Forbes Magazine - Three Ways To Accelerate Your Digital Transformation
2021 May — Forbes Magazine
The pandemic has accelerated every organization's digital transformation. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it, "We’ve seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months." For organizations that had not yet begun their digital transformation, the pandemic quickly made it a priority. And those that had already started their transformation journey were suddenly motivated to pick up the pace.
But many organizations have reached a plateau. The pandemic forced many companies to take shortcuts and skip important steps in the transformation planning and adoption process. The initial sense of panic, urgency and energy has worn off, and now these organizations are struggling with fatigue and burnout.
In the last year, my company's field experts — Harry Koehnemann, SAFe Fellow and Principal Consultant at Scaled Agile, and Jeff Shupack, President of Advisory Practice at Project & Team — revealed some powerful insights as our team worked with hard-hit industries like automotive and aerospace and helped guide some of the largest commercial and government programs in navigating the disruption. We saw how organizations' rapid pivots left many workers struggling with fatigue and burnout.
Now is the time to build a solid foundation for your pandemic-accelerated transformation. Here are the three areas you should strengthen now to make sure your transformation better serves your employees, your customers and your bottom line.
1. Address organizational change fatigue.
Organizational change is already challenging, but the pandemic has blurred the lines between when work starts and ends, exacerbating employee burnout. Exhaustion affects the mental muscles needed for creative thinking, focus and resilience when confronted with obstacles. These are also the mental muscles required to make the digital transformation successful. We must address the burnout, complacency and poor morale of change fatigue as an impediment before we can begin to combat it.
John Kotter, the author of Leading Change, writes that the new practices we are introducing must be grafted onto our existing culture if we want to modify its DNA. Leaders need to be intentional in how they design cultural changes. Informal communities of practice can serve as organizational support structures to reinforce our desired habits. Leaders also must take time to communicate and celebrate successes. In time, new practices will replace the old habits and culture with modernized values and principles.
Organizational leaders should:
• Respect that the old way of doing things got the organization to where it is. Then acknowledge that change is necessary, and show how the old way is no longer helpful in moving forward.
• Be intentional in communicating how new practices improve performance. Celebrate those who exemplify the new behaviors and make a point to mention them in staff and all-hands meetings.
• Embed the new culture in hiring and promotion. Hire people with experience and passion for the new way of working. A successful transformation requires that you fill key, influential roles with people who promote the new way of working.
2. Relax rigid or prescriptive practices.
The urgency with which organizations were forced to accelerate their digital transformations resulted in a quick — and in some cases, reckless — implementation of new practices without an understanding of their underlying principles. Lean, Agile and DevOps principles have proven to be the most effective way of building systems today, but organizations experience suboptimal results when they apply practices without understanding the foundations that guide them.
Teams need to apply new practices and processes intentionally. First, they must fully understand the problem in order to identify which principle can help resolve it; then, they should explore a range of relevant practices that achieve that principle's intention.
Organizational leaders should:
• Focus on the principles as the immutable guardrails for applying practices. To lead effectively, leaders must understand the principles that drive the new way of working.
• Provide the time and space to experiment with practices and only keep the ones that prove valuable.
• Make your thought process visible and help others do the same by connecting decisions and answers to principles.
3. Repay technical and cultural debt.
When Covid-19 hit, the tyranny of the urgency caused organizations to focus on expanding their digital and online capabilities so that they (and their customers) could survive in a dramatically new business environment. With so little time to determine optimal choices, teams took shortcuts and created brittle systems that are now error-prone and difficult to change, which slows predictability and reduces quality. Companies' initial myopia led to poor decisions that have caused both technical debt and cultural debt.
Many organizations incurred technical debt when they changed their production systems quickly, with little consideration for their long-term health. And when people suddenly began working together remotely from home — with the added challenges of no on-site tech support, child care or privacy — they were operating without norms or precedent for how to do it effectively. This cultural debt must be addressed with better, more inclusive guidance for collaboration and work/life flexibility. To enable operational sustainability, organizations must pay down these technical and cultural debts.
Organizational leaders should:
• Establish guardrails for technical leaders. Ensure the teams' backlogs include the capacity to address technical debt. Some percentage of their work should improve the system design, refactor brittle architectures and standardize quality practices.
• Build an environment of collective emotional intelligence with empathy and mindfulness for your team's unique needs, concerns and feelings. Demonstrate authenticity to build shared trust among team members. Recognize that operating environments are limited when a person’s work is their home.
Now is the time to reinforce how we support transformational change. By addressing change fatigue, relaxing overly prescriptive practices and repaying technical and cultural debt, we can build organizations with the strength and resilience to respond to whatever comes next.
Chris James
CEO of Scaled Agile, Inc. | Read Chris James' full executive profile here.
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Direct link to Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/05/17/three-ways-to-accelerate-your-digital-transformation/