With so many companies scrambling to integrate digital-first strategies, it’s no surprise there is significant complexity with new technology, legacy systems, and specialized resource requirements. The right strategy and team make it possible to navigate digital challenges with purpose and clarity, creating less turbulence for your clients, stakeholders, managers, and employees.
It’s unlikely that the program manager will be the face of a company’s digital transformation but that doesn’t diminish the amount of pressure involved in transforming a brick and mortar establishment into a stealthy ‘start-upesque’ competitor. This post explores the challenges project managers face navigating digital transformation at the enterprise level and building capability for sustained effort:
Platform Agility for Greater Flexibility
For most small and medium businesses (SMBs), it’s easy to find technology solutions that fit the organization’s structure. You will need to do far more than just a cloud migration strategy to call it transformed at the enterprise level. Enterprise-level companies are choosing to create their solutions through a process called digital engineering, and it’s changing the way they do business.
The goal here involves developing a solution that keeps your company’s security and workflow at the forefront and doesn’t disrupt your operations, but at the same time works seamlessly – and perhaps it even works with your company’s existing proprietary systems. Enterprise-level companies are developing their customizable digital platforms based on proprietary data and unique business needs.
In fact, due to the sheer amount of digital engineering going on in the world today, there are brand-new IPs out there that didn’t exist only a few years ago. For example, automobile dealerships are developing programs that keep them in closer contact with their customers. Healthcare systems, which have countless security regulations, create IPs that allow them to communicate more effectively with their clients.
Though it might sound like engineering your solution for enterprise-level digital transformation is a vast and expensive undertaking, it’s often more affordable in the long run when compared to the alternatives. What happens if the solutions you choose don’t work together seamlessly? What if you can’t find programs that work with your custom systems? These are real concerns that have real impacts, but digital engineering your solution can help you resolve them.
A scalable, agile, and flexible platform can make it easier to take advantage of market cycles or ramp up during a period of unforeseen demand. Digital engineering is genuinely revolutionizing the world we live in, and it’s giving companies a competitive advantage that seems challenging to overcome. From a project management perspective, you don’t have to be the expert but definitely understand what comes with building scalable data driven platforms.
You’ll Need to Develop a Multi-phase Digital Agenda
SMBs usually have relatively simple digital agendas, which are ultimately to-do lists that encompass everything a company wants to tackle during a digital transformation. The digital plan is far more complex for an enterprise-level company with its numerous levels, departments, and stakeholders. The best way to handle this part of the process is to create something similar to a mindmap that starts with the critical things you want to accomplish; things like security improvement, a better customer experience, more recent and relevant service concepts, and even automation of processes might be on that list.
As you branch out from your core focus, you start creating smaller, more manageable tasks. For example, suppose you’re focusing on a better overall customer experience as your primary task. In that case, you might break it down into chunks like improving customer relationships, reducing delivery times, finalizing transactions more quickly, providing more data and insight to clients, and more. If you’re expanding on more relevant service concepts, you might consider the various ways you can expand what you offer to include new, more in-demand products or services to your clients.
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During the final phase, each of the second phase tasks will be closely examined and expanded upon to develop a final to-do list consisting of manageable chunks of actionable tasks. For another example, assume you’ve decided to focus on providing more insight to your clients, which is part of your more significant customer experience task. In this phase, you’ll focus on exactly how and what your digital transformation could do to help you accomplish that goal. Things like digitally engineering a data delivery solution might be one of the actionable tasks on that list and implementing a better customer communication and engagement feature might be another. Your core infrastructure should make smaller nodes interchangeable with little to no disruption.
Finding the Right Integration Partner
Finding the right technology may be time consuming but It’s the cost of implementing, caring, and feeding for new systems that make rapid technological change prohibitive. In the age of software as a service, you can pay a monthly fee and make some of those pains disappear; the vendor will provide the resources and expertise needed to manage the new solution.
That doesn’t mean selecting the right vendor is simple; you will still need to consider whether they have the level of support and service capability you will need now and in the future. Establishing a process for vendor selection and management will help you clarify how to manage your vendor relationship ups and downs. Remember, your in this for the long haul, look for business practices that support collaboration and customer service. Try to opt for a team approach involving procurement and legal, they often have insights that might be overlooked from a PM perspective.
Implementing Legacy Management
Legacy management is the process via which you line out exactly how you’re going to modify your Mustang and turn it into a multi-million-dollar race car fit for a NASCAR race, and you will need to put a skilled driver behind the wheel. For your company, it means analyzing everything you have now and transitioning into the things you want to have at the end of your digital transformation so that you can keep up with – or even pass – the competition.
There are five main areas of focus when it comes to legacy management:
- Optimizing the requirements for the IT network and infrastructure. Simply put, it’s important to make sure that your network and infrastructure will be able to support any required changes for the move to digital. This includes things like enhanced security, scalable hardware, or handling increased network traffic, for example.
- Globalizing to save money. More often than not, larger companies can leverage globalization to their advantage by managing international operations more efficiently. Better still, you can utilize digital platforms and tools to introduce your products and services into fast-growing markets all over the world – and in real-time.
- Reaching out to vendors and suppliers for discounts and deals. It’s always a good idea to renegotiate with your vendors and suppliers from time to time, especially if your needs change. Often, you’ll find that you can bundle products and services together for incredible savings.
- Getting rid of extras that your company no longer needs. Between globalization efforts and renegotiating with your vendors and suppliers, you might find that you no longer need certain platforms, services, or departments within your own organization.
- Automating anything that can be automated safely and securely. If you’re still relying on older data entry methods, now is the perfect time to look for processes that can capture, enter, and process data automatically, which frees up your employees for other tasks and saves you a great deal of time and money.
Legacy management is a complex process that requires time and attention to detail that you will likely find in a project management plan. Decommissioning old solutions are part of the transformation process and should not be overlooked.
Implementing a Change Management Plan
Perhaps the trickiest part of navigating a digital transformation is keeping your entire company engaged throughout the process. People don’t like change, and that’s especially true in the workplace. As an enterprise-level company, you’ve probably had some of your employees with you for many, many years – and they’ve probably gotten used to the day-to-day workflow, as well.
A good formula to remember is that any disruptions to workflow are also disruptions to the workforce, and the earlier you can plan for these, the more likely you will be to overcome fears and objections that can lead to unhappy employees and stakeholders.
To define change management, you could say that it’s a series of methods and skills via which a business plans for and implements both internal and external process changes. Though there are planning skills and technical skills involved, there is another set of skills required that can be difficult to find in today’s day and age – people skills and the ability to talk to people face-to-face about their concerns.
There are eight key steps in successfully implementing change management:
- Defining the change(s);
- Selecting your change management team(s);
- Identify management sponsorship (management personnel on board with the proposed changes) and gain their commitment to the process;
- Create a plan for implementation as well as KPIs/metrics that you can measure;
- Implement slowly but surely over time wherever you can;
- Collect data and compare it to your KPIs/metrics during the analysis;
- Look for gaps and resistance in the plan and quantify them; and
- Make changes to the overall plan and go back to implementation.
he last four steps may need to be repeated a few times, but with each new data analysis, you get closer to reaching the ultimate goal – a solid digital transformation with happy stakeholders and employees. It’s a great idea to hire a digital transformation partner with exceptional change management skills to help you navigate through each step, as well.
Project Management and Agile Practices
To manage a program or project of this scale, you will need to determine the gap between the resources you have in-house and the resources you need to procure. Understanding your organization’s track record in implementing large-scale projects will help you determine the governance level that needs to be implemented before you start. Not all companies have an established PMO, in that case, it’s wise to clarify who and what principles will guide project delivery.
An organic approach will probably not cut it based on the level of risk, impact, and interdependency involved. Hiring a project manager is essential but understanding how your organizations deliver projects will help the decision-making process for tools and resources needed. Explore options like flexible talents, virtual PMO, online project management, and agile tools for different project delivery options.
Undergoing Skills Transformation at Every Level
Finally, on the topic of people skills and change management, it’s important to examine a different kind of people skills – your employees’ skills and abilities. In this particular case, skills transformation refers to your stakeholders’, managers’, and employees’ abilities to incorporate and adopt new technologies and systems into their everyday workflow. Labor is transforming all over the world thanks to the digital revolution. When you really think about it, a digital transformation is a small revolution occurring within the boundaries of your organization.
There are five broad steps involved in skills transformation that you should carefully consider before taking the first step toward your digital transformation, they are:
- Determining the skills your managers and employees need based on the goals and strategies of your digital transformation. These skills will vary a great deal depending on your organization’s size, the size of each department, the industry and niche your company falls under, the size of your budget, and even any major concerns that your stakeholders or managers are expressing about the digital transformation itself. All of these are critical considerations, so spend some time with each one.
- Assessing the size of the current skills gap. What kind of skills will individuals within your organization need to get from Point A to Point B? Determining the fundamental skills gap through assessments and interviews can help you figure out what you need to do to bridge that gap in the long run.
- Creating a learning plan. Once you’ve determined the size of the learning gap, the next step is to create a curriculum, or learning plan, that will help your employees reach the level of skills they need to work in your newly-transformed digital workplace.
- Give managers and team leaders the info they need to best support their teams. Giving these individuals access to helpful research and other resources can help them develop their teams in a way that best supports your company’s initiatives. Ideally, any real skills training should begin with the managers and then trickle over into their teams. When your managers teach their teams new skills, they’re reinforcing those skills within themselves, too.
- Launch the skills transformation effort organization-wide. Though your managers and executives may have already had some training, it’s always a good idea to ensure everyone within the organization stays on the same page throughout the entire process. What’s more, you’ll be accomplishing goals across the entire organization, which gives you plenty of reason to celebrate and boost morale in a challenging environment and time.
Digital transformation at the enterprise level is far more complicated than for SMBs. Though the principles remain the same, the number of people involved in the effort – and the steps you’ll need to take to reach your goals – are far more numerous. The cost of getting it wrong far outweighed the cost of getting it right, not to mention the embarrassment to your company and sullied reputation from preventable missteps. To be successful your program or project needs to be collaborative and inclusive of stakeholders.
