Digital Transformation: Five Insider Tips for Unlocking Success

One thing we always talk to clients about is keeping the ‘why’ of digital transformation in sight throughout the process. It’s easy to get lost in specifics and technicalities, because there’s no doubt digital transformation can be a complex and technical thing to achieve.

But when you strip all of that away, what is it that you are trying to achieve? Digitisation is ultimately about business enablement. It’s about driving business improvements by supporting your people and your customers - making processes more user-friendly and workflows more efficient, removing unnecessary friction, increasing flexibility and convenience.

Business enablement is also all about bringing people with you on the transformation journey. There’s no point investing heavily in the latest cutting edge technologies if staff or customers don’t know how to use them, or don’t want to. So whenever we work on digital transformation projects with clients, we focus heavily on communication, onboarding and training.

It’s important from the very start to map out who will be using any new systems, how and when. These people need to be involved in the conversation. Work needs to be done to sell the benefits - after all, it’s their working lives that are being changed. And training needs to be provided to boost confidence, support a smooth transition and ensure maximum impact from the go live date.

Leading on from this, digital transformation doesn’t just happen in the IT department. It’s something that affects the whole organisation. There needs to be a collaborative approach between all parts of the business affected by the changes.

In our experience, digital transformation is most successful when cross functional teams work together towards common goals, and everyone has a shared understanding of what success looks like and how to get there. Yet this in itself takes work to put in place. Some of the steps towards adopting a team approach to digital transformation are:

• Setting a clear vision - having clarity and consistency about the end objective to aid common understanding.

• Building bridges - a cross-functional approach means challenging traditional team and hierarchical structures that persist in organisations.

• Establishing clear communication - providing the channels and forums to encourage two way communication between all parties is important for maintaining effective collaboration and a unified team ethic.

• Getting specialist help - driving behavioural change whilst delivering strategic programmes is notoriously difficult. Change management is a highly specialised field, so take advantage of the support of external partners who are experienced in making it work.

Often we come across businesses who want to take a ‘big bang’ approach to digital transformation - if they’re going to commit to change, they want to do it all, now. Why wait for the benefits?

We understand the drive to be ambitious with digitization, especially when an organisation really buys into its benefits. But we actually advise against trying to do too much, too soon. Success in digital transformation is usually achieved in incremental steps, by making small changes, assessing what works, altering the approach as necessary and then scaling to the next level. And repeat.

There are several benefits to this:

• If you go all in with sweeping changes across the whole business, you are taking a huge risk if something doesn’t pan out. It could mean major system outages, key functionalities being hamstrung while the problems are worked through, and a big drag on productivity and performance.

• Picking a smaller project to start with where there isn’t the same fear of failure sets you free to experiment and innovate. That’s the sort of environment where the best solutions are developed.

• Rather than having just one big end goal, you can treat every step as a success. Sharing and celebrating each one helps to keep motivation high and encourages further buy-in.

• Big challenges are best overcome by tackling them in chunks. An incremental approach can make even the most daunting transformation projects seem manageable.

The incremental approach described above ties in with Agile methodology, a model of software development that these days doubles up as a manifesto for project management.

Agile works, especially for tech projects, because of the reasons listed above - it breaks down big, complex challenges into manageable chunks, it minimises risks, it is built on the idea of continuously testing ideas and learning what works before moving forward, it encourages innovation.

But adopting an Agile mindset is itself a challenge for mature organisations who have never engaged with it before. It means moving away from siloed working, top-down structures and protracted decision-making. Agile significantly boosts the chances of digital transformation being successful. But it requires significant cultural change in its own right, the scale of which should not be underestimated.

In particular, Agile demands changes in governance and decision-making. It means delegating authority to project teams who are empowered to make decisions based on what unfolds in the development process. This requires both buy-in from senior leaders who have to trust in the process, and ensuring project teams have the skills and confidence to make strategic as well as operational decisions.

We would advise bringing in external expertise in the form of an Agile coach to support such a transition.

Finally, to bring things full circle, back to people. Digitisation is fundamentally about enabling people to work smarter through technology. But flipping that round, for technology to have the optimum impact, you need people with the right skill sets.

Digital skills are in demand. Recruiting people with the skills and talent to deliver the strategic, operational and technical side of your digital transformation journey isn’t easy. Nor is keeping hold of them once you do find them. There is a high turnover in digital talent right across industry.

There are, however, things you can do to find, attract and then retain people with the digital skills you need:

• Offer flexible working to broaden the location of potential candidates. Remote working is particularly well suited to tech roles.

• Conduct salary benchmarking to ensure rewards are in-line with the current market rates (this will also help to educate HR and the wider business on just how valuable digital resources are!)

• Emphasize the opportunities of the role to prospective candidates e.g. leading a project, building a team from scratch.

• Use your brand to appeal to candidates.

• Make it clear that you will actively support career development through training, future project opportunities to provide a fresh challenge, progression pathways in the business etc.

None of this is a guarantee that you will find the talent you are looking for, quickly at least, or that they will stay. Back up talent acquisition with a robust internal CPD programme that focuses on digital skills development for existing staff. Ensure that succession planning is also part of the process, in order to keep talent in the pipeline. And plug short-terms gaps with contractors and perhaps secondments from digital partners.

To mitigate the impact of high turnover, invest in high quality documentation for your digital systems so there is a formal knowledgebase to support new users and ensure consistency of approach. Make knowledge sharing a priority - the last thing you want is someone leaving and taking valuable knowledge about a system with them.