How Are Your Digital Transformation Efforts REALLY Going?
Whenever we come to a milestone like the beginning of a new year or quarter, there’s a natural tendency to assess how we’re doing. Are we on track to meet any goals we’ve set for ourselves and our organiszation?
Unfortunately, we’ve seen many leaders approach this as a sort of “going through the motions” exercise. They’ll often do some agile benchmarking, which can feel a bit too surface-level and focused on ticking off boxes. It can be easy to go through this type of exercise and give yourself a false sense of security. “We’re doing everything on the list!” you might say to yourself. But taking this templated approach won’t prompt you to do any genuine reflection or push you toward excellence.
So we’d encourage you to take some time to honestly assess how your organization’s transformation efforts are really going.
Here are a few symptoms to look out for as indications that there might be a larger problem:
You’ve added more headcount, but it hasn’t led to a significant impact on your outcomes
Priorities are unclear and goals aren’t aligned across different teams or disciplines
The cycle from idea to launch is too lengthy
You’re shipping features, but it’s not creating the anticipated value
Risks that weren’t understood pre-launch are materialising as work is delivered
People aren’t empowered to make decisions at the individual or team level, so decisions travel up the org chart
Functions or teams are siloed and don’t align on strategy or outcomes
Employees don’t feel valued (perhaps you’re feeling the effects of the Great Resignation firsthand?)
Do you recognise your organization somewhere in here? It probably won’t be one thing in isolation, but likely a few since many of these “symptoms” are interconnected.
So how do you overcome these challenges?
It won’t work to simply go through a reorg or implement more agile practices. These approaches might help you out in the short-term—you may be able to move faster temporarily—but they don’t help you ensure that you’re building the right thing. And is it really that helpful to move faster if you’re not any more confident that you’re delivering value?
What we recommend is a more personalised and comprehensive approach, or what we call an “operating model assessment.” You can think of it as a transformation health check. During this process, we meet with leaders and a cross-section of teams to see how they work together from strategy through to delivery. Our goal is to diagnose your specific challenges and help you decide on next steps to maximise the value you deliver to customers and your business through your products.
Our process involves:
Observing key ceremonies like planning and prioritisation sessions and stakeholder reviews
Interviewing and participating in working sessions with leaders, managers, core, and extended team members
Synthesising what we learn and documenting our key observations, findings, and prioritised areas of focus
Working collaboratively with leaders to align around priorities and path forward to address the identified challenges
And, of course, we can work with you to implement these recommendations and take the next concrete steps in your digital transformation journey.
We find the operating model assessment can be beneficial when you’re already in the midst of implementing transformational changes or when you recognise you aren’t making the progress you expected but have yet to determine how to address it.
If you’d like to learn more about the operating model assessment or any other services we offer to help your transformation success, we’d love to talk. Get in touch with us here.
