Te Maunga: The Power of Alignment

70% of digital projects fail, making them risky, high-stakes endeavours. How do you beat the odds?

Journey has been in the digital space since its infancy - designing the first websites when manual HTML coding was the gold (and only) standard, and no one really mentioned the ‘customer journey’.

Over the last 25 years, we’ve seen the large-scale disruption (and in some cases obliteration) of entire industries by newcomers replacing the old way of doing things with digital solutions that customers didn’t even know they needed, and now can’t live without.

As Sam Morgan said when TradeMe was sold to? Fairfax for $700 million in 2006, “who knew Kiwis would be happy to send money to people they’ve never met for goods they’ve never seen?" Turns out, we were more than happy, and the entire classified ad industry, the backbone of print media, was swiftly replaced in New Zealand by TradeMe and around the world by ebay.

Five years later, Fairfax sold 50% of their stake in TradeMe for $500 million. Five stars, would trade again!

So the fear of being disrupted is real. But amongst the rush to be digitally enabled, we’ve watched with depressing regularity businesses undertaking ‘digital transformation’ projects that inevitably go pear-shaped.

In an attempt to mitigate the risk of failure, decision-makers typically engage a big-box consulting firm, who charge them millions (and millions) of dollars for a doorstop report that recommends an ambitious digital transformation strategy that will take years (and more millions) to complete.

After all that time and money, the client is no better off: nothing has been implemented yet, and the ‘doers’ have yet to be included. Worse than that, the people in the business who will be actually using the technology typically haven’t been considered.

According to McKinsey, (ironically enough one of those big consulting firms) 70% of these digital projects don’t meet their objectives. And according to Deloitte, another big-box firm, the cost of that failure is $US1.7 trillion dollars every year. That’s more than the GDP of Canada being wasted on digital transformations that don’t work, let alone transform anything. Every year!

So what’s behind this madness? Again, according to McKinsey, it’s not that the tech doesn’t work, or the wrong CTO was hired. Almost all of this wastage is down to a simple, very human factor: the technology is being implemented without thinking enough about the problems it needs to solve, due to lack of alignment across the humans in the organisation

Over our nearly 25 years of witnessing this transformation frenzy we know that alignment is the key (and often missing ingredient) to delivering successful digital projects.

This doesn’t just apply to large transformations either: any digital project, from a simple website, chatbot or CRM implementation to a multi-year complex digital strategy, lack of alignment is the most common cause of delay, confusion, cost blowout and ultimate failure.

So, how do you avoid the potholes on your digital journey? How do you get aligned, and stay aligned?? And where do you even start?

Well, after 25 years of seeing what works and what doesn’t, our team at Journey have developed an easy approach to this sticky problem. It’s the first step in our Solve & Evolve process, our solution to avoiding the pitfalls of old-school digital transformation.

Te Maunga – Journey's alignment process

Achieving alignment isn’t easy – it needs to happen on multiple fronts, bringing together your company vision, long term business objectives, staff engagement, and the voice of your customer. And it needs to be embedded consistently across the project, so the project stays aligned, and speed wobbles don’t send it off track.

In order to help beat the odds and not be part of the 70% that fail, we run a workshop that we call Te Maunga (The Mountain).

It’s a simple, but highly effective session that brings together the key stakeholders in the project in order to drive organisational alignment before the mahi (work) begins.

First we identify your North Star - the visionary place your organisation wants to get to. Te Maunga focuses on aligning your team around this vision, which naturally leads to identifying the problems and barriers that stand so we can achieve the customer experience that turns the vision into reality.

By breaking big problems down into smaller ones, and solving them one at a time, you can continue to drive alignment across your organisation with every quick win.

It’s all about shifting your team’s mindset from being stuck in park to moving freely, into a state where rapid problem solving becomes business as usual.

This is the opposite to old-school “transformation”, with its six-month sprints and endless horizons: our approach is practical, do-able and it feels good.

People feel included, involved and inspired, because they can see the results of their efforts. It’s the power of focus, solving one problem at a time, building confidence at every step, creating positive momentum.

And every step of the way, by working collaboratively with your organisation's leadership, team and customers, you minimise the risk of going off track as the journey unfolds.

If you’re embarking on a digital project, we’d love to help you climb Te Maunga. To set up a time to plan your ascent, drop me a line at [email protected] or message me here.