Digital Transformation – Watch out for these 3 gotchas

Few days back, I attended a conference “Leading through Change” in Cranfield School of Management. One of the key themes was the pace of technology changes. Specifically how does it affect organisations & its people? It brought back vivid memories of my Digital Transformation experiences. On reflection, I can definitely share three gotchas & lessons. If you are leading a Digital Transformation or being a part of one, keep an eye on these three gotchas!

Gotcha #1:Partial digitalisation and/or digitalising bad process are not good.

How can we simplify things and deliver better customer experience – That is how most of the Digital Transformation start. Therefore, it is pretty useless if you digitalise only part of the process. In one of the Digital Transformation works, our aspiration was to digitalise all customer interactions completely. However, behind the scenes people were still holding on to the notion that old practice of keeping a physical copy for every customer order would continue. This was leading to i) Increased cost of inventory due to need for stationary and storage space year on year ii) Increased time & effort due to manual search to retrieving orders. After working out the cost & benefit, we manage to avert both. Thank god! Lessons learnt: When you do digitalise, do it completely. No half measures.  Don’t lose ethos of transformation. Digitalising bad process means garbage in & garbage out

Gotcha #2: Linear project execution to deliver change are not always suitable.

 Anybody with good experience will know that this is true. Yet with Digital Transformations, I quite often see traditional project plan & execution taking over when the pressure to deliver kicks in. Agreed, delivery is important but not at the cost of losing people. The role of the transformation programme is to help people manoeuvre their way around the change adventure. Whilst doing that, it is ok to be reactive at times & have small failure(s) along the way.

Whilst having a plan is a good thing, we need to blend good stakeholder management with those plans to increase effectiveness of the delivery. Here is one way to do it – As and when you deliver (or not deliver) each milestone, what change bombs will present itself? How will it affect the views of your stakeholders and specifically will it cause them to go back & forth on their stance?

Lessons learnt:

• Plans are means to an end so don’t jeopardise the end game for the sake of sticking to a plan. 
• Use traditional project plan in conjunction with stakeholder management to guide your change execution. 

Gotcha #3: Turning a blind eye to people’s feelings & emotion will cause irrevocable damage 

With Digital Transformations, there is a lot of focus on delivering a system that can be a game changer. That often drives the people leading change to concentrate purely on digitalisation and forget that people are very important. In this day & age, organisations will undergo number of changes at the same time. So the chances are that there is some other change ongoing simultaneously. Although Digital Transformations is for greater good, it will not be beneficial to everyone. People have to make radical adjustments. Talking about these adjustments openly will boost the authenticity of the programme. Allow people to share their fears & aspirations honestly in an informal setting. Initially such an effort might seem counterproductive but in the long run, it will pay dividends. Lessons Learnt: Change programme will affect people so don’t brush away their concerns  Emotions are a big factor but being transparent is the only way to be authentic

Feel free to share your lessons on how you are winning in your Change adventure.

Why driving Improvements beyond Organisation boundaries matter?

Business improvements and customer experience are topics that are very close to my heart. Driving business improvements is my core capability. Delivering better customer experience through improvements is something that am passionate about.

As an Improvement lead, my current adventure is to improve O2’s Change Process. On a daily basis, O2 uses this process to make a fundamental difference to its Network & IT landscape – whether it is maintenance, upgrade or rollout of new technology. With close to 100k changes a year, this is a key operational process. If this process does not live up to the expectations, O2’s customers are going to know pretty soon as the service will be affected.

Until recently, the focus has always been on the implementation and delivery of a change on the day. However with growing customer base and changing time, customers' expectations has grown and so has O2’s commitments to them.  Therefore, in order to provide a consistent customer experience across the piece, there was a clear need for improving the operational efficiency. However, there was a small challenge. Just like any other big organisation in today’s world, the end-end process stretched beyond the organisation boundary.  From the start of this year (2017), I dedicated my efforts to a key yet challenging area of the business that had 60+ (yes, 60+ vendors!).

Recently, I visited one of our key vendors’ office to conduct a workshop/awareness session with 30+ people. The session was very effective mainly because everybody shared the common ethos of delivering better customer experience through operational excellence. During the workshop, we discussed number of challenging issues and used a data-driven approach to develop a deep understanding of root cause & solutions to it.

Result: Until date, there has been 25% improvement. That means only one thing – Better Service and hence improved Customer experience.

Here is a pic of cross-border team in serious action mode (Sorry, next time I will take a better picture)

Final thoughts:

Irrespective of where you work, the key thing is to understand where your process is d delivering great customer experience. Therefore if you are:

• An improvement or transformation professional - You will have to break the mould and encourage organisations to be bold enough to stretch into its supply-chain. Only then, they can truly become “customer-centric”.
• An Operations Manager/Leader – Know where your process begins and ends from the customer experience point of view. Then look at how you can improve continuously to deliver better customer experience.

Heads & Tails of Island(s) of efficiency

70% of change initiatives fail, irrespective of their size. While this is true, many of the change initiatives are classified as failure not because it hasn’t delivered but because it hasn’t delivered a sustainable change. Generally, a transformation activity or change initiative (be it a small or big) sets out to change a sub-set of the organisation i.e. one or two divisions/functions within an organisation. As a result, an imbalance is introduced within the organisation, which is what I call as “Islands of efficiency” 

How does it get created?

For simplicity sake, let us consider that all things are equal before the introduction of a change. As a result of completion of transformation or change initiative, one part of the organisation starts to function better.  Whilst this is not bad, it creates an imbalance within the organisation. These imbalances aka “Island of efficiency” cannot be avoided because as the saying goes “World cannot be changed in a day” and the same applies to an organisation.  However, if the island of efficiency is not carefully nurtured, it can quickly disband to act as an opposing force to the introduced change and more dangerously, builds a culture of resistance for future change initiatives as well.

So what happens once Islands of efficiency are introduced?

As with everything in life, these islands of efficiency will create traits of thrills and spills. And these traits are inseparable because they are essentially similar to two sides of the coin – head and tails. Importantly, this means that the adoption and resistance to change is as likely to come from inside a change initiative as from outside!

What does the head side give? Essentially, three things

1. Create a Movement
                                    By starting small and wonderful, an organisation will be able to digest changes as it will be in byte-size chunks as opposed to dropping change in one big shot, which is often intimidating & scary. This helps build momentum and creates a right environment for the employees and leaders within the organisation to increase the momentum and thereby introduce further efficiencies.

2. Improve visibility
                                    By optimising one part of the organisation and improving how things are done within the organisation, it elevates the view of best practice to everyone – especially middle to senior management. At the same time, it also starts to uncover inefficient areas with proper insights to drive further improvement.
3. Approach to Improvement
                                    In this blog, I have made an inherent assumption that the approach taken to introduce the islands of efficiency is clean & credible and not quick & dirty. So a credible approach not only drives increased level of adoption but also provides a platform and mechanism for two things a) A template on how to improve things b) A template for how to work as change agents before, during and post the introduction of change. 

What does the Tail side entail?

Everything is not hunky-dory when you start & deliver something small. There are things that can cause negative impacts.
1. Slow bleed to death
                                    Changes generally will not have a sudden death; it will always be painful & slow. Why does it happen that way? The answer is simple – it’s called the law of equilibrium. Let me explain. Once an improved part of the organisation starts to interact with other part (read inefficient) of the organisation, there are only two outcomes:

a.       Efficient side of the organisation influences more  change to remove inefficiency

b.      Inefficient side of the organisation grinds away the efficiency to restore balance

The former is a direct characteristic of “Head” side in action and while the latter means, we are seeing “tail” side in action which means slow bleed towards the old status-quo!
2. Too much focus on the Island of efficiency
                                    By law of diminishing returns, continuous effort & investment in improving what is already good, whilst ignoring the rest, will increase the gap between the efficient & inefficient areas. Consequently these investments will struggle to deliver the planned benefits which will ultimately reduce the level of acceptance.
3. Loss of support & commitment
                                    This happens in two flavours. First one is very visible – this is when some of the key leaders and employees are frustrated and they move out of the organisation. Second one is a bit trickier to spot early on. This happens when some of the key leaders & change agents get promoted and the replacement, with no fault of theirs, does not clearly understand the improvements and subsequently starts to untangle the good work!

Now that I have explained both sides of the coin, what is expected of an organisation embarking on a change journey? The tip is simple but it needs extreme level of single-mindedness and focus – Keep fuelling the “heads” whilst not removing your eye off the "tails". And remember, tails is part of the same coin and heads can turn into tails if you are not careful. 

As always, I will leave you with one quote -  

“Once you start working on something, don’t be afraid of failure and don’t abandon it” – Extract from Chanakya

So never quit, once you initiate anything and never quit, until the goal is reached.