Accountability: Transportation Transformation

When I started with Brightline in January '22, I incorporated a system of yearly planning that I picked up at Travel and Leisure (Plan on a Page). This one pager gives our team a collection of things we plan to accomplish throughout the year that everyone feels they and their team members are fully a part of. Everyone should be representative, and everyone should feel like they have a stake in the outcomes. This Plan on a Page is also a view into a complicated system of changes across the Brightline organization that holds my Digital and Technology teams accountable to meeting and exceeding expectations. It has many words, but what it represents is so much more than bullets on a page. It is the 30-thousand-foot view of a complicated web of proactive assaults on bad code, no process, the wrong people and partners, and technology that simply would not or could not support our guest and teammates needs if they were left untouched.

This simple, but critical step of holding ourselves accountable to delivery of better, more succinct outputs for our guests and teammates is a tool that holds us to a standard of delivery. Some of this is a starting point, some of it is super ambitious, and some we know we will nail. Overall, this collection is a guidepost that keeps us on track from a project, budget, resource, and expectations standpoint. It is our quarterly check point. It is what we will look back upon at the end of the year to determine what we celebrate, what we offer up to the gods, and what we put in front of us as '24 creeps closer and our next Plan on the Page gets penned based on what we learn from data, guest experience, and results.

In '23, since '22 enabled us to build a team, put tools in place to help clean up our process, eliminate bad partners, and get our research, design, and roadmap laid out, we are attacking the Plan on a Page in three key areas: Building Foundations where focus will be on continued strategic enhancements and continued service to our guest experiences; Enabling Scale where we will begin enabling journeys that matter most when, where, and how internal/external consumers want/need them; Maintaining, Activating, Personalizing where we will begin leveraging listening posts to continually hone strategic direction (Guest obsession front and center).

It started with my to do list of one in '22: Find Kick Ass People to GET SHIT DONE! It has evolved into a transformation for not only the technology and digital teams at Brightline Trains, but I believe a transformation for the entire organization in how we leverage people, process, data, and technology to evolve our business acumen and meet our guests where they need us to be so we can meet our business goals. With that, here is our plan on a page for '23:

BUILDING FOUNDATIONS BREAK DOWN:

FIRMING UP THE BASE: CHECK!

• Maintain: Run, fix, focus on what exists until we get to the new
• APMO: Continued development of documentation, RACIs, risk management, sustainment, KPIS, SLAs, training, and best practices around Agile/Scrum
• Open a Ticket: Continued rollout, education, and migration of all issues to JIRA (work = ticket)
• Hold Accountability: Real-time dashboard views of incidents, requests, trends, etc. against SLAs and KPIs
• Cyber Security First: Protect our guests and our teammates from outside threats
• Compliance Matters: Build applications that are usable by all guests (ADA), giving guests choice in how we manage their data, and holding ourselves and partners accountable to best practices
• Data, Data, Data: Everything that goes live, MUST have data and reporting on day one
• Budget Focused: Keep our costs down and manage projects with ROI, ROAS, and cost cutting decision making at the forefront
• Product Focused: Develop SMEs who have their fingers on pulse of partner, teammate, and guest wants/needs and how to achieve it

BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE CORE: CHECK!

• Dev Ops: Control of how we deploy, manage our digital assets, and leverage the power of the cloud
• Full Stack Dev: Owing the code
• Quality Assurance: Automated and owned
• Alerts & Monitoring: Keeping our eyes on the prize
• Infrastructure: Inventory of all assets and owning up-time, life cycle, remediation, and replacement
• Architectural Review: Evaluate impact and cost of innovative solutions/ideas before we build or buy

KEEPING IT ON THE RAILS: CHECK!

• Runbook/access on all core systems for quick triage
• 24/7 support model across enterprise
• On-call dedicated number and rotation

ENABLING SCALE BREAK DOWN:

REDEFINING CAPABILITIES: CHECK! CHECK! CHECK!

• Move off Drupal to Adobe Sites: Migrated GoBrightline.com marketing site (April) Launch MVP version of BrightlineWest.com (May) and remainder of our Gobrightline.com site will go live on July 26
• Move to Uber via IOMOB Mobility as a Service (MaaS): Two Months/Launched January
• Move to Atlassian Suite (Jira/Confluence): Ongoing Evolution
• Move to Dedicated Offshore Team: Worked Through Three Vendors to Land the Right One in Cloudtech
• Move to Starlink Satellite for Onboard Wi-Fi: Three Months/Launched April on All Trains/Ongoing Optimization
• Move to Square for Point of Sale: Two Months/Finishing in July
• Move to Adyen for Payments and Processing: Two Months/Launching on July 26 Across eCommerce and Kiosks
• Consolidation and Move to Magicinfo Across all 400+ Displays: Seven Months Due to Supply Chain Slow Down/Complete by End of August (All 6 Stations)
• Move to TendedBar for Autonomous Drink Stations (Orlando to Start)
• Movement Towards Gate-Less Parking with SP+: Aventura and Boca Launched officially in January 2023
• Move to a New Backend Ecommerce Engine with Sqills: Five Months/Launching on July 26
• From Custom Code on Log-In to OKTA CIAM (Including Workforce): Five Months/Launching on July 26
• Move to the Adobe Experience Platform (Campaign, Journey Optimizer, Real Time CDP): Three Months/Launched End of March
• Move to Customer Journey Analytics on Adobe: Two Months/Launching on July 26
• Move to Abnormal (AI) for Cyber: Launched Q1 2023
• No Test Automation to Full Test Automation Suite: Seven Months/Launching with code on July 26
• No Translations at all to Translations.com (Coming Soon): Launching Q4 2023
• Consolidation to Sharepoint/One Drive: Completing in November/Ongoing Since January on Migration/Training
• Upgrade Existing Station Turnstile Hardware and Operating Systems (MIA, WBP, FLL): Four Months Due to Supply Chain Slow Downs/Completed August 2023

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE EXPANSION + INTEGRATIONS: CHECK!

• Maintain (Keep the Lights on):  Slow new feature development, prioritize break-fixes, plan roadmap around marketing support and existing feature enhancements, respond to customer feedback (Qualtrics & Full Story)
• Design and Develop: Best-in-class experience for MVP, maintainability, ADA compliance, mobile responsiveness, and SEO
• Manage Business Continuity: Booking, Operations, Groups, Distribution, Marketing, Sales, Revenue Management, Ancillaries, more
• Pivot from Reactive to Proactive: Create framework for feature testing and personalization
• Support Expansion: Orlando preparedness (Digital and Tech installs in station and online), mobility enhancements, and onboard (wi-fi, booking, etc.)

MAINTINING, ACTIVATING, PERSONALIZING BREAK DOWN:

DIGITAL DATA PLATFORM EXPANSION: CHECK!

• Adobe Customer Journey Analytics
• Adobe Test and Target
• Adobe Real Time Customer Data Management Platform
• Full Story and Qualtrics Expansion

DIGITAL DATA ADOPTION: CHECK!

• Data Governance Framework: Implement processes and technologies that ensure data is discoverable, accessible, accurate, well-defined/understood, secure for end-users, and valuable.
• Managing Costs: Ensure data solutions are cost optimized; guard rails are in place to avoid over consumption; current technology is optimized for cost and value.
• Risk and Compliance: Adhere to best practices for industry regulations such as GDPR and CCPA
• Critical Business Support: Create framework to collect business needs, prioritize, and develop solutions that drive corporate goals
• Leverage AI and Data Science: Grow ridership and revenue, reduce impact on the environment, and understand voice of guest

ACTIVATION: CHECK! 

• POVs, POCs, & MVP+s: Moving to a more feature-oriented deployment model AFTER New web and app launch on July 26 (we’ve built the framework, but we will take this up a notch soon)
• Modeling/Segmentation: Creating data models that can feed the systems we install to create and optimize experiences (thought this one would be a year or two away)
• Test Culture: Start automating and executing a series of tests that drive results and prevent needless spend (Getting people to think differently about how we learn and grow)
• Personalization: Platforms activate!

I have asked a lot of my team this year. I have pushed them harder than I have ever pushed a team. They responded with a positive attitude, a desire to win, and an unbelievable devotion to getting shit done. We keep chopping wood. We keep knocking one tree down at a time. We always keep an eye on the forest through those trees. I am proud to be the leader of this organization. I am proud to represent their work here. I am excited to celebrate them on July 26!

HERE'S THEIR CONCEPTING JOURNEY: