Service Excellence in the Age of Distance
Change is something you can't stop; sometimes that just happens right in front of your nose, at a speed that you would never be able to anticipate. When I joined DXC Technology in 2020, the gears were already moving fast. A new virus had been reported in Wuhan, China, the previous Christmas, and cases began spreading to other countries. On January 30, the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. By March, cases and deaths had increased rapidly across multiple continents, disrupting industries, supply chains, and daily life. For me, what was a new start in February began as a promising new role but quickly turned into something very challenging.
My role required me to wear three hats at once. In the first capacity, I was a Global Service Excellence Lead, tasked with training colleagues, coaching teams, and driving projects through the Lean Six Sigma DMAIC framework, work I had done a few years earlier at Credit Suisse. I was also asked to act as a Solutions Manager, helping design and deliver the right technology solution to solve a customer's or company's problem. Half of my time was spent partnering with developers, architects, and account managers to build practical automation using optical character recognition and machine learning in cloud environments. The goal for our customers was simple but powerful: to extract data from invoices and feed it directly into customers' enterprise resource planning software.
My third hat was one seriously impacted by the new looming pandemic. Local leadership in Poland asked me to reignite employee engagement, which had dropped year after year since HP employees were relocated to a new company that spun off, called DXC Technology. I was tasked with resurrecting from flames a program reduced to ashes and revamping something that had all but disappeared as a corporate initiative.
On paper, these roles overlapped neatly. In practice, they revealed the complexity of operating in a pandemic, with colleagues working remotely, cautious clients unsure what to expect, and projects requiring radical collaboration to find new ways to work entirely online.
As Service Excellence Lead, I returned to familiar ground. Both Lean and Six Sigma tools had to solve problems with statistical methods that had shaped my professional experience at Hewlett-Packard and Credit Suisse. The structured approach of DMAIC entails five stages where practitioners learn how to Define the problem, measure the defects, Analyze the pain points identified, and focus on root causes to Improve and Control outcomes. That approach had a lot to offer across industries, but in 202,0 the challenge was different. The problem wasn't lack of methodology; it was the fatigue, isolation, and uncertainty gripping teams. That's when I turned to Design Thinking and Agile.
People needed more than process to work well; they needed motivation. Workshops once held in conference rooms were now virtual sessions, and coaching required not only technical skill but also empathy, patience, and creativity in digital facilitation. Any given event on Microsoft Teams lacked the energy of sticky notes on a wall, but by experimenting with digital whiteboards, virtual breakout rooms, and gamified participation, we made progress. Slowly, Service Excellence found new life, proving that structured improvement could survive and even thrive under unprecedented constraints.
Automating Intelligence
The second part of my mandate brought me directly into the emerging field of intelligent automation. I worked closely with developers and architects to design an OCR-based pipeline within our Azure tenant. Speaking in plain language, DXC Technology had to ingest digitized invoices, train models to recognize variations in format and language, and use machine learning to capture essential data points such as vendor name, invoice number, amounts, and due dates. These outputs were then integrated into client ERP systems through automated workflows. Using AI was a game-changer; over time, the supervised training models would bring differentiation and help to do things faster.
Underneath, what seemed like a technical problem of digitizing invoices was really a transformation of mindset, process, and intelligence. Each invoice was a story of exceptions, edge cases, and inconsistencies at the start of the process. Model training became an exercise in continuous learning because the more data and samples fed into the system, the better it became at handling anomalies. This mirrors human intelligence, where our own experience often refines judgment. In the end, the automation pipeline not only could reduce errors and cycle times but also gave people who were processing invoices manually the time to focus on higher-value analysis.
For me, this was a revelation, first of all because Service Excellence had traditionally relied on statistical analysis and human-driven process optimization. Second, by embedding technology with machine learning into workflows, we started building systems that could adapt and improve on their own, far faster and with fewer errors. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was essentially the moment when companies began using software "robots" to automate repetitive office tasks, and two decades later, this gained enhanced capabilities through companies like Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath, which found new ways to use cloud environments.
Reigniting Global Service Excellence
The third part of my role was narrowed down to reigniting a Global Service Excellence program. That was probably the most challenging thing, since the program had become dormant and HP's spin-off effectively put the program on standby. After interviewing employees, they told me this was a cultural problem caused by constantly shifting corporate priorities, and it was actually because of this curious scenario that they couldn't possibly care less. Before COVID-19, I went to the office and found a friend sitting at the same desk, telling the same jokes and drinking from his HP-branded mug like time had not passed at all. The pandemic created an unexpected opportunity to make people finally understand that since 2017, they had been working for a new company called DXC Technology, not HP. Through the use of empathy maps and several interviews, I found that employees had gone through a lot during the transition and were hungry for something real, structured, and developed in a world where boundaries between work and home were blurred.
Enabling online training with digital badges offers visible, portable recognition of skills gained, projects completed, and contributions made. With support from teams in India and England, we gamified learning in a way that appealed to employees navigating the monotony of lockdown. Instead of attending training out of obligation, people pursued badges as milestones of achievement, proudly displaying them on their corporate profiles. That was just a start, but it ignited a behavioral change.
Participation became higher, projects multiplied, and conversations regained energy. I loved the fact that employees who had been nearly forgotten were driving a global movement once again, powered by recognition and the desire for meaningful progress during a time of rapid changes.
Lessons from a Pandemic Experiment
Turns out that resilience is multi-dimensional, so for instance Lean Six Sigma, Design Thinking, and Agile gave us frameworks and a structured way to understand and analyze problems, AI gave employees adaptability, and digital badges gave them motivation. Together, those were elements creating resilience in the face of disruption.
Technology amplifies the outputs of processes that are maintained by people. However, recognition is what drives engagement, and that's something you can rely on in times of crisis. People crave acknowledgement, and although a great deal of change management was applied, digital badges became more than symbols; they were anchors of new communities and a human-centric approach.
Leadership requires reinvention. My job description didn't change for two decades, but the titles I had did, adapting to different organizations and needs. For me, it felt like I took on more facilitation, more empathy, and more experimentation, with rewarding results.
The entire experience also highlighted a broader truth, perhaps that digital transformation is not only about tools and platforms. It is about aligning people, processes, and both human and artificial intelligence, in ways that create resilience. And guess what, you can't do this if leadership doesn't actually care about the people they serve.
The Capabilities That Define the Future
The pandemic made intelligence the defining capability of modern organizations. Human intelligence had to adapt under extreme uncertainty, and at the same ttimee artificial intelligence advanced with tools like Blue Prism for robotic process automation and cloud-native machine learning platforms,ms accelerating adoption. These capabilitipointted toward a future where continuous improvement and artificial intelligence converge, to a new era where learning, adapting, and improving are shared between humans and machines.
This was not the smoothest period of my career; it was excruciating, challenging, and sometimes overwhelming. Masks and lockdowns didn't exactly help. We have all been shaped by circumstances beyond anyone's control, a period of profound growth. Igniting once again our Service Excellence during COVID-19 showed me that intelligence is resilient, adaptive, and collective, and would define the next chapter of digital transformation.