Digital Transformation without bumps?
Digital transformation projects can be riddled with challenges that may throw
your project off-course. But the fact of the matter is that digital transformation is not a luxury — it is a necessity to maintain operational effectiveness and competitive advantage. Having delivered over 120 Rapid Application Development (RAD) projects, we understand the digital transformation challenges you may face along the way. Which means we also know how to overcome them. So to help you on your journey here are just a few of our top tips to helping drive successful digital transformation projects:
1. Change your perspective
Put yourself in your client’s and the end user’s shoes and strive to understand their needs and wants. Understand how you are catering to their needs and identify the nuisances that may lie beneath the day-to- day. Collaborate with your clients. Invite or bring them into your team and consult with them often. Challenge them to develop ideas with you and always test your ideas with them. If developing for your internal teams, pretend you know nothing about your organisation and picture it from the outside: How do you see the products and services on offer? How do you see how they are ordered, delivered and paid for? Use your imagination — just think how your experience and your UX can be transformed. (it doesn’t need to be a revolution; sometimes small changes make big differences).
2. Learn with the market
Benchmark your competition; go beyond the look and feel and understand the processes beneath. Don’t limit yourself to your direct competition in your local market or sector — go global and analyse offers, products and services in other sectors. Draw on the best practices. Pick and choose the things your clients will like, the items that will improve the way your organisation interacts and the things that will make the difference.
3. Be digital
Digital is not a department. Digital is in every department. Digital results require involvement from people from across the company, providing input, contributing to the decision-making process and, above all, shaping and sharing the vision. Digital transformation projects depend on leaders across the organisation to deliver the change that will transform the organisation to truly enable digital.
4. Test, maybe fail, learn and repeat
Be brave and encourage people to experiment, try and maybe even fail. Stand
ready and open to embrace ideas that will sprawl from customers, workers and market alike. Be quick: for an engaged customer that contributes with a good idea the difference between appreciation and inaction is just a few weeks. Experiment challenging ideas with small groups of clients. Learn from your experiments, from your failures and from the failures of others in the market.
5. Technology is not the goal
Technology is key to enabling your digital strategy but it’s not the ultimate goal. Don’t make the mistake of trying to support every latest gizmo and gadget. Consider technology a key part of your strategy, evaluate the value it might add to your existing offer and, if it works, incorporate it into your experimentation strategy.
6. Measure, measure, measure
Evaluate your actions and create indicators that enable you to measure how
well you’re doing, both on what is important for your customers and on what’s
important for your organisation. Keep a timeline of your experiments and
compare them against your numbers to see what worked and what didn’t.
Use these indicators to trigger discussion within the organisation and engage
with internal stakeholders that relate to them and feel the variations as a result of the changes they’ve implemented.
7. Continuous, incremental delivery
Digital transformation is an ongoing activity. You’ll find that, to be successful,
there needs to be an organisation wide, long term commitment to the vision.
This is because the digital market place moves very fast and innovators reap
many of the benefits. The digital touchpoints of an organisation are never
ending sources of innovation that will push it towards the future, ultimately
influencing the development of new products, services and operations, and are key to the organization.
We’d love to hear from you, your experiences and what you think about our toptips. Mail us on mkt@truewind.uk and we are happy to learn and share :)
