Transformation Starts from Within

70% of transformations failed.1

Given the above research findings, for a company to achieve their first successful transformation is never an easy feat. As transformation result can be easily impacted by a number of confluence factors; external factors such as macro trends and internal factors such as organisation inertia. The landscape scan to identify such influential factors has be consistently monitored and adjusted.

The benefits of a successful transformation not only resulted in a major shift in the organisation capability. The next transformation would also be much easier as the foundation has been set up. To succeed, one of the pre-requisites is to assess the organisation readiness to identify the gaps. Follow which, a series of pre-engagement work are to be completed before the transformation officially kick-off.

Below elaborates some key drivers identified during a transformation. Having them planned out during strategy design greatly increases the probability of success. If they are excluded, it doesn't equate to immediate failure but failure rate is definitely much higher.

The overarching goal of the transformation starts with a vision. A good vision comprises of both the business goals and transformation goals. Question to uncover.

What is the strategic business outcome this transformation is steering towards?

After above is answered with concise wordings. Break them into feasible goals. Then use the following key drivers, People, Process & Tools to facilitate the transformation.

People

One key driver is assembling a group of internal talents as the main focus. They are the change agents/ champions who will be seeded across varying levels in an organisation. Act as a messenger, they convey the "change spirit" to their peers via their involvement in the project. They are the one who understand the grassroot problem first hand and able to demonstrate the transformation results and benefits. A role model for other employee to see the potential they can also achieved.

Intention of having champions is to convey the message

People comes first, technology second

An ideal scenario for a leader to steer a successful transformation is getting support from both groups; 1) a ready group of champions 2) commitment & accountability from management. Management, CEO/ Chief Transformation Officer (CTO) has to take this as first priority and account for the outcome. However, often far from it, champions need to be identified rather than volunteered. Management starts to take charge to transform only when crisis or a windfall opportunity appears on the horizon.

For the champions, a question from their perspective

"What's in it for me?"

Each champion's intrinsic motivation got to be uncovered and align back to a part of the transformation vision. Without this purpose-driven alignment, the motivation to execute the pilot project on top of their daily operation is exhausting. They will eventually go back to operation works as this is their main KPI.

Nonetheless, here are some suggestions to motivate the champions in project

1. Autonomy with accountability
2. Empowerment to make decision with concise goals, timeline & measurable outcomes
3. Experimental mindset with "alright to fail small" and quick execution. Team should be given authority to "kill" unsuccessful pilot and starts the next one with lesson learnt. Environment should encourage speaking the hard truth without penalty/ judgement.
4. Lesson learned to be shared among champion teams and applied to next upcoming prototypes/ pilot projects
5. Give the champions enabler tools for them to communicate, coordinate, ease of access to data during their respective pilot projects execution. Also simplified the project status report to the transformation lead. Example. JIRA, MS Teams, etc...
6. Define roles with competency road map tied to training courses to up-skill/ re-skill the talents. There are 2 groups of road maps to be defined.

One is identify the training to equip the champion ready for transformation. Example. Design thinking, data literacy, data governance, data privacy, etc...

Another is to equip the employee to be sufficient ready to adopt the technology. Example. technology training, data catalogue usage, etc...

7. Transparent communication in a consistent manner within the champion teams and across organisation.

Examples. Build community site to create awareness. Foster innovative solutions from the community and also build up the domain knowledge base. This creates a level of trust and a platform for employee to adopt the tool through successful showcases.

Workshop to educate employee on soft aspects such as compliance matters, privacy, data literacy. Alternatively, hands-on workshop to guide employee. The key intention is to show support activities by the organisation to transit them through.

8. Governance structure & processes for champion teams to work effectively.

Structure such as establishing standards, templates, terminology, common data language, communication tools, standard reporting guidelines, guiding principles, etc...

Processes such as project methodologies, governance processes to review pilot projects on data, ethics, legal and privacy, etc...

Starts by appointing an SME individual/ central governance team to govern ethics, legal, privacy laws, security, etc... to review the pilot projects. Highlight potential risks exposure and liability to relevant stakeholders such as data owner or product owner.

Establishing governance policy is often seen as a hinder and slowed down progress. Instead, it can be seen as "going slower is faster" when required to scale up the solution rapidly. It reduced the friction to reach the goal faster without worrying on the known unknown.

9. Management to remove impediments highlighted by teams during pilot projects or through transformation lead who is consistently monitoring and walking the ground to identify them.

10. Ideally, a signed team charter for respective champion team on the shared goal, values and house rules to ensure commitment.

Another subtle yet crucial consideration is the delicate balance between making a business value decision and technology decision. "Business before technology" are difficult to practice when such conflict arises. Wrong decision made often resulted in confusion and discontent experience for the end users. This piled up the technical debt which further lengthen the time to reach the targeted goal.

In theory, this is resolved if both product owner and technical lead are subject matter experts in their respective domains. Equipped with a good judgement eye based on past wisdom and lesson learnt. In transformation projects, champions come from different functions. They are individuals equipped with totally different skillsets. They may have gone through the training roadmap to close the gap. But in reality, when conflict arises, the judgement to make a good call may still be missing.

To minimise such grey areas, decision makers forming the steering committee has to be comprised of senior stakeholders. Selected domain experts in respective business and technical functions. They formed the central team and collaborate to create a list of guiding principles.

This list is then cascaded to the champion teams to ensure proper alignment during conflicting team decision. Also ensure decisions are not won by loudest voice or highest authority team member.

There are times where the transformation goal set for the team is too niche/ complex. In this case, transformation lead can consider either bring in external expertise or outsource certain area to reach the goal. Internal team still has to be involved with the external resources to learn the knowledge to ensure smooth running after hand over.

Below are some grey area decisions observed.

1. Selection of business use case benefits Versus Choice of technology
2. Advocate how's a new technology better users' daily work Versus Advocating technology feature/ advantage over existing technology
3. Measuring business outcome (e.g. revenue, bottom line, time reduction) as success factors Versus Measuring technical metrics (e.g. number of people using technology, time spent) as success factors
4. Assessing how an organisation behaves after post-implementation Versus Looking at successful implementation of technology after post-implementation
5. Planning on scalability of solving more/ harder business problems Versus Planning on implementing the next 'shiny' technology
6. Design better users' experience using new technology feature Versus Implement new technology feature to better users' work

Ways of working (WoW)

Ways of working (WoW) established in a transformation cannot be same as the existing ones. If the existing ones worked, there is no need for transformation in the first place. Accepting new WoW boils down to the receptiveness of open mindsets and how a management view and support the culture change.

Question on insisting existing WoW

Why keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?

An example, a transformation lead has to revert to existing WoW due to some project hurdles/ raised raised by senior management/ senior champions/ other influential stakeholders. Inevitably, this transformation will fail in time to come. Why?

Reversal to old WoW discourages the team to think/ work in an innovative way which stifles the creativity. Cue of such behavior will be something along the line "This is how we do things here" or "This is the company way of doing".

To counter this effectively, the lead has to first set up governance and processes (refer to above point #8). Then open for adjustment based on ground feedback by the champions. The lead also has to break down barrier of silo thinking and communicate openly on the new WoW benefits through results. Powerpoint slides won't be working in this context if the new Wow is not allow to run the ground with a feedback loop.

Tools

Tools are enablers to ensure project execution seamlessly, delivering business outcomes effectively and efficiently, creating insights and recommendation for appropriate actions or forecast or prevention.

Following are the classification

1. Transformation project tools for both the transformation lead and champions
2. Technology or Application tool targeted to roll out to enterprise-wide employee during digital transformation
3. Catalogued cleaned or usable data (data is seen as a mean to an end. Based on a use case, data is used to generate insights or actions)
4. Techniques to implement in the transformation project to reduce the frictions between the champions or employee. Equipped with a bag of toolkits is essential.

Project tools are used to communicate, coordinate project execution, monitor milestones for accountability and shared documents/ coding among team members. Examples are JIRA, Github, Sharepoint, ZOOM, Slack, Chanty, etc...

Technology or application are tool rolled out during digital transformation. Examples are Robotics Process Automation (RPA), Business Intelligence, Machine Learning platform, new CRM, PoS, etc...

Catalogued data are cleaned and stored in places with ease of access with clearance on data ownership, legal issues and security. They are also required to design in term of user experience for ease of understand data and ease of access & usage. If this is done well, employee are empower and self-reliance to innovate creative solution, cross-domain reports or prototyping ML using business hypothesis to get quick win. One of the most challenging work in a transformation but highly satisfactory. To get such quick win, it is always good to prioritise datasets based on highest business value before democratised.

Techniques toolkits are grouped into soft and hard capabilities. Hard capabilities such as digital nudge, business analysis framework (Blue ocean strategy, Growth–share matrix, Jobs to be done, etc...), analytics skillset (for digital transformation), competitors intelligence, understanding customer needs, organisation design/ behavior, etc... Soft capabilities such as coaching, facilitating workshop, negotiation, able to bring ideas & communicate quickly across all levels, storytelling, crisis management, (transformation lead) orchestration across different champion teams, etc...

An organisation wide project

People, Process & Tools formed the building blocks in a transformation project. There are other drivers beyond the project judications but equally important. Fortunately, these are within the CEO/ CTO's authority to get it done.

Equally important drivers are resource allocation between projects, HR to redesign of compensation package for new roles, competency road map, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI), and retention strategy. Financial team to allocate funding to feed the transformation projects while sustaining operation and measuring project ROI. Data team on data strategy, data policy and data governance. Technical architecture team on re-designing of architecture ecosystem to handle cloud, on-premise, security, business continuity, facilitating of employee ease of access, etc... Functions to re-design the WoW to cross-collaborate to create substantiate solutions. Soft aspects such as changing culture, education on data literacy/ fluency, assessing analytics maturity measures, etc...

Not all transformation are 100% successful

If one is fortune enough to choose which to lead the transformation. One can start by learning to identify red flags before decided to take the challenge. If not, the takeaways would be learned the lesson learnt after this partial successful transformation and better them in the next ones.

Personal Transformation

Lastly, before one can lead a transformation project, highly suggest to personally transform oneself. The guts to move out of one's comfort zone and learn new things takes courage and will to succeed. If one's is not able to transform oneself, it will be tough to empower and motivate others without any personal experience.

For the readers, turn the lens of an organisation transformation inwards to view your life.

When was the last time you decide to move out of comfort zone to do or learn new things in personal life to reach your goals?

Thanks for dropping by to read :)

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Reference

1. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/transformation/our-insights/perspectives-on-transformation

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