Roadblocks, pitfalls, wasted time, lost momentum…
Why are goals that seemed attainable so difficult to achieve? Why do teams struggle to determine what they should be focusing on? Why does so much effort go into getting projects approved only to struggle with delays and wasted effort?
The world doesn’t need another article explaining why strategies and projects fail. Alternatively, I’d like to share some thoughts from my perspective on factors that can build and maintain momentum. Breaking through roadblocks with technology and analytics leaders is what I do.
In this post we’ll explore Transformation Journey roadblocks and the mindset that can get you through them.
Beginnings are inspirational
Every year business leaders come together to define their annual goals for sales, costs, products, new markets, customer experience, and so on. These strategic business themes are widely distributed throughout the company with hopes that everyone will come together and focus their efforts on achieving these targets.
It’s a very motivational and inspiring time.
Then teams head back to their silos where they get caught in the daily storms of ad hoc requests and shifting priorities. They become overwhelmed with the expectations of driving projects that may or may not align with one of the ‘new’ strategic business themes.
People begin asking, “Why are we working on this? Is it the most important thing we should be doing? Are we moving the needle?
6 stages that produce roadblocks during your Transformation Journey
There are hundreds of methodologies, frameworks and processes from various organizations and big consulting firms. I’m not looking to replace these – although I believe most of them are too vague to be useful. Instead, I want to share how I connect bite-size stages in a way that will help you think about the overall journey.
At a high level the 6 stages fit together intuitively. However, approaching each stage requires a broad spectrum of technical, business, and social skills applied in ways that are anything but obvious.
Each pillar is driven by processes and methodologies to produce outcomes. Hazards lurk throughout the journey. These hazards are the consequences stemming from a failure to satisfy one or more Pillar.
1. Discover: Digital transformation is an investment and every investment should be anchored to some sort of return – financial, competitive, regulatory, or even reputational.
Ultimately you want to produce strategic themes that are aspirational, measurable, and clear. Clear enough to enable business and technology teams to link their priorities. And to understand what they’re driving toward.
Hazards at this stage include insufficient insights to guide decisions and using intuition instead of facts. Both lead to vague goals. Vague goals lead to frustration, stress, and waste.
2. Map: Digital transformation is most effective as a collection of discrete initiatives and objectives rather than as a single, monolithic program.
Curating a superset of potential initiatives as a backlog from which to draw upon helps to ensure continuous progress towards the larger objectives. Quickly producing explicit business cases is key to building a high-quality holistic view.
Hazards at this stage that impact delivering value include slow turnaround time to produce analysis and implicit business cases. Excessive assumptions within business cases combined with vague strategic goals will certainly lead to roadblocks.
3. Prioritize: Digital transformation initiatives are likely to require the same resources that are busy running business as usual efforts. It’s critical for stakeholders across the organization to have a common view of the strategic goals and team priorities.
With a qualified pool of potential transformation initiatives and a broad leadership consensus on the organization’s priorities, a roadmap of initiatives can be rationally scheduled and funded.
Hazards at this stage include assumptions, indecision and unresolved dependencies – financial, human and technological. A lack of clarity will generate confusion and stalled efforts.
4. Manage: Digital transformation requires focus and discipline to build and maintain momentum. You are not simply improving some processes for a business group; you’re driving change across the whole organization.
This stage primarily concerns itself with setting and preserving a proper mindset versus promoting any particular project management software or methodology. While it is essential to preserve the connection between an initiative and its foundational priorities, it is critical to establish strong communication and build trust amongst teams.
Hazards at this stage come from many angles – never-ending ad hoc requests, shifting priorities, losing focus and unforeseen pitfalls. Teams will have to remain resilient and trust one another to get through the obstacles that are certain to pop up.
5. Validate: Digital transformation is aiming to move the needle more than your competitors. And without continuous feedback, there will be no continuous transformation.
Ideally business cases and project goals will be crystal clear. In reality, you need to constantly adjust course based on activities that are happening in real time. This stage serves as an agile feedback loop to address changing priorities quickly and ensure that everyone understands how the organization is being impacted.
Hazards at this stage are heavily rooted in communication. Without a clear process to capture, communicate and address issues and impacts, significant time can be spent going down the wrong path.
6. Measure: Digital transformation is an investment and every investment should be anchored to some sort of return – financial, competitive, regulatory, or even reputational.
As each initiative comes to a close, a means of holding each other accountable to the execution as well as expected return must not be ignored. This is the opportunity to look back at the strategic goals that business leaders determined would drive great advantages.
Hazards at this stage not only include forgetting to actually prove that the outcomes provide a positive return – either quantitative or qualitative – but poorly defined strategic goals from the very beginning will make it impossible to demonstrate the value of your efforts.
Mindsets drive methodologies
In Good to Great, Jim Collins uses the powerful analogy of a flywheel to establish and reinforce the case that genuinely great companies share a corporate culture (a mindset) that encourages disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner executing against collections of smaller-sized, coordinated projects.
This approach is, by design, in stark contrast to the notion that great change can only be achieved through grandiose and sweeping initiatives led by iconoclastic leadership.
There are numerous methodologies that claim to bridge strategy and execution. Many are similar in their approach; however, the reality is that you and your teams face constant change, unrelenting interruptions, and other unpredictable (but inevitable) volatility.
Personally, I have come to appreciate the mindset that is necessary to drive real effectiveness from any framework. The key components of this mindset include:
- Establishing a proactive communication culture
- Building high-trust relationships
- Encouraging creative collaboration
- Providing confidence-building leadership
Be ambitious
A number of factors, both controllable and uncontrollable, can derail your plans. Staying vigilant requires a combination of methodologies to standardize your processes and mindsets to standardize your thinking.
Many technology and analytics leaders I talk to continue to struggle with connecting strategy and execution. Aside from resource management and skillset deficits, common roadblocks at the Prioritize and Manage stages can be traced back to hazards at the Discover and Map stages.
Addressing hazards at each stage and focusing on key mindsets will help you break through roadblocks to build and maintain momentum during your Transformation Journey.
