15-Step Roadmap to Prevent Enterprise Digital Transformation Failure

Studies have consistently shown that more than 65% of Digital Transformation (DX) initiatives fail, meaning they are over budget, behind schedule, or unable to deliver on the value envisioned in the original business case.

So, how does one avoid leading a “sinking ship”?when implementing their Enterprise Digital Transformations?

Most of the time, the reason for Enterprise Digital Transformation implementation failure is the “disconnection” of people, processes, and technology across an organization’s DX implementation team.

Here is our 15-step roadmap for removing the disconnection that cripples every transformation.?By following our roadmap, you, as a leader of your DX initiative, are destined to deliver your implementation on time, on budget, and with all the value promised to your organization’s leadership.

1. We need to build a business process decomposition all the way down to the system transaction level.?Within this business process decomposition we should be able to connect which processes are providing how much value back to our original business case.?Within this business process we should be able to identify what job roles will be necessary to execute the business processes and from there what system security those job roles should have in order to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley.
2. We need to define all the systems and the data that has to be curated as a result of our digital transformation.?What strategic data elements are necessary and need to be perfect in order to provide the value identified in our original business case??What data has to be migrated from the old legacy systems to this new digital operating model and the integration points that data has with business processes, enhancement development, integrations, organizational change management and the dozens of other teams in your Enterprise Digital Transformation program??What roles within our organization are going to be responsible for governing that data once we operationalize this digital product?
3. We need to define all of the integrations that are going to take place in and around our new digital product.?What systems are going to be retired? How are we going to connect our new digital products to the existing environments to create this new digital operating model.?What data needs to be connected??How is this going to impact our business processes, data migrations, organizational change management, technologies and how are we going to communicate these changes to everyone who needs to know?
4. We need to connect the business process design and all the rules and requirements defined in that design, to the application configuration or development specialists so they can build the appropriate the functionality to support that design, and in the event that something changes to that design over the course of time, automated mechanisms to keep all of the pertinent resources informed on the changes and the potential impact those changes might have to their scope of work.
5. We need to connect the organizational change-management professionals to the business-process analysts, data professionals, technologists and?business stakeholders so they can build their content around leadership transformation, organizational design, communication, learning, and?stakeholder engagement to enable the "connection of the dots" across not only the program, but across the entire organization.
6. We need a knowledge repository for every single thing that took place during the delivery of our new digital product so that the knowledge obtained can be used by the people who will be supporting the product once it goes into production, as well as be the repository for the continual evolvement of the digital product over the lifetime of its use to the organization.
7. We need to prepare the organization for the technical deployment of the new digital operating model so that program leaders have one source of truth to understand the organization's readiness, from a variety of different lenses,?to use this new solution.
8. We need to house the single source of truth for every piece of content written for the benefit of the program and has the built-in controls to ensure that the content is appropriately governed and communicated to the appropriate resources throughout the implementation life cycle.
9. We need to allow the program to take all of the centralized content written for the benefit of the program to develop the test steps, components, cases and scenarios needed to test the digital product, providing complete traceability to every aspect of the application design down to the individual rule or requirement.?We then take this testing library content and provide the ability to create configurable test plans for any situation your program needs.
10. We need to allow the project managers to define all of their in-scope deliverables and work packages in one repository that allows them to assign who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed on the delivery of the work package and then automatically build a project plan based on those deliverables and work packages to see what it will take to deliver that segment of work.
11. We need to capture the effort it took to complete each and every deliverable and work package developed for our digital product so we can determine the cost of development for that component in terms of hours and dollars, allowing the program to remain fiscally responsible while providing better forecasting on future spend.
12. We need to allow our program leaders to quickly review and make decisions based on one source of truth where everything in their program is connected and governed by the principles established by PMI around risks, issues, actions, key decisions, change requests, procurement and commercial management.
13. We need to allow a CxO or portfolio owner to quickly see how each of her/his programs are running under your domain.?Or if you are a managing partner in your consulting practice, how each and everyone of your client initiatives are running under your domain.
14. We a need to automatically and surgically send the millions of "micro communications" to the right resources whenever something changes to the implementation environment that may have an impact to their work, and a collaborative forum in which to gather the right people to discuss that impact and take corrective action.
15. We need to have a true digital community where everyone around the world is in sync and working together to deliver on time, on budget, in scope, and delivering the value that was defined in your original digital-transformation business case.

If you can effectively implement this roadmap, this is what it might look like at a high level across the global enterprise....

I wish you the best in creating your DX-success initiative! Drop me a line and let me know what you're doing, your challenges, your triumphs, and how you've overcome the roadblocks and the odds to lead a successful DX and program-management initiative. My contact info is on my LinkedIn profile.

And for those of you who don't have the time, patience, and/or budget to craft your DX-success initiative, please know that we (Platinum PMO) have spent millions of dollars and untold hours putting the AMIGO DX/PM platform out there if you need it. You could tap into it immediately to begin your organization's trip along the roadmap to DX/PM success.

Frank Howard