Rule 1: Leadership Vision and Commitment are key
In any large-scale transformation project, or for that matter, any transformation project, the commitment of the leadership plays an important role in how the project finally pans out. Leadership matters as much in a transformation project as in day-to-day activities. Leaders cannot just delegate the transformation project to a program team and expect results. In my opinion, these projects need executive support in three different forms:
- Access & Attention: Everyone in the team or organization needs to see that the executives are paying attention to the project. They are actively following up on the progress being made on the project. They include these in their regular updates and business reviews.
- Budget & Belief: It is not enough to just pay attention, leaders also need to ensure that the team has enough budgets (money, resources) to be able to continue their work on the transformation projects. When it comes to digital transformation projects, it requires them to believe that these projects have transformative potential and invest in their beliefs.
- Communication & Continuous Action: It is important that there are always two sided communications in terms of what is being done, why is it being done and what are the results. The project team needs to communicate this with the leaders, leaders then need to take that and continually communicate back to the larger organizations and take actions that reflect the progress made.
Rule 2: Create Business Value
This is so critical for the digital team to get right as quickly as possible. Almost every organization requires a business case for them to invest in any project, let alone a digital transformation project. So, when you are launching your first project, trust in the ability of the team to create business value, is a currency you are usually short of. It is in this situation that leadership belief & commitment is key. This can get you started but unless the team continues to earn the trust of the leaders and the larger organization, the transformation effort will be short lived. So, how do you go about ensuring that you end up creating business value.
Low Hanging Fruits: There are many who approach this from the perspective of winning quick wins or addressing the low hanging fruits. This could mean automating a manual process either using a mobile app or a website.
Leveraged: Then there is the approach to pick projects that have the potential for disproportionate and outsized results, compared to the investments that they need. These projects are not easily visible. One needs to search for them. They can be found in the complaints that you hear around the coffee corners and during water-cooler conversations.
Rule 3: Create the digital vision
Once you understand what you want to achieve, produce, and publish your digital strategy. Specific objectives are not necessarily needed at this stage, but the strategy will help ensure that stakeholders understand your vision and appreciate what is ultimate to be achieved.
Rule 4: Think Customer journey first
Once you have identified the project, it is important that you start thinking of this not as a project or a program but as a product. The simple shift in your mindset can pay off rich dividend in terms of your approach to the transformation effort. Once you start approaching this as a product design effort, you then need to identify who your target customer (sales executive, marketing manager, research & development head, plant head, accounts manager or whoever else) is and look at their entire journey – both current and future.
This ability for you to document the current journey and how the future journey might look like gives you the opportunity to develop quick prototypes and seek early feedback from the users and incorporate these feedbacks into your final product or service that you will deliver. This also addresses the biggest deterrent of many digital transformation initiatives – lack of adoption. IF they think that they have been a part of the process of developing the product or service, the chances that they will adopt it once you go-live is much higher.
In addition, your initial contrast frame can serve as a great reminder to all about the journey that you took. Keep that image front and center when you communicate the progress made on the programs
Rule 5: Partnerships
Digital transformation projects are not just IT or technology projects. They cut across organizations. So, it is imperative that you partner with the part of the organization that is both affected by the initiative and that benefits by the initiative (and yes both can be different, depending on which project you are running. The earlier they get involved and contribute, the better will the adoption be. Their engagement will also bring in the much-needed business perspective that they have built over years of running the process. You bring in the fresh perspective. It is at the intersection of experience and fresh perspectives do you find fresh insights, the secret ingredient for successful digital transformation projects.
It is also a good idea if you partner with start-ups or other potential partners (technology or otherwise) who also bring in their expertise to the team. In some cases, the initiatives that we run require very specialized set of expertise that we may or may not have internally within our organization, like skills around building and training AI/ML algorithms or AR/VR experiences or any such skills. So, it is a good idea to partner with someone who can bring this expertise to the team and contribute.
What we need to remember is that with all partnerships, these partnerships also should have a win-win proposition for all parties involved. So, when choosing an external partner be incredibly careful in selecting the partners, such that they can support the team in all phases of the roll-out and not just while doing pilots. This is a sure shot recipe of disaster later when you decide to scale the project.
Rule 6: Business models and the power of platforms
One of the things that all teams that want to engage in digital transformation projects need to do is to understand the different business models that your existing business is using currently. You can use any different models to analyze that. One simple and comprehensive model is the business model canvas built by Alexander Osterwalder and the team. This is a simple one-page explanation of the business model of your organization. We need to know that businesses can and potentially do operate with multiple business models. Having a thorough understanding of these models can help you in the following ways:
- Give you an understanding of potential new business models that you can enable through digital technologies (create new revenue models, create new customer engagement models, new ways to reduce cost, enable new partnerships, optimize existing processes, etc. This also tells you which part of the business you need to partner with.
- When you go speak to the business, this gives you credibility and builds trust. When they see that you understand how things operate in their part of the world, they will trust and respect you, which is the foundation on which you can build the partnerships.
- This also gives you a language that you can use when engaging with the business leaders like CEO/CFO. This will help you in getting the necessary approvals and the resources that you need for completing these processes.
Most digital transformation projects never take off because there is a lack of business case and the team is unable to convince the business to give them the resources needed for the projects. This ability to understand the business models and to articulate clearly how the project will affect the business model and which part of the business model will get you a lot of respect and much-needed resources.
Rule 7: Cultural transformation
For the introduction of digital services to achieve their true potential, cultural change will be needed. Make sure that you involve those people that are important to the success of projects, particularly if there is a fear that they will resist change. Celebrate success wherever possible as this will counter the challenges you will inevitably encounter, promoting what is being achieved and recognizing and rewarding those that have been fundamental to its success.
Rule 8: Patience
This is a contradiction of sorts. On one end, you need to be able to demonstrate results quickly, you also need to instill patience in your stakeholders about the time it takes to see tangible results.
This becomes critically important as the scale of your projects increases, the speed at which you can get the results will slow down as the scope of any transformation project is inversely related to the speed at which the project will deliver results.
Add to this the fact you will start getting your transformative results when you reach version 5 or 6. So, you need to iterate and for you to do so, you need your stakeholders to show some patience and allow you to work on the project till you reach that version.