Transformation Journey - A High Level Practical Approach

Whenever any organization decides to embark on Transformation Journey for whatever reason it might be, it is essential to have some guidelines handy that would help the organization in achieving the goals and objectives of the transformation. These guidelines would help in better planning of the

transformation and would also help in proactively identifying the associated risks and challenges.

For the sake of this article, I am considering the scenario of transformation from on-prem implementation to cloud-based solution. When we talk about on-prem implementation, probability is very high that the on-prem system currently being used is either becoming too costly to maintain or the vendor has stopped the support for that product marking it as obsolete.

It is very much possible that since the current system has been there for many years, there may have been customizations in the system throughout the years to support the business continuity. This can pose a huge challenge to the whole transformation initiative from the perspective of mapping those customizations to the new system.

In such situation strong governance can play a vital role. For organizations with proper governance checks in place, ideally there would a repository having track of all such enhancements and relevant documentation would be present in the repository for further use.

Unfortunately, on ground this is not the case for most of the organizations. Systems and applications being utilized for a long time are mostly lacking proper documentation for implemented UI and flow enhancements, integrations, and reports. Not only this, but the data also including configurations, profiles, transactions, and history may have some broken links or information that is no longer needed and must be cleansed and transformed to support the new system.

While planning for the transformation, it is recommended to have a set of guidelines as part of the planning process which may cover following points:

1. Prepare a detailed inventory of all the relevant existing objects that are being utilized for running the business. This could include applications, licenses, hardware, documents, user manuals, locations, users, batch processes, etc.

2. Sketch a high-level design diagram that should cover the main existing system objects identified in the inventory and how they are linked together through different integration points.

3. High level design diagram shall be further elaborated into a detailed design document providing details of platform, system wise data flows, details of application integration points, system configuration, setup values and pre-requisites, batch processes and interaction with the hardware.

4. User wise function details shall list down all the functions that are being currently performed by each user in the system and their respective role. This shall be clear enough to facilitate in the calculation of licensing and role requirement for the new solution.

5. Perform the most crucial activity of preliminary data validation, correction, and cleansing. Data shall be extracted from the existing system and validated by the business users. As part of validation activity, any broken links identified within the data shall be corrected within the system. Any obsolete information that is no longer used may be marked separately for action prior to migration. These actions could include attaining approval from business users for not migrating it at all or disassociating it from the main data, transforming it, etc.

6. Based on the preliminary data validation activity, data sizing shall be defined for the existing data that shall be migrated to new system. This shall at the minimum include the data objects, record types, data cutoff dates and reference/supporting documents.

7. AS-IS process shall be documented. Going for transformation without this always lead to considerable delays in implementation and at time causes it to fail completely.

8. TO-BE process is mostly aligned with the new system by default. It is essential to have a thorough review of AS-IS, optimize it and then perform a gap analysis between the optimized AS-IS and TO-BE processes. This is a more practical approach and always prove beneficial when going with the transformation since AS-IS speaks the language of existing system being used and users feel more comfortable with it instead of directly going with the TO-BE process approach. This will give more confidence to the users and adaptability to new system shall be much easier with this approach.

9. Training and readjustment plan for the users shall be put in place. One of the greatest challenges that the organizations face as part of transformation is resistance from users due to the fear factor. With proper training and readjustment plan communicated to the users from the very start shall help to boost the morale of the users and at the same time support to bring in positive energy and contribution from users’ side. This shall also help the users in enhancing their skills and apply them at work.

10. System gap analysis shall be performed to assess the system level functionality enhancements that shall come with the new system and map the functions old vs new. This shall also cover dependencies and any integrations that would have to be upgraded to support the new architecture. Hardware analysis shall check the compatibility of existing hardware with the new system, for example, handhelds, POS, etc.

11. Application migration plan shall provide the strategy and methodology for migrating embedded 3rd party applications, middleware services, integrations, user roles, and customized reports to the new system. At times it happens that a functionality provided through a 3rd party component in existing system is available by default in the new system. Such scenarios shall be catered in the application migration plan. Relevant quality assurance activities can also be included within this plan.

12. Data migration plan shall detail the object wise sequence of the data to be migrated to the new system. There can be many approaches that can be applied for data migration, and it varies from organization to organization. But there are certain basic facts that shall be kept in mind while preparing the data migration. This includes the data verification iterations, data mapping, data transformation, data loading sequence, data sizing, approach for delta and historical data, loading of reference documents, user hierarchies, user roles, and approval hierarchies. These are some of the basic parameters that shall be considered while preparing the data migration plan.

13. Strong communication plan must be in place to avoid last minute setbacks and surprises. It shall cover the timelines for the transformation program as a whole but in particular must have details of different activities including data validation, freezing of regular business operations on existing system, business continuity plan during migration, do’s and don’ts during migration, training plan, resuming of business operations on new system and support process.

14. Support process shall be detailed enough to cater different type of user queries. During initial weeks of system launch, support team would be loaded with queries and management of tickets. Till the new system is stabilized it is recommended to have some extra support resources for quick resolution of tickets to avoid any disruption to the continuity of business operations.

Throughout the journey strict governance shall be ensured. Documentation for all the activities followed for the transformation shall be kept at a central repository. This will not only help in smooth transformation journey but will also allow the post implementation team and users to have all the relevant documents and processes easily accessible for future reference.

Whatever is mentioned in this article is based on my practical experience and can be refined further based on the feedback from readers and field experts.