Product Lifecycle & the DX Roadmap

Just like a painkiller won’t cure what’s wrong with you, so too throwing technology at a problem, won’t change your organization for its future competitiveness.

To understand what your organization, your employees, and customers need and want in the age of IoT, AI, speed, personalization, and omni-channel experiences, you’ll need a documented digital transformation (DX) roadmap.

Digital transformation is a journey. For every company, the destination will be unique and the path different. Like any journey, however, some careful planning and a methodical process can help ensure you reach your destination safely and avoid excessive detours and unnecessary costs.

For companies that are new entrants to the marketplace, technology-enabled business processes are all they have ever known. Whereas, companies that have existed for more than a few years may find operating in the modern environment to be challenging and very different from their previous experience.?

For these companies to compete successfully, a DX is needed – bringing them forward into modern ways of working to fulfill their customers’ needs and expectations. The degree of digital transformation required will depend on several factors:?

• the nature of the industry in which the company competes,?
• the age and size of the company,?
• the number of legacy tools?and processes that must be transformed
• the motivation of company owners and leaders to impact change in their businesses.?

How effectively the company can transform itself will be critical to determining how successful it will be able to compete in the market.?

Customer expectations continue to shift, and each day you wait to begin your DX journey is another day further behind the competition - "snooze, you lose"

What is & why do you need a DX?

Think of?DX as the embedding of digital technology -- e.g., systems, applications and specialized technologies into each area of your business. Many, if not all, of the business processes will need to change and adapt to the new technologies.?

Your culture?will inevitably need to change. This often results in modifying, perhaps removing established procedures, experimenting with and adopting new ones, and being ready for some losses/failures?and thereafter learnings, leading to successes.?

Adapt, survive and thrive!?

As businesses of all types and sizes migrate to DX technologies and resources, they have the potential to:

• increase their competitive position,?
• boost their reputation,?
• enhance customer experiences,?
• improve operational efficiency,?
• increase revenues,
• attract new customers?
• retain existing ones.?

Failure to embrace the the benefits of a DX Program is the slippery slope!?

Clearly, as more organizations gain experience with and realize the benefits of a DX, they will be well positioned to adapt to new market opportunities faster and more successfully than those firms avoiding the new technologies. The firm's leadership team, key stakeholders and employees will all need to adjust to the new normal for the business.

The DX Roadmap

It’s a new and emerging world, a New Town, with a different culture and just as when trying to navigate any new place, you wouldn’t do so efficiently without a map/GPS.?

Large-scale digital transformations can be incredibly daunting, which is why a roadmap is vital. It helps you break down large tasks into manageable parts allowing you to allocate resources effectively and generate the value your company expects.

A DX often consists of a combination of technology projects, process adjustments, and organizational changes—all of which depend on each other to succeed.?

A roadmap will help you understand the event's sequence to avoid confusion, ensure a smooth transition, and encourage cooperation.?

Initially, there may be confusion, but the roadmap enables different teams to work on various parts of the transformation simultaneously as you progress.

As with a GPS system, a direction of travel is established, but the exact route can change along the way. That's because a successful roadmap is able to evolve in line with continuous insight, both customer and marketplace.

Without this continuous insight, and a realistic plan for where you want to go, you risk making incorrect digital investments that fail to deliver return or sustainable value for you and your customers.

But it’s just as important to have a roadmap that’s actually effective.?

There are a few core elements every digital transformation roadmap should include

• Where are you headed?
• What does DX mean for your organization??
• How much of a DX do you want to make and by when??
• What is an initially acceptable level of change??

Companies undertake transformations (of all sorts) because they have a vision of a target state they are trying to achieve. Articulating the leadership vision of this target state (what it looks like, what it feels like, and why it is important to the company) is critical for securing support and buy-in from individuals throughout the company that will be required to achieve success.

A clearly stated vision that resonates with employees, partners, and customers will help ensure everyone’s actions are aligned and promotes patience and understanding if the path of change isn’t always smooth.

Your strategy for arriving at your destination

How much time are you expecting the transformation to require? (Months, years?)?

Always keep in mind, it’s the long-game and one that’s won through the building of momentum across your organization. There’s no “switch flicking” when it comes to moving teams or individuals!

Do you understand initially all the changes that must occur or will you determine the details as you progress, using, for example, proofs of concept and prototypes to explore different opportunities??

What are the key areas of focus for your transformation that you see as essential to overall success??

Key milestones?

For each organization, the key milestones will be different:

• technology projects
• organizational restructuring
• changes to the supplier ecosystem
• modifications to business processes?

The milestones can help set expectations, for when when people will start seeing value from the transformation and experiencing changes in their work environment. For transformation initiatives expected to require more time to complete, it is often helpful to plan for periods of normalization to avoid the fatigue from ongoing change.

What are the DX Macro shifts?

A digital roadmap consists of three macros shifts:?

• people
• process
• technology

1. People?

The people changes include creating a customer-centric culture in your organization is the foundation of a superior customer experience. The people approach to a digital roadmap also addresses the role business partners play in creating this vision, personalizing how buyers engage with a company's brand and involving all company members through cross-functional collaboration.

2. Process?

The process changes require a lifecycle analysis, including creating a map of the customer, engineering, manufacturing & supply chain journey to maximize organizational efficiency and achieve scalability for its new business model.?

The process changes’ goal is to thoroughly understand how every customer engages with your product during every step of the customer experience lifecycle and how engineering, manufacturing and supply chain adjusts. Once complete, it will be possible to build an operational platform to supply customers precisely what they need at the moment they need it.

3. Technology

Choosing the right technology of a DX roadmap focuses on building an integrated information infrastructure. This approach creates a foundation for integrating data across silos and enables all information management platforms to interact, allowing for data analytics to drive growth. The technology strategy a company uses should be a combination of software and hardware.

Getting started

As with any major project, especially one that potentially impacts the entire organization, plenty of upfront research and analysis is needed first.

Once the research has been completed, senior management must be engaged and embrace the program - not only from a financial perspective, but also from cultural and operational views.

The DX Roadmap Culture

Go Agile and avoid rigidity!

Your DX Roadmap (DXR) should be a live document that can grow with the journey. It provides a constant reference point to keep the digital strategy on track and aligned with the business goals – even as those goals evolve over time. The roadmap needs to be reviewed on a frequent basis and updated in line with real-time analysis, changing business requirements, and influence from external factors such as what your competitors are focusing on, market forces, and disruption attempts.?

Collaborate & over-communicate?

While they should only have one owner, digital roadmaps should be created and maintained as part of collaborative?workshops that involve all relevant stakeholders. This is key to creating an integrated digital strategy focused on achieving an agreed, shared business goal, rather than delivering a series of isolated digital initiatives. A product manager typically owns the digital or product roadmap, refining it with the support of a digital product owner?(or several product owners). These individuals play an important role in ensuring ongoing value delivery, rather than one-off projects.?

Clearly-defined business objectives

Your DXR needs to be based on clearly-articulated strategic goals from the start, and must include key performance indicators to measure progress of the digital strategy against those goals. It should build in ambitious but achievable milestones and checkpoints for assessing progress made, demonstrating the rationale of the proposed digital strategy.?

A useful first step is to use a SWOT analysis to identify where the gaps are in your business proposition, processes, and supporting capabilities (such as your technology stack and the people who support it). Then identify which areas you want to specifically address.

Step x Step

1. Establish your vision, why & values

The starting point for your DXR should focus on the existing vision for the company, your overall mission, “big why” and the values you want. DX requires your organization changes the way things were done previously to better align with new technologies and customer requirements.

As the champion of the DXR, authenticity, inclusivity and humbleness are essential to bring your organization together and to jump onboard the journey.??Understand that this is a process, you’ll make mistakes, and that’s ok.?

2. Get people on-board with your digital transformation plan

It’s important your people understand the core purpose of this DXR and are clear about what’s involved.?

Step-1 is executive sponsorship, without which the journey will be unsustainable.

Find the existing organizational pains and combine these with your future DX big plans and in so doing, your people?will buy into your vision for the organization much faster. Let people know what the plans for your digital transformation are up-front to avoid raising red flags that slow progress down the road.

Organize a meeting to discuss the digital transformation process with your key stakeholders and use the session to identify key issues before you begin. Make sure people in your organization understand what digital transformation is and what it means for your brand.?

3. Quantify and prioritize those business pains

In your initial meetings about digital transformation, issues are going to come up. Find these issues and any interconnected opportunities.?Classify these issues and chart impact vs effort for the opportunities that are connected to them. seek out the “low hanging fruit”/ the quick wins and focus on gathering momentum.

For those high impact solutions, it’s important to think through the plan and to determine if there are dependencies that could derail an agile approach and affect the momentum you’re endeavoring to build.??

4. What gets measured, gets done

does is bring a business benefit and ROI? and how is that measured? Understanding how your business can be and needs to be improved is then measured as a KPI.?

Your KPIs should center around specific outcomes. Don’t simply state that you want to improve operational efficiency. Instead, your KPI could be to improve operational efficiency by 20% within the next quarter.

5. Establish accountability

Empowered, responsible is where your stakeholders/leaders need to be. They’re either with you or not. Support them and remove obstacles in their way.?

6. Allocate time and budget

Allocate a budget for each owner and discuss the impact on business resources to keep everyone in check.?

7. Be Agile

A DX will consist of many projects and tasks, with variable timelines. Careful momentum planning will be required to break into a series of sprints resulting in rapid learnings and successes.??

By undertaking the digital transformation process in sprints, you’ll understand what you did well and didn’t do well, gather feedback and make adjustments as necessary.

8. Review, celebrate & adjust

Back to the milestones - when they’re reached, it’s important to review and adjust, also considering marketplace and ecosystem conditions.

See you on the journey

Andrew

Product Lifecycle Management: People, Teams & Business Solutions enabled through Change & Technology

Sometimes you need a real expert to help decide what's next and sometimes you need an entire team and sometimes you need an entire program delivering.

Delivering the entire PLM application layer, along with a productive PLM methodology and moving your people to adopt new ways of working, is the holistic approach we take. It's the quality of our people and their experience that makes the difference.

If we can help you through your PLM journey, you just have to ask

I'm a huge believer in constant change.

Standing still is going backwards

It starts with People changing their mindsets & Processes, enabled through Technology.

Innovative Products, Smarter Manufacturing all happens through Agile

Revolutions - start small, empower people & scale fast.

Oh, I can "boil the ocean" with the best of them, but let's not live there. Analysis leads to paralysis. Dreaming of & waiting for perfection is the enemy of execution.

Do something, get some quick wins and start building momentum.

I like to bring attention to Innovation, Smart Manufacturing, Global People Integration & Human Sustainability - I Blog, Vlog, Podcast, host a few Live Shows and love being involved in your revolutionary programs.

I love & thrive in working with some of the world's largest companies & most innovative organizations.

I'm a big people-person & have spent my life meeting as many people & cultures as I can. At my last count, I am lucky enough to have visited & done business in over 55 countries

You can reach me on: 310-367-4123 | [email protected]