M.A.P. - A Framework to Measure your Transformation Progress

A couple of years ago I developed a simple, yet powerful framework in order to help our clients to measure their transformation progress. It surprises me to this day how many organization talk about their digital transformation efforts, even voice their dissatisfaction with the progress they are making, but lack a holistic way to actually track it.

Sure - there are often some KPI's floating around somewhere. But none of these actually paint a fair picture of what is happening within an organization, nor do they create the required transparency of where to take a closer look to unlock blockers and accelerate progress.

In this very first edition of my newsletter "The Accelerator Program" I want to share with you the very principles of my framework to give you an inspiration of how to better track your very own transformation efforts. It's the key foundation from which you can start to accelerate what you do.

The Three Dimensions of Transformation Progress

To be honest. It was a complete coincidence, that the three dimensions I had chosen to track transformation progress actually made up the word "map", but I was super happy, when I discovered it, as it is actually a great metaphor for what we want: a map to guide us through this transformation endeavor which takes years - most often lacks a clear beginning and end - and is in its complexity often hard to grasp.

The three characters represent the following three dimensions:

As part of every digital transformation initiative you need to raise your digital maturity in certain areas. You build up new capabilities you haven't had before and by the end of a quarter or by the end of a year you need to know the progress you have been making to raise your digital maturity and how fast your execution is.

What unfortunately often happens is that the focus is exclusively on building up new capabilities alone. But none of these new capabilities will ever produce value for your organization, if they don't see widespread adoption. Therefore it's absolutely necessary to track adoption and to also use these metrics to refine what you do in the maturity build-up.

And last but not least: even if you build up new capabilities, if your organization starts to adopt it you want to see the real business impact from it and need to understand how your performance is hopefully improving over time. Attributing transformation progress to actual performance improvements is not trivial, but possible and even necessary to justify all in the investments into your transformation program.

These are for me the three fundamental lenses through which you want to look at your transformation efforts. Let's explore in more depth each of them.

Maturity - Building up new capabilities

Let's start with an example to make it more tangible. A pivotal part of almost every digital transformation program is to raise the "Data & Analytics" maturity. You need to leave the pure descriptive analytics state in which you report on the past and you want to reach a prescriptive or even cognitive state of analytics, to advance how your organization can leverage their data assets to its advantage.

For this part of your transformation program already exist proven maturity models, which can give you milestones with requirements to determine how mature your overall organizations capabilities are. You can break these milestones down into very tangible metrics, which help you understand the progress you are making. How many data sources are for example connected to cover which percentage of the customer journey? How man reporting silos do still exist in your organization? How many data stuarts are trained and appointed?

Tracking in the MAP framework the maturity layer comes down to three different aspects:

• milestone progress within a given domain specific maturity model
• diagnostic metrics to understand in more depth the individual achievements
• a defined roadmap with typical progress metrics within it

This can and should be setup for every single stream within your digital transformation program and is more of a homework exercise you need to complete, rather than a challenging and complicated process. Nevertheless this homework is often skipped or started way too late. If you set this up early and track it consistently for example each quarter you will get a pretty fair idea of what you are accomplishing over time in your maturity build-up.

Adoption - Operationalizing the new capabilities

Let's stick with the example from above: it's great if for example your IT department connected all those data points, has a new data governance process in place and is offering you an End-2-End enterprise ready platform to work with the data in a secure way.

But what if nobody uses it?

It's is absolutely key to develop a set of adoption metrics per transformation stream, which gives you an idea on how these newly developed capabilities are used! How many data use-cases are actually running on-top of this platform? In how many markets are these use-cases live? How much iterations have these use-cases already gone through? How many reports have been build and how many active weekly or monthly users actually work with these dashboards?

The uncomfortable truth is, that the adoption part of the transformation program is too often skipped, due to internal politics. How often have I heard the sentence: "Well, it's only my responsibility to build it. I can't be made responsible for how many people then use this. That is the responsibility of somebody else".

But having adoption metrics available even for those who build new capabilities is an absolute value driver and transformation accelerator, as it helps to avoid investing in capabilities or features nobody needs. Moderating this dialogue between those who build and those who need to adopt and use is a key aspect of every transformation program.

And actually there is no excuse for not tracking adoption. Every aspect of a digital transformation has an adoption component.

An additional aspect I added later to the framework as a sub-category to adoption is "readiness". Let's imagine we have an international organization, which centrally develops new use-cases capabilities and wants to track the rollout and adoption in each market. In that case it is critical to know if the market is technically actually ready to use it. More than often these centrally developed capabilities require an effort to make them work locally and it's only fair in this case to take into the readiness to do so.

Performance - Measuring the impact

You for sure already have an established set of KPIs in order to measure the performance of your business and your marketing & sales efforts. What you want to add is to create performance measures for use-cases you are developing as part of your transformation program, which are clear to attribute.

Sticking to our example: maybe one of the data use-cases you develop - now that your data is better connected and your abilities to work with your data grows - is to apply propensity scoring on existing customers based on their behavior on your owned touchpoints, combined with the CRM data you have.

Leveraging these scores with your marketing and sales tactics should result in an improved performance of those and therefore should improve your overall ROI. You want to measure this for example through clear A/B Testing on the use-case level to demonstrate that the new capability and its adoption is actually driving value.

Consequently measuring use-cases specific performance metrics and putting them into the context of your overall KPI framework is key to get a sense of how all your efforts are paying off.

Putting in all together

The magic truly happens if you rigorously track all three dimensions over a longer timeframe for your entire transformation program. That allows you to truly see how the maturity in key areas is building up over time, how the adoption throughout your organization is developing and what performance uplifts you see from the individual use-cases unlocked and the impact this has on your entire business.

It's not rocket science. It is actually straight forward and simple. It is more about a rigorous implementation of such a framework and the ability of an organization to execute it and getting politics out of the way.

The typical transformation pain-points this framework is surfacing

It's no coincidence that I designed the framework this way. The three biggest blockers I have witnessed first hand over the last 10 years are the following:

1. organizations building new capabilities centrally without having an eye on internal "product-market-fit" and without having a true understanding of everything it takes to unlock the next level in the maturity model
2. a lack of insight and focus on how adoption develops within the organization and missing feedback loops between those who build and those who use these new capabilities, making the process unmanageable and creating disappointments on both sides
3. either a completely missing connection to business value or a too ambitious expectation of the direct business impact, which might be impossible to attribute right form the get-go and therefore disappointment, that "it didn't make a difference"

If you put the M.A.P. framework in place you will have a very sound tool to report on the progress and success of your transformation program.

It's probably needless to say that we at the Plan.Net Group do exactly this: we help our clients structure their transformation program, bring transparency to it and play a key role in steering it to accelerate transformations and to make them more successful.

I know this articles can only touch the framework on a very high level. Feel free to ask questions in the comments or ping me directly. I am very happy to answer them! I hope you find this helpful and can take a few thoughts in order to accelerate your own transformation program.