Our formula for running effective digital transformation projects.
Introduction
If you have been following our series digging into digital transformation and digital maturity, you will already understand most digital transformation projects fail to meet their objectives.
Every digital transformation failure will have its own unique set of causes, but we think that the whole process of big, org-wide, top-down digital transformations taking place over multi-year time frames is fundamentally flawed.
Our years of experience delivering major digital projects in world-leading purpose driven institutions have led us to develop a formula for effective digital transformation, and it involves turning a lot of the usual digital transformation model on its head.
A better way
25 years of learning ‘on-the-job’ has led us to develop four key principles for effective digital transformation: Middle out, people over technology, start tomorrow, and create a culture that accepts failure.
These are drastically different to how many digital transformation projects are run and can even seem counter intuitive. But we’ve found this is what really works to drive change and unlock the benefits of successful digital transformation.
Middle out
Big digital transformation projects are usually top down, imposed by a senior digital transformation leader (sometimes a ‘Head of Digital Transformation’). We think top-down projects typically have big blind spots. Senior leaders are often too far-removed from the detail on digital projects to be able to make effective decisions. Too often new systems are procured ‘for’ teams and not ‘by’ teams, leading to problems with adoption as new processes are imposed from above.
We find digital transformation initiatives are most successful when they’re being driven from the ‘middle-out’. This involves the leaders of project teams championing digital transformation and driving change across the organisation. These people need buy-in from the SLT to be able to change tools and processes, but crucially they are empowered to make these key decisions, rather than the decisions being imposed on them from above.
These mid-level roles are sufficiently close to the users and to the technical detail that they have the situational awareness to make the right decisions for their teams. Crucially though, this is still a small enough cohort of managers that they can easily coordinate with each other to standardise tools and processes. That’s why we advocate for ‘middle out’ rather than ‘bottom up’. Bottom up might sound great, but realistically it’s incredibly difficult to coordinate and standardise at that scale. It will inevitably lead to frequent duplication of efforts.
People over technology
Digital transformation projects can get too wrapped up in the tech, but fundamentally the most important thing you’re changing is people’s mindsets.
Tools come and go, but if you can instil a culture that embraces change, dares to experiment and seizes opportunities, then you’ve delivered something that’s going to massively pay off over the long run.
It’s also important to always remember who you’re ultimately doing this for – your users – and factor their needs into your decision making. When considering any new system, you should avoid making assumptions about what users want. Instead, involve users as early as possible in the process, take their input, and refine it to better suit them.
This process is equally important whether you are designing tools for internal users (staff) or external users (the public). Frequently we see user centric techniques only applied for external facing systems, but they can be equally effective when procuring or designing internal systems.
‘Start tomorrow’
Digital transformation projects are often big, slow and cumbersome. It’s tempting to spend a huge amount of time developing the perfect plan, covering every element and variable, managing a complex process of change across many years.
But no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, as fan favourite Helmuth von Moltke famously said.
In our experience, successful digital transformation requires momentum. You need to get buy-in from across the organisation, including those ‘at the coalface’. The best way to do this isn’t having the perfect change management strategy. It’s to remove sources of frustration in their workflow, which generates valuable good will to get them onboard with making changes to the processes and systems they use.
For this reason, we don’t think your time is best spent trying to craft the perfect digital transformation plan. Instead, we recommend you start by identifying and fixing the lowest hanging fruit. What isn’t working? What system annoys everyone and wastes their time? Start there. Make the easiest fix first, and you’ll show everyone that the changes you’re introducing are useful.
When trying to introduce solutions, think in terms of ‘MVPs’ – the minimum viable product. What’s the simplest version you can quickly test to see if it will solve a need? Testing a quick, simple version first lets you learn quickly from finding out what works and what doesn’t.
Creating a culture that allows failure
The last of our four principles for effective digital transformation is perhaps the most important, because without it change is almost impossible. You need to make your culture conducive to innovation by embracing failure.
Large organisations are typically highly risk-averse, and there are good reasons for this. But to learn, you must experiment. If it can’t fail, then it’s not an experiment.
To bring about the required cultural change to embrace experimentation, we recommend setting up a regular ‘show and tell’ meeting for teams to share what they’ve learned from projects and encouraging them to be as open with any failures as they are with successes. This forum will show that failure is a necessary part of the learning process.
How do you measure success?
As we’ve discussed, momentum is a key part of an effective digital transformation strategy. To maintain momentum, you need to be able to track your progress.
It’s important to establish a baseline at the start of your project so you can measure how successful it’s been. We recommend starting with a survey of the current state of your organisation’s digital maturity.
We’ve created a digital maturity survey you can use to do this, or you can create your own.
As well as tracking progress, you should also tie in digital transformation success into your wider strategy and goals. Digital transformation should help you deliver your most crucial KPIs, so you can track its impact by using those very same KPIs. There’s no need to develop a whole new set of metrics to measure the impact it’s having. This alignment of KPIs helps keep the project aligned with the organisation’s overall mission.
Next steps
We hope you’ve found these principles for effective digital transformation useful. For a deeper dive into running successful digital transformation projects, with insights from practitioners leading digital transformation projects in major charities and universities, watch our recent webinar: Digital Transformation you can start next week.
For further support in running effective digital transformation projects, sign up for our upcoming Digital Transformation Bootcamp, an intensive one-day course that will give you the tools you need to make your projects a success.
