Digital transformation: 3 mistakes that hurt agility
Digital transformation is difficult enough to get right: Making a mistake that inhibits your agility can set you off on the wrong foot and prevent your transformation from succeeding.
Transformations don’t fail because of the technology. They fail when organizations neglect to develop better ways of problem-solving, testing ideas, and managing work (what we call agility). If you’re unsucceed in these areas, your transformation may be sluggish and at risk of missing out on delivering the true value you set out to achieve.
Before we get started – a quick note about the difference between “Agile” and “agility.” In this article, we’ll treat Agile as the set of processes and artifacts teams follow to manage complex work. Separately, we’ll use the word “agility” to refer to the thinking and ways of working that often come after a team has implemented Agile.
Let’s get started with three easy-to-make mistakes that inhibit your agility and prevent your transformation from becoming a revolution.
Almost every org we talk to starts their digital transformation at leadership levels in the technology organization. The mistake we see companies making is keeping it there. Instead of developing agility through deeper relationships with cross-functional teams, the initiative ends up internally focused on operational efficiency. This misses the opportunity to start a revolution.
Successful transformations often start with technology leaders. Then, one of the first things these leaders do is form cross-functional leadership teams and soon thereafter, they enroll entire organizations to find the best new business opportunities. This approach opens doors to ideas well-beyond the typical scope visible to the technology organization. The initiatives will be more externally facing and focused deeper on consumer needs. Meanwhile, initiatives that are internal and operationally focused get deprioritized. The result is a transformation that produces a bigger impact to top-line growth.
The challenge most leaders face here is that they’ve not previously had the responsibility to drive this type of change across so many other parts of the company. Being successful requires focus on these two things:
Agile started with software development teams 20 years ago and, unfortunately for many companies, it often remains in the ranks of the tech org. But its ability to streamline operations and boost results also offers plenty of benefits across the organization. There’s a reason why some folks are die-hard Agile zealots. They’re not crazy.
