labs, you worked in different IT consultancies in the UK in the field of strategy and transformation. Could you share more about your achievements?
I’ve worked with a wide array of clients across all sectors. My background is mainly banking and financial services, where I’ve worked with many MNC financial institutions. I started out in software development for a global healthcare company, building products managing patients’ data. I’m quite passionate about privacy, security, and protection of data. It’s certainly a current and relevant topic in today’s technological landscape. I’m a believer that the safe handling of data should be at the heart of what we do.
My journey then shifted towards consulting within Managed IT Services: infrastructure delivery, cloud computing, and system integration. Having this exposure to strategic IT transformation in smaller businesses, I quickly developed the understanding, importance, and skills of consulting from technology to business development, operations to human resources, and compliance to finance. I developed a profound appreciation for how all these areas are weaved together, how involved I was, and the importance of my role in the whole process. I was adding value on another level, and that encouraged my development and drive to succeed.
As far as consultancy goes, I have worked with smaller dynamic consultancies as well as larger top-tier consultancies. My focus within them remained in the IT space. From a project management background, my skills developed down various paths: business analysis, business development, technical project manager, and now being focused as a manager. As I have progressed through my career, I’ve developed my strategic skills and thinking, ranging from how to build up a strategy, what it means to a client, all the way to building a strategic framework. I like to think of it as a business development tool that can be used to take to the market.
Digital strategy and transformation became a big part of my work while consulting to deliver an e-commerce platform. The solution had the potential to add significant value to enhancing the client’s reach to their consumer base. I also worked with a global pharmaceutical provider, being responsible for digitizing the supply chain portfolio management. In the context of digital strategy, we worked across a set structure of pillars to deliver a thoughtful and well-executed initiative to fully understand client requirements and deliver solid digital projects.
For one of my clients, I consulted for the delivery of a marketing automation tool. The client was an MNC retailer — a slow mover struggling to digitize their offering to appease the change in consumer needs — and required our support. The aim was to achieve a similar business approach that had proved successful for other major online retailers. My main challenge was to produce something innovative and groundbreaking that would engage the customer base on a whole new level while producing something that was still in line with a client who was reluctant to change their business model too much.
When working on initiatives that are user-centric, user experience and design thinking should be the core of project initiation.
User experience should be driven by people and the technology should support that, not the other way around. I believe that’s the reason for the failing of work in the industry. Now with my team at MING, we work together to make this our sole focus, endeavoring to understand more about the people and how this paves the way for digital transformation.
Q: What was your favorite transformation project you worked on — and why?
A project I delivered in the digital e-commerce space. I really enjoyed observing the changes from performing the transformation of their digital landscape. The initial phases of assessment and conception I found really challenging and rewarding. For me, it is always about having a satisfied client where you have delivered value and optimized their business.
One key point I have always been aware of, and it was very evident here, was that the decisions around bringing in new user experiences or new technology are usually made by the team at C-level. Lacking consideration for the end users who actually use these solutions on a day-to-day basis. I think not engaging them is a hole in this overall process. I believe in the strength and engagement of the core user base: Conducting various research methods — focus groups, experiments, observations — to bolster this digital assessment. Penultimately taking the assessment to those stakeholders at C-level, presenting back what we have discovered and making them understand the current outlook of their users within their business from our recommendations. This change in approach strengthened the use case and added value to delivering the end solution.
An important aspect here was not only looking at the business as a whole but also the businesses position in the market. Engaging in consumer and technology trends, political movements, environmental changes, and social reforms. All these have high impact on business evolution.
In the field of retail, retailers are also facing the rise in awareness of environmental sustainability: Current trends and awareness in the fashion industry focus on producing organic fashion, encouraging upcycling, improving working conditions, and so forth. Looking at the market at the moment, people are a lot more educated about what’s happening in the wider world around them, and consumers are becoming more sustainably conscious about their choices and more concerned about the environment.
It’s about increasing awareness and educating people to empower the decisions they make. That’s the mindset we adopted for this assessment. Changing mindsets, shifting thinking, but also bringing another layer of education to it. Thinking about what could be done strategically utilizing technology to encourage consumption, but also what the competitors are doing to diversify their offering and make them more attractive to their consumers.
I felt like I was contributing to a change not just for the business but to how we make an impact on the wider world around us that we live in. Ultimately, we affect peoples’ lives by the choices that we make with these tools.
Ultimately, that is what I like about MING. We are creating user experiences for people, and we are conscious of the impact it has on people. We are about focusing on user needs for immediate and sustainable impact.
It’s clear in my interest with the human level of impact on this project that I saw the value. The impact it had on the greater good and how it affected the wider audience. For me personally, I enjoyed the exploration into the environmental, social aspect of the scope and furthering exploring disruptive technologies. It was a fascinating experience and a rewarding learning curve.
If you are in business, you need to be conscious about what is happening around you. Having that kind of mindset is important to achieve successful goals.
Q: Which principles are especially important when driving innovation and transformation forward? What advice would you give companies that strive to be more digital?
The best approach is to put people first and really understand the needs of your audience. Only then can you really understand the outlook and develop your design. I’ve worked within the traditional technology-first approach to support thinking, processes, and infrastructure. This for me doesn’t deliver the desired effect to understand what fits your specific audience. For example: Handing out Neon Monzo cards to unconnected pensioners probably won’t achieve your desired uptake to achieving your business goals, whereas tech-savvy mobile university students might. That’s why it’s very important to understand your audience in the first place.
It’s also essential to educate the people who are going to use the tools to be digital. This could be a new mobile app for your customers. Ask yourself: What is going to resonate with the audience to make them use it? Can it be made more user-friendly? Can onboarding and payment be simplified?
By putting yourself personally in that situation, by understanding it yourself and also educating someone — that really helps develop the mindset of going digital.
My advice would be: Try to think outside of the box, be innovative, and find that line between being bold and disruptive. Having an innovative mindset with technology requires creativity from like-minded people. MING has all of these ingredients. I’m curious to see where we’re going and how disruptive technology will evolve our work for our customers.
Q: What interests you most about MING Labs? And what are you most looking forward to?
What makes MING especially interesting for me is that we have a very diverse client base across very different markets. Our work between Europe and Asia is very different. Then if you look at Asia, for example, how we operate in Singapore vs. China is again very different. We cater to a unique audience, across geographies that span a broad array of clients. That to me is challenging and another interesting lens on what we do.
Ultimately, what we create in China, Germany, the US, or Singapore is different — but our end goal is always the same.
At this point in my career, I feel that engaging and working in the rapidly developing Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) digital market is naturally the next step. Having had exposure to the digital market so far in Europe, I have a platform to develop these skills and use what I have learned to leverage business in Singapore. I always wanted to go back to working for a smaller business, preferably a startup. Some of my best experiences and work have transpired in that setup. I’m excited to delve further into the digital strategic space in the ASEAN market. The market in Singapore is the gateway to Asia, an important growth market to be a part of, and somewhere that I am very proud to be a part of. It’s definitely challenging working in Singapore, but I have a great team and support system around me that has made the transition smooth. Working abroad has also come naturally, that's mainly down to the fact that travel is second nature to me.
As my strengths are very much in the organizational and operational space, I like to work with the design teams that have that level of experience that I can learn from. Our teams are lean, that’s the beauty of it. The fact that we are a global team but work in small entities everywhere supports our agile approach. You can learn a lot, gain great exposure quickly, and really advance yourself. It’s a great opportunity.
In Singapore, the project management function doesn’t exist at MING. I’m really looking forward to building something from the ground that is organic and works for us as a team. But also I am thinking that we can create something that we can take out to potential clients and actually use as a business proposition. The core of the business is obviously the user design and user experience, but it would be great to use project management as a service to support our work and deliver that additional layer of quality to our clients.
As a savvy individual who is keen on business development, what better way to place myself amongst the team, to propose ideas on how we engage with our clients. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how we can restructure and reshape our business model.
Q: You have helped lots of companies with their transformational efforts. How do you see the future and trends of digital transformation?
I see our needs for capacity, power, and speed growing exponentially, which will be fueled by the 5G boom. It will be really interesting to see if we are ready for that, and how we as consumers use these great powers. A large part of this is education, putting people first to understand the technology and its real value.
I expect the ability and channels for free will to change especially in those markets which haven’t had that opportunity. Curiosity and aspiration fuels growth. I also expect our personal awareness and contribution to privacy, security, and protection to overpower our need for free will. It will be interesting to see how consumers evolve in deciding how to regain power over their identities — and the access they are willing to forego to protect themselves.
Who knows, maybe Minority Report might happen!
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MING Labs is a leading digital business builder located in Berlin, Munich, New York City, Shanghai, and Singapore. We guide clients in designing their businesses for the future, ensuring they are leaders in the field of innovation.
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