Source: The messy business of reinventing happiness: Inside Disney's radical plan to modernize its cherished theme parks | Fast Company, Austin Carr, April 2015
You should all read this lots to learn from the masters of customer service and there serious rethink of digital strategy for their parks
“Disney World was on the verge of becoming "dangerously complex and transactional.”
Disney Park Division is built for consistency and volume not change
The rest of Disney is younger, more progressive—risk takers—but [Parks] is not," explains one former high-level company leader with strong ties to NGE. "It’s built to be industrial and resilient, for consistency and volume; it’s not built for change." Arguably, the division’s core competency isn’t creativity, but turning creativity into a predictable operation.
Most large organisations have this same challenge. If they are large and run by command and control hierarchies they struggle to integrate and respond to rapid change demands.
Pushback was huge
- Yes this problem in large beaureaucratic organistaions.
As other groups within Disney learned of NGE, "the pushback was huge," one source tells me. "You had operations pushback, security and fraud pushback, creative pushback. There was never any shortage of pushback."
Uncertainty about the consequences of MyMagic+ raised the stakes—that’s what new technology does to the status quo. For example, if ticketing were to get digitized, many jobs held by traditional ticketing folks might become irrelevant.
Collaboration involved land-grabbing, finger pointing, and yelling
One source deeply enmeshed in NGE's development at the time describes Disney as a "culture that is all smiles and happiness, and everyone is going in to give you a hug. But you have no idea who is working against you. You come out bruised and bloody." A former Disney exec says there was "land-grabbing, finger-pointing, and, quite frankly, a lot of yelling in closed-door meetings." But, this source adds, "disagreement was how we were going to get to the end result."
Outside software consultancies feasted and internal IT was incensed
- The usual story
As this dynamic played out, the company turned to outside software consultancies, all feasting on Disney's resources for the project, which one partner describes as a "cash cow." (According to a knowledgeable source, Accenture billed over $100 million for its role in developing MyMagic+.) Says a leader of one of these project consultancies, 'We were basically chartered as a shadow organization [to the IT group], like a backup plan in case shit hits the fan.' [my emphasis, a popular use of external contractors.]
"It really didn’t go over well with the traditional IT org. It was like, ‘Wait, you’re going to actually have a successful launch of a project on time, on budget, as you promised? Even though our [technical] components, which were supposed to support the system, aren’t ready?’ "
User experience people are trying to keep people in the flow
"Imagineers are trying to hit that sweet spot where the technology stays 'subconscious', because he doesn’t want to see 'switching behavior'—he waves his wrist around in front of his face—'in between the human and the experience.'