A structured, agile approach to digital transformation

“Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence.” Nick Negroponte, Wired 1998

In my previous blog posts I explained the importance of organisational strategy in guiding a digital transformation, and how teamwork and culture are vital for success. I will now introduce my recommended approach to transformation which I will expand upon in future blog posts.

Why?

When embarking on any journey, it’s advisable to have a clear destination and plan of how to get there. With a journey as complex, multi-faceted and full of risk as a digital transformation, a structured approach will help an organisation understand where it is, where to next and how to get to the destination. In an environment where the market forces and available technology are constantly changing, it’s vital that the approach leverages agile best practice. 

The planning loop

Progress through the planning loop - see Figure 1 - is facilitated by the tech team and business team working together, as I described in my previous blog post. The business team bring first hand knowledge of how the organisation goes about their day to day business, and the tech team bring in-depth knowledge of the technologies available for transformation. Close, balanced collaboration will be needed for the transformation to be successful. 

Figure 1: The Planning Loop

I will expand on each planning loop step in future blog posts, outlining why we do it, how it’s done, who does what between the tech and business teams and typical outputs. But let’s start by introducing each step and how they fit together.

The goal of the prepare step is to ensure that the organisation is ready to start the transformation. After checking that the strategy is complete, up to date and well communicated, the organisation’s information, business process and cultural foundations are examined to understand how these must evolve to support the strategy. The horizon scan works within a search envelope set by the business team to find technologies which could help the organisation achieve their strategic objectives. 

These candidate technologies are then prioritised, ordering them by potential business benefit and execution challenge. Selected technologies are taken forward into the learn step, where the teams acquire deeper knowledge / awareness of the technology to further calibrate the business potential. The experiment step comprises a proof of concept (mini project) to calibrate the real business value to the organisation. The plan and implement steps prepare for, then execute the projects needed to realise the long term benefit in the business.

Loopbacks and review points

Although I’ve described the steps as sequential, loop backs will be the norm as we progress around the planning loop. For example, the horizon scan may be re-visited after the learn or experiment steps if the technology does not do quite what was expected of it, or is harder to work with than anticipated. Similarly, the prioritise step may be re-visited as a result of learn or experiment if we find technologies that add more or less business value than we originally thought.

Review points will be frequent as we progress around the planning loop. Agile scrum-like reviews should be used by the business and tech teams to steer the planning process, combined with periodic board play backs at salient points in the process. The purpose of both will be to ensure total business alignment and to improve the transformation process by constant - but constructive - peer group and stakeholder challenge.

Leveraging ‘agile’

Market forces change so fast, and technology develops so quickly that organisations are increasingly turning to lessons learnt from agile software development to ensure their organisational change can keep up. This movement is referred to as strategic agility, described as “the ability for companies to stay competitive by adjusting and adapting to new innovative ideas. 

There are three central tenants of strategic agility as originally outlined by Doz & Kosonen (2008) based on their practical experience at Nokia. These themes - together with their implications for the planning loop - are outlined in Table 2.

Table 2: Strategic agility and the planning loop

Agility plays a big part in organisational change and transformation, as explained in this excellent infographic from the Dandy People (who publish a wealth of excellent Agile material!). Several elements of agility should be amalgamated with the planning loop. Specifically the scrum methodology will help the business and tech teams work together to steer the transformation process, and regular board level stakeholder reviews will help overcome the inevitable challenges as they occur.

In summary, it’s useful to have a roadmap for the transformation process, which will help the business team and technical team navigate through the inevitable challenges. Since market forces and technology change so rapidly, it’s essential that this planning loop embraces business agility. In subsequent blog posts I will ‘deep dive’ into each step describing the why, how, who for each step together with the outputs.

I would really appreciate comments on this blog post, or feel free to contact me directly if preferred.

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