How can you improve communication with IT partners during digital transformation?

Collaboration will be more effective and efficient is when you create cross functional team. This team should have clear backlog and adapt as we go with the transformation following lean method rather than traditional method where adaptation of the changes is a must. Business should nominate an ambassadors as well which their skill at least be tech savvy’s Requirement should also be based on organization strategy and how we can achieve the mission in a timely manner’s by identifying the pain/issue and find solutions towards it.

One of things that help is to explan to IT the importance of their role in the change , make them believe in the outcome of the project that will return on the organization and as well staff with profitability and achievement, if you placed this communication channel is now opened . as an advice do not ask how IT works as they always find a solution for your issues and let them think about untraditional solution that will help project . instead of escalation and reporting make them involved be the servant leader that accommodate them and support them.

The customer need is often the missing component when embarking on digital transformation journeys. Living their experience is key to aligning the scoping of business requirements to strategic goals.

The easiest way to improve communication with partners during digital transformation is to establish clear objectives, provide regular updates through collaboration platforms, encourage feedback, offer training, remain flexible, and maintain transparency about timelines and budgets.

Don’t come to IT with a solution to implement, come with a problem to solve. The earlier that business and IT collaborate on a problem: 1) the better both parties understand what you are delivering together 2) the higher the quality of the end solution 3) the better the solution will leverage available technologies 4) the more you break down the silos and form one delivery team

Here it's important to emphasize that during planning and working on roles and responsibilities matrix, and in case a project involves cross countries and multicultural teams and their cooperation, it's crucial to have understanding of cultural and behavioral varieties and "ways of doing the business". Another vital point is to figure out risks, having in mind that risks are evolving over the time and ones valid for projects 1-5 years ago won't be valid for the current and future projects.

Defining roles and responsibilities is essential to also help manage the expectations of commitment from everyone involved. This helps ensure that people across different functions have the right availability and that sponsors agreed and signed off appropriate budgets to make this happen. This will help ensure that the commitment is secured and budgeted appropriately that will help improve stakeholder relationships and ultimately project success.

Here are some pointers to align vision and goals: Successful digital transformation requires a shared vision and clear goals. To achieve this, communicate your vision consistently, align with business objectives, focus on customer needs, involve IT partners in co-creation, and maintain an open feedback loop. That's the key to success.

In my experience, business stakeholders tend to underestimate the level of complexity involved, while IT Partners overthink the underlying "real" business requirements. I often encourage business stakeholders to start by sharing their current experience with whatever it is we are discussing, and refrain from problem solving as much as possible at this point. We then ofter use metaphors or everyday stroies to better understand each other, as well as stick to a top-down breakdown approach as much as possible.

Communication is multi-faceted if you want true co-creation and collaboration. You shouldn't need to have to share information back and forth, because you should be one fully integrated team working towards the same goal, and success. Good IT partners will welcome this approach with open arms, co-locate their team with yours and work side-by-side with you. Bad IT partners won't want to do this, or have their resources on site with you (where effectively you have more control, insight and viewpoints on what they are doing and delivering. Those are the ones whose Invoices you check doubly carefully.

Running a Digital Transformation Framework that demands setting up cross-functional teams is key. Information sharing is a risk for information loss - co-creation and close collaboration reduces this risk and often even speeds up delivery. With today's readily available tools, collaboration has never been easier even between multiple locations. It is still important to keep clear accountability for each deliverable - with the collaborative approach, non-accountable members may feel slower progression compared to those who own the particular deliverable, however, in my experience, close collaboration drastically reduces the overall time requirement for a project.

What I find important is to balance the iterative nature of developments with the rigid nature of budgets and deadlines expected by senior stakeholders. In practice, this often means limiting the scope of a project so that it fits into X number of iterations. Should a scope exceed this arbitrary X, it needs to be broken down to multiple, smaller projects. This significantly reduces risk by enabling strict commitments, while keeping the benefits of an iterative approach.

Often, projects don’t move at the pace expected or planned for at the initial stages. In this time, there could be a lot of personnel movement in and out the project, or more permanently, in and out the company. Documentation of every process and business requirement is essential in reducing key man dependencies. This collateral needs to be robust enough to make sense to someone on their first day on the project.

Align on Transformation Implementation and Delivery Methodology and Tools Waterfall and Agile methodologies (Scrum, ScrumBan, Kanban, SAFe et al) provides different communication approaches. It is critical that that you align with your partner on which methodology is at play for your digital transformation project. If your inhouse team is agile and your partner is waterfall, this by and of itself presents internal inconsistencies that would complicate communications and delivery, so you want to avoid that. Furthermore you want to start off with stakeholder assessment, focusing on expectations and concerns, then develop a communications plan that provides periodic update on cadence to key stakeholders through an agreed upon medium

Documenting current state of the architecture, assets, and processes is crucial to designing and implementing the future desired state. The stakeholders and users should be aligned on the vision as stated earlier. The SME's have to be identified as well as the secondary SME's in case the first group is not available. Programs and Projects have to have the lag built in so as to not rush into implementations. There has to be constant feedback loops for every process documented.