To Succeed at Digital Transformation, Do Less

Why your digital transformation is going to fail

Your digital transformation is going to fail

In recent research, consultancy firm Deloitte reported that 70 percent of digital transformations fail. That’s a shocking number, for sure, but if you’ve been through enterprise-scale modernization efforts, you’re likely not that surprised. In this article, we’ll look at how you can build a robust business case for your change initiative by starting with realistic expectations, ensuring stakeholders are fully engaged, and structuring your delivery plan to maximize value.

Unrealistic expectations

Change can be a risky and expensive process. There is often pressure to create an impressive-looking business case that promises big results in order to get buy-in from all the necessary stakeholders. The problem, of course, is that at this stage, you likely have a limited understanding of how you’ll meet those goals, who you’ll need help from to achieve them, or what challenges and delays you’ll face along the way. The only thing you can be certain of is that things will not go as smoothly as your glossy slide deck and rose-tinted estimates suggest.

Expert tip: Good business cases are simple to understand, and they anticipate a need for adapting and learning throughout the delivery.

Poor internal engagement

Change requires a combination of people, process, and technology. All three must work in harmony to deliver a successful outcome. Before you begin any new initiative, it’s important to talk to others to communicate your ideas, get feedback, and, most importantly, identify who can help you turn those ideas into action. Through these conversations, try to identify a few easy wins and understand where complexities might lie. Leaders who try to implement change without any prior consultation will quickly find themselves battling competing priorities and wasting valuable time arguing with detractors. By engaging people early, you can build a community to support your idea, help identify blind spots in your business case, act as advocates for your idea, and help you deliver by aligning their priorities to your cause.

Expert tip: Good business cases already have endorsement from stakeholders from across the business and continue to build their community of supporters through regular, transparent progress reports.

Monolithic approach

If change is seen to be a high-risk or high-cost endeavor, then it follows that there should be a full and detailed plan for every step of its execution. However, organizations will often spend months of their newly acquired project budget with consultants, program managers, and business analysts looking at the change in great depth before a single step toward the improvement has been made. The problem is that at this early stage, we often don’t have a strong understanding of what is going to work and what isn’t. If we’ve learned anything over the past 20 years of software delivery, it’s that “big bang,” monolithic IT projects usually fail to deliver a finished product in a timely fashion. These projects, thus, fall short of the original expectations.

Instead, your business case should be honest about your level of confidence in delivering the various components of change. As long as you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve, an iterative process allows you to learn as you go, build on previous success, and give you the confidence and flexibility to change course if required. Start small, and ramp up as you learn more. If you’re unsure about something, why not build a prototype or minimum viable product (MVP) to flush problems and prove the value early in the project? If you practice a discipline of learning through small feedback loops like this—and have a track record of changing and improving how you do things—you and the rest of the organization will build trust that you can deliver value, irrespective of what troubles might present themselves along the way.

Expert tip: Good business cases build trust by laying a pragmatic plan that can be adapted and improved over time as understanding grows.

Value realization

In that same Deloitte report, we’re told that, “In digital transformation, the transformation is more important than the digital.” Most of the multimillion dollar projects that I’ve seen struggle have involved the upfront installation of a new, large, complex IT system that promises to solve all problems. The project trundles forward, consuming budget, yet failing to deliver any business value until the majority of teams have been successfully migrated. Of course, many run out of budget before those migrations conclude.

To borrow another page from the agile playbook, leaders should instead aim to structure a program so that it can deliver a series of improvements over time. In addition to leveraging the momentum of small wins, such an approach means we can be more flexible in how we fund a project. Traditionally, we would ask finance for a large committed spend over a series of years that then takes a further period of time to recognize any value. This will make any good accountant twitch. How well can they predict what will happen in the business over the next five years? You’ll make many more finance friends if you’re able to show that your project will deliver small increments of value over time and can start, stop, scale up, or wind down as necessary. I’ve been in situations where finance has asked what I could achieve if I were given additional budget. I’ve also been in the position of closing a project down early, before too much money was spent, because it became apparent through experimentation that our vision wasn’t attainable—an awkward moment, for sure, but one where I gained credibility, rather than losing it. Mike Skaife, the head of engineering at digital for Jaguar Land Rover, recently spoke on the Tanzu Talks podcast about the cultural shift he’s seen at Jaguar Land Rover, as they move from linear investment in large projects with a fixed time/scope toward product development that is more agile in its delivery and requires continuous investment.  

Expert tip: Good business cases deliver value early and can quickly adapt to budgetary opportunities or constraints.

Takeaway

What’s common to all of these pitfalls is that people are overly confident in what they believe they can deliver. There’s a huge, voluminous chasm between pitching and provisioning a new service or change. The smart way to approach digital transformation is to approach it with equal measures of curiosity and simplicity.

With software, I’ve seen projects succeed more often when teams put in place a process that aims to learn as it goes instead of coasting on initial confidence in planning. Software can be incredibly agile. Compared with big costs like factories, software can be created and changed almost instantaneously. That is, if you’re running your software process in peak form. When you take advantage of the agile nature of software, you can make your business cases much more agile as well.

Many organizations are geared toward overly ambitious business plans that rarely deliver the full extent of their outcomes. It’s OK to just be ambitious instead of overly ambitious. The philosophy of “do less” does not have an eye-rolling rejoinder like “...to do more!” No, the goal is to keep doing less. This allows you to deliver a series of smaller, more achievable goals faster, cheaper, and more reliably. If in doubt, do less than you think.

(an adapted version of this article also appeared on the VMware Tanzu Blog)