Transformation is the key

Business transformation is a term which means to bring changes or transformation in the day to day business operations. This leads to a change in the goals of the company and helps them in achieving them through a different action plan. This includes technology or processes which helps them in working effectively within the current market scenario and help them in meeting with the dynamic working environment with ease and efficacy. This widespread organizational change leads to better customer satisfaction and employee experience. The companies need to adapt to the new changes to deliver their exceptional services to their clients while delivering value to the business.

There are various types of transformations which a business can do. Some of them are cultural transformation, management transformation, information related transformation and business process transformation. Hence in this digital age, change is constant and businesses should opt for changes if they want to thrive and survive in the market. The past cannot be changed. But you can change. The mistakes, disappointments, and poor choices have occurred, and cannot be undone. Yet they can teach you, motivate you, make you more determined and purposeful.

Today you have the opportunity to transform negative experience into positive power. Today you can take whatever has happened and make it into whatever you want. The future does not equal the past, and you stand right here in the present, able to create that future. No matter how far you’ve strayed from the path, you can turn right now in the direction of your choice. Today, positive, purposeful action will push you past the regrets, beyond the frustrations, away from previous mistakes. Look forward, with your goal firmly in mind, and go for it. All the ups and downs of the past have brought you here. Now, make of it the very best you can imagine.

Its directly connected to speed and nature of change in business environment. The org has to learn to adapt to it at the same rate otherwise your offerings will be rejected by customers. Not only that, due to digital, rules of competition are being rewritten. A traditional camera manufacturer faces competition not only from other camera manufacturers but also from high end smartphones and tabs. So how should the camera manufacturer compete? It has to question everything it does and what it thinks about itself and the market. The more honestly it does this job, better the odds of survival. More often than not, you have to abandon much of what gave you success in past and develop new ways of thinking and doing. This is nothing but transformation.

Business Transformation Implementation is complex but based on a lot of common sense, structure, governance and the use of a methodology, can be highly successfully delivered. Conversely, transformations inevitably and frequently fail when these factors are not taken into consideration or adhered to. There are myriad project management and change management methodologies but where possible, a transformation programme should adopt methodologies already supported by systems and processes in their organisations.

Agile methodologies are increasingly popular but may have fundamental role (definition) conflicts with other structures, which should be clarified and resolved before starting the programme. Beyond that, if also delivering a technology implementation, there may be additional methodologies used in the software development process, all of which must work in some kind of harmony to avoid duplication, waste and frustration.

Business Transformation is ultimately a change management exercise which necessarily must refer back to the drivers for organisational, operational, people and procedural change. Strategic objectives should align with the business case for the change and functional and line of business leaders must co-sponsor the business change. Multi-level plans and workstream packages with clear responsibilities and accountabilities for success are crucial.

At the core of transformation, and highly contributory to cohesiveness and success, is the development of an overarching and graduated target operating models, process designs and maps along with operational timelines that govern dependencies, incident management, hand offs and the timings within which tasks and actions must be taken under the overall organisational design. These should be underpinned by a clear training plan, risk management profiles for time dependent tasks and failover for critical activities and mitigation measures.

The management of the programme must be under strict control, governance and establish a set of benefits and metrics for measuring these. Fundamental to the programme is a team structure that is robust enough and cohesive enough to manage and resolve ambiguity, risks and emergent events and issues. There must be strong, broad and widespread elements of testing, dress rehearsals and phased on-boarding pre implementation to find problems and refine solutions and allow integrations between system/software changes, new platforms and few or reengineered processes to be proven in this process.

Transformation programmes must be clearly phased on a deliverable and/or workstream basis. This has implications for the control of the budget, the objective quality of what is implemented and of course the duration of the programme. The truth is that there is always tension in managing all three but I have never seen a programme where everything was sacrificed on the altar of Time that did not fail or need to be reworked and reverse engineered. Spending lots and lots of time and honest,painful conversations at the outset with all the right people from the areas of engagement can go a very long way to mitigating this very salient risk. Traceability to transformation drivers and requirements must exist to benefits realisation as well as to deliverables and their underlying tasks and validation activities. Clear owners must be agreed and allocated to facilitate the delivery phase. Cheers!