Insights

8 Value -Sustaining Principles to Power a Digital Agility Transformation Strategy

Ming Gong, VP Digital Agility Platform Solutions

Today’s business environment is significantly more challenging than ever before. To compete through COVID and other rapidly evolving geopolitical trends, companies with limited resources need to cultivate digital agility to seize new opportunities and simply survive. Industry forecasts project massive annual spending ($400B - $600B) on cloud transformation, legacy modernization, cloud-native development and Agile/DevOps transformation for 2021 and beyond. We’re seeing evidence of this on the ground as our enterprise customers continue to increase digital transformation efforts at a double-digit pace.

Large transformation efforts often fail or under-deliver due to many possible factors such as:

• Resistance to change induced by legacy organizational inertia/silos
• Unstable leadership commitment due to frequent organizational changes
• Complexities in technology and legacy systems
• Execution challenges resulted from the talent shortage
• Lack of focus on delivering maximum value

The Digital Agility Transformation Manifesto

These eight principles power the self-sustaining flywheel of transformation. once it gets moving, these new practices become self-perpetuating and continue to deliver value regardless of rapid shifts in the business environment. Like the Agile manifesto, these principles don’t advocate for one approach over another but instead highlight the relative importance between the two. To illustrate:

• Value OVER Volume
  Value realization ultimately fuels and sustains multi-year transformation initiatives. While volume-based metrics are important (e.g. # of teams transitioned from waterfall to agile; # of applications have full DevOps pipelines created, etc.), it’s more important is to show how these tactics delivered impactful business value (e.g. % reduction in cycle time to bring new product offering to the market; % improvement in the release frequency from the transformation; % improvement in the meantime to recovery due to the automation effort of the new SRE team)
• Pull OVER Push
  “Tops-down” transformation mandates are important. But overcoming people’s natural resistance makes it more important to create an environment that encourages employees to embrace change (i.e. Pull) vs. being forced to change (i.e. Push). For example, a successful legacy modernization initiative would clearly map out how the existing workforce will be upskilled and transitioned to the new target operating roles. Without that clarity from the start, it’s natural to meet a lot of resistance due to employees’ fear of job loss.
• Iterative OVER Big Bang
  Big bang approaches often fail because it takes a very long time to execute and to realize value. They are very vulnerable to rapid changes in the business environment, technology, and organization leadership/strategic direction. With limited resources and energy, large companies must adopt more iterative, disciplined processes for continuously assessing and “grooming” the transformation backlog. This ensures support for rapidly evolving business strategy and maximizes business value delivery with each sprint.
• Transparency OVER Silos
  When teams operating in silos, there is so much waste in areas such as R&D/technology investments due to lack of effective sharing. Operational silos are the #1 reason digital transformation projects lose inertia or fail. Transparency needs to be integrated and accessible across teams to illuminate the progress made on both the Means (e.g. how teams are maturing, performing, and sharing) and the End (i.e. business value).
• Active calibration OVER Punitive Measurement
  Establishing an effective/nimble metrics program to track transformation progress is essential. But not for primarily to judge and punish people who seem to be underperforming. When people feel like “big brother is watching” they find ways to game the system and skew results to look good. Instead, metrics should be used as a calibration tool to proactively identify improvement opportunities and to adjust the transformation approach as necessary.
• Pragmatism OVER Dogmatism
  “Perfection is the enemy of progress.”—Winston Churchill. This is especially relevant in the context of driving large/multi-year change through a complex organization. Instead of setting/enforcing prescriptive/rigid standards (i.e. Dogmatic) for components that can quickly become obsolete, companies should establish pragmatic guard rails and higher-level standards to align the “true north” and to enable distributed innovation.
• Culture and Talent OVER Process and Headcount
  “Culture eats strategy/process/etc.”. Large transformations will fail unless a sustained talent transformation plan is being implemented to fundamentally motivate and transform the employees to operate effectively in the future operating model. For example, when we are helping our customers with legacy modernizations, we will establish a plan from the start to map the current employees to the appropriate future roles, training them, actively engaging them in the transformation, and ultimately transition the new systems for them to operate going forward.
• Reinvest OVER Realization
  Companies often shift value realized from successful programs in order to plug budget holes elsewhere. While that’s sometimes necessary (especially in the current COVID world), it’s critical to reinvest into digital transformation initiatives to continually power the flywheel of transformation.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Digital Agility Transformation Manifesto and our approach to enabling value-driven legacy modernizations and digital transformation programs, watch our presentation.