Adapting customer workflows to unleash greater creativity — Jan Tore Bugge

Jan Tore’s working life started in the hotel and leisure industry. He found the daily interaction with a wide variety of people to be a delight; helping others to make the right choices, to get the most out of what they wanted to do, and creating memorable outcomes.

Meanwhile, he had always had a deep interest in technology, and was an avid early adopter of the next ‘big thing’. Then he found the ideal route to combining his social and technical skills by taking on a sales role at Symetri.

“As soon as I arrived at Symetri I knew I was in the right place”, says Jan Tore. “The sense of team spirit, the high levels of energy in the company, and the sheer wealth of technical knowledge across the team, all attracted me like a magnet”.

Always ask ‘What if?’

Jan Tore grew quickly through several skills levels and roles. He became involved in Key Account management and increasingly worked with third-party vendors for software integrations addressing specific customer requirements. In 2016, Jan Tore joined the Symetri Technology team and became involved in Symetri’s deployment of the SAFe Development Platform, reducing product release lead times.

“This was a time of truly accelerated change for Symetri. We were able to help customers faster. In the AEC industry, being able to move quickly is very important, given the rapid digital transformation constantly underway in the sector.

My big focus is on Naviate. It’s great to be able to get it up and running for customers in a short space of time. It can be frustrating for a customer when they make a decision to change something and then have to wait for ages for the solution to be in place”.

Jan Tore says that the sense of community and shared commitment to customer success at Symetri comes alive by everybody on the team being encouraged to think about, and have ideas about, informed choices for customers:

“We are always asking “What if? What if the customer could improve this workflow by doing this? What if we could save customers more time? What if we could automate the tasks most common to every workflow, to free designers and architects up to devote their talents more single-mindedly to creative thinking, rather than process handling?”

Loving software

Jan Tore is not only a Naviate ambassador, he is a personal fan of the software. He has it installed on his own machine; regularly looking at its functionality with fresh eyes. “I’m not alone in Symetri in believing that the only way to gain new insights into where we can go next with our software is to view it as if I were a customer.

So, I ask myself: Can this aspect of the functionality be done better? Can this link to this? Is the UI really as simple as it can be? I use it, I test it, I love it”.

The Symetri team depends on Jan Tore to interpret customer challenges so they know where best to focus their own talents. Customers depend on him to understand their workflows in-depth and to deliver smarter ways of streamlining them. Jan Tore depends on the Symetri development team to find the pathways through to improved customer processes. It’s a circular three-way partnership which carries on getting stronger.

The ideas keep on coming

“After two decades of being with Symetri, that feeling that there’s always a fresh challenge just around the corner never goes away. What’s even more exciting is that our collective ability to create the fresh approach to, and solution for, each new challenge is what constantly defines the value we bring as a team to our customers.

This is not a ‘top-down’ culture, where instructions come from on high and everybody has to respond; it’s an inclusive culture. We’re all equals.

Across the organisation structure, everyone joins in, and I feel that this is one of the gems in our working ethos. We’re all in this together. We’re all growing together. We’re all aware that the ultimate judge of our value is when our solutions bring smarter ways of working to our customers. I’m happy to say, they always do”.