Digitisation, transformation and tracing the golden thread of strategic prioritisation
I recently presented Shelter’s Digital transformation journey at the 2022 London Digital Transformation conference, to share how we moved from a point that made it hard, if not impossible, to align digital delivery with organisational strategy, to a point where we can align more closely with business priorities, even when those change. This required us to scale our operation, change our technology infrastructure and modernise our ways of working.
Starting situation
For several years, Shelter had already been taking a proactive approach to finding out how a voluntary sector organisation like ours can approach and use digital to meet our goals. The challenge of the housing emergency requires us to be able to use digital culture, approaches and applications successfully — at scale.
As a charity, Shelter is driven by a cause and there is a strong strategic focus on our purpose. What we needed was the ability to see that golden thread and act on those strategic priorities consistently over time in an efficient and adaptive way, especially when those priorities needed to change.
Saying that, in practice, digitisation was often ad-hoc and not aligned enough. We had multiple teams working in different ways and to different standards. The teams struggled with all the hallmark issues of legacy organisations: user need was deprioritised, considerable technical debt was not addressed, and product development followed manual processes with no clear golden thread from the organisational strategy to our opportunity selection.
Observations from 2017:
User need was deprioritised
Considerable technical debt was not addressed
Considerable content debt was not addressed
Too many manual processes
Prioritisation not closely connected to strategy
Initial alignment at the strategic level
When I joined in late 2016 initially as an agile consultant, work was coming from all directions to the central digital team. Not only that, there were a number of specialist digital teams around the organisation, but how those related to each other was not clear.
Because work was coming from all directions, one of the first things I did was to introduce an organisational planning event to get an overview over all planned work for the next quarter. Upfront quarterly planning is not exactly agile, but I needed to make the volume and scale of work visible to understand the root of the problem. These quarterly planning events usually involved around 30 people representing teams from across the organisation. They took turns presenting their projects and we then jointly created a single column prioritisation of work that could be estimated and matched to our capacity. The planning event couldn’t have been any more unpopular and was probably one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done in my career. I was only making organisational dynamics visible rather than creating them. The problem at this point was not process, it wasn’t agile ways of working, it was capacity and opportunity selection.
I felt that it was necessary for Shelter to go through that pain, to understand and accept the necessity of creating an organisational digital framework that allowed addressing overall capacity, technology and our ways of working.
Feedback and engagement workshops
With buy-in from our senior leadership, we commissioned a digital maturity audit in 2018 that gave us a benchmark. Over the course of 2019 we ran a series of workshops with existing in-house teams about ways of working, practices, goals and governance which formed the basis of the operating model that was to become Shelter’s Digital Framework for our digital services and products, for all teams and digital practitioners in the organisation.
Normalising digital: communities of practice and cross-functional teams
How did we work through all of the feedback teams and stakeholders gave us?
Shelter is an ambitious organisation, so we needed to scale the rate at which we could build and test digital products and services. We already had multiple digital teams, so we used the digital framework to find alignment between those teams and created a rationale for how all teams relate to each other.
To avoid creating a digital silo, we didn’t want to centralise those teams and instead opted to try and normalise digital activities into as many departments as possible. The key enablers here are our communities of practice for different disciplines. They connect professionals of the same discipline across the organisation in a non-hierarchical way. Those CoPs are responsible for codifying best practice and meet regularly to share their experience of using their skills at Shelter. They review and create guidance — from how to write online content, to how to create accessible user journeys, to using user research, to coding best practice.
With the right mix of insight, design, product, technology and content design expertise, we create a shared understanding and enable prioritisation and opportunity selection.
In a cross-functional structure, we differentiate between team and function. We would refer to a function as a collection of related disciplines. A cross-functional team focuses on goals, and needs to contain all the necessary skills to start and complete the work to meet that goal. If someone is collaborating and working together daily, they should be in the same team, focused on a shared goal. If they are working in similar jobs or the same discipline, but working on different goals, they’d be in the same function or Community of Practice, but probably not in the same team.
Keeping hold of the golden thread: the digital framework
The alignment, once achieved, is not static nor stable.It would need to continue to be renewed and refocused constantly, returning to why we are trying to meet those goals, revisiting structure, ways of working, skills and roles. I’d go so far as saying that without articulating a framework for digital practice somewhere optimal for your organisation, alignment will be difficult to achieve and almost impossible to retain.
Shelter’s digital framework came out of a need to maintain alignment and scale the application of technology and digital to achieve our goals. It was needed to align multiple digital teams, yet give those teams more autonomy to do what they are good at, but this is crucial, in a way that’s demonstrably connected to our organisational strategy.
Inside the framework you will find information on how digital teams work, and how we collaborate with others — as well as a comprehensive guides section that details our approach to content publishing, Shelter’s house style , product and service development, user research, accessibility guidelines and an excellent set of video production guides.
The framework is always growing and evolving, by the time of writing we are about to launch a new section on content operation, and hoping to soon share more about how we are trying to develop ethical and anti-racist digital products and services.
Working in the open
In 2019 we launched a written document that articulated our Digital Framework to small groups internally — and in the summer of 2021 we shared the framework publicly, with the aim of being open about how we work, and what’s important to us.
The success of digitisation and service transformation depends on establishing a culture that liberates an organisation to make best use of their people, infrastructure and data to meet users’ needs and expectations.
That takes a lot of commitment and openness from any organisation and their leadership team. But the ultimate success factor in being ready to operate in the future is the willingness of an organisation to update its business models.
Sharing our operational framework for digital publicly and writing about our digital experts’ experiences was crucial to building that culture.
In the last few years, we learned a lot from other organisations and individuals in the public, private and voluntary sector who showed their ways of working openly, so it feels right to reciprocate.
“Grounding the golden thread” — Our ethos and user centricity
Lived experience is core to our vision at Shelter. In digital that means we put the user and the value we deliver to them at the centre of the products and services we build.
Through our user research function and digital business insight team, we work with a focus on creating usable insights and inclusivity by speaking directly to users.
Through a service design approach, we map out interactions, systems, gaps and friction in user journeys, regardless of the channel through which we deliver the service.
The Digital Lifecycle
Our alignment is anchored constantly in the digital framework defining how digital products and services are developed, tested and scaled, as well as operated, monitored and improved, and eventually retired when they stop delivering value. We call this the digital lifecycle, which applies to small pieces of work, as well large innovation projects, although of course with different cadences.
To align our digital services with current staffing and close the accountability gap that can emerge around poorly maintained services, products or pages, we actively take unsupported content and systems offline.
We’ve built a robust and well aligned governance structure; one of its early tasks was to locate ownership and responsibility for all services, products, websites, sections and pages and integrate them into a continuous improvement lifecycle. This is obviously essential to maintaining the golden thread of alignment with overall strategy.
Content managers and dashboards
That means each piece of content, every digital service and every product needs to have a named owner inside or outside of digital who can monitor quality, justify the ROI and connect the work and these assets to our organisational goals. That’s a good example of what we mean when we talk about the golden thread.
Business owners
Alignment with strategy over and above the level of content management is handled by a new additional role we created for this purpose using existing senior staff: we call these staff our digital business owners. They are senior leaders in the core functions of the organisation who can prioritise and arbitrate on behalf of their business area and they receive reports about content and product performance.
They can also reflect changes in organisational priorities and set goals (not solutions) for the cross-functional product teams aligned with their business area. In this way we can follow the golden thread from the most senior level to the most delivery focused operations, passing information in terms of our strategy so our alignment is always being renewed and increased.
Technology and Infrastructure
Having an aligned vision of Shelter’s strategy allowed us to see a crucial need to scale publishing, so we built a new headless infrastructure, leveraging structured content. This lets us shift both responsibility and execution to more teams and publishers, and bring the operation of web-content-based services closer to those teams that engage directly with our users.
Moving from unstructured to structured content has been very difficult and time consuming, but it means we can now make our content work harder by re-using assets and content, publishing into multiple channels and touchpoints. We’re using the same principle of standardisation and re-use with our design elements. To do that, we’ve created a design system and pattern library to make the creation of simple things faster. Knowing these innovations were aligned with the organisation’s strategy was key to making longer term decisions and not settling for a quick fix that would have built in technical debt that would become due whenever things shifted.
The success of digitisation and service transformation depends on establishing a culture of articulated alignment that liberates an organisation to make best use of their people, infrastructure and data to meet users’ needs and expectations.
That alignment takes a lot of commitment and openness from any organisation and their leadership team. But the ultimate success factor in being ready to operate in the future is the willingness of an organisation to update its business models.
The future of this approach
Consolidating and innovating on our aligned understanding, Shelter has just published a new strategy on how to address the housing emergency for the next three years. It’s quite a step-change for us, and without a doubt this means that our digital framework has to change again. This doesn’t change our focus on aligning our approach, it only changes our focus in line with the changing strategy.
What we do know is that we’ve focused on alignment to build the right culture, scaled our operation and built the technical infrastructure to reflect those changes in priorities and goal setting and successfully deliver against them.
