Our role at Xodiac in helping organizations with their digital transformations is to create clarity and visibility. Especially as we believe in the importance of creating visibility as the first step in the transformation.
In fact, with seemingly every company undergoing a digital transformation, there are three main requests we are getting from our clients.
- Having had some initial success, how do I scale?
- What do I need to continue to grow?
- How do I know I’m on the right track to achieve my goals?
Below I’ll give an overview of what we’ve seen help with these three concerns and how visibility is so crucial to all of them.
First off, what do I mean by “visibility”. The definition we use in our maturity model for Visibility reads:
At this maturity level, the delivery organization has visibility in the various aspects of the process and the progress of delivery along this process. Data is available to analyze various aspects of delivery and assess opportunities for improvement and other challenges. At this maturity level, the delivery organization is not necessarily capable of controlling how delivery is organized but is at least not running blind.
So what steps can you take to gain visibility for the three questions our clients asked earlier.
Having had some initial success, how do I scale?
Even when there has been an initial success of rolling Agile practices to a specific IT area, often a department with “digital” in its title, we find a need to create visibility. Although rituals have been put into place and a new language introduced, there are gaps in understanding of how value is delivered to customers. It is also common that although practices are being adopted within the delivery teams, senior management is not as onboard as they claim. You especially see this when the organization has not yet attempted to look at the following two areas:
- How the organization determines what to work on next
- How to fund persistent delivery teams working on products
By creating visibility into not only how the organization delivers value to its customers but also how it determines what to deliver, we create the ability for the organization to scale new practices as it undergoes its Digital Transformation.
To do this, having an objective view of how you deliver can be very valuable. This can be gathered from interviews, workshops and organizational knowledge. Translating this into metrics that measure the processes and making those visible are great first steps on the path to scaling your digital transformation.
What do I need to continue to grow?
Whether it shows you to have the right people, processes or technology to enable the Digital Transformation, having visibility enables you to find the gaps in your current processes. From there, you can identify the best steps to take in order to close those gaps.
Interestingly, we encounter this question in all sizes of organizations.
- Small organizations who have scaled beyond the ability for everybody to communicate with each other
- Larger organizations who often have too much complexity in place and need a path through it.
Creating visibility into what you have allows you to understand if it will support your growth.
How do I know I’m on the right track to achieve my goals?
This is one of our favourite questions as it allows us to help the organization map their goals to their current capabilities and what they are currently working towards. Providing this visibility through the creation of powerful roadmaps and supporting business cases helps organizations not only get on track but stay there.
Xodiac’s application of systems thinking to organizational delivery flow has already helped many organizations identify the next steps on their journeys. Of course, we don’t do it all ourselves, our ecosystem of partners allows us to bring the best team to the table to enable you to succeed.
Conclusion
Organizations, both big and small, are gathering momentum in breaking down barriers and using technology to drive value. This transformation of businesses using digital technology is key to ever organization’s future.
I’ll leave you with these two questions:
What is your biggest Digital Transformation goal in the next year?
When you get to to the 31st of December, what will you look back on and say, “I did that”?
Archive
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Directing Flow
Jan 5, 2021
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Automating Governance
Nov 30, 2020
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Metrics to help your team improve
Nov 19, 2020
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Taking on your new VP role
May 17, 2020
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Do I need a platform team?
Apr 27, 2020
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Knowing where you are on your digital transformation journey
Apr 19, 2020
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Securing the value chain
Apr 6, 2020
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This is the time. Every crisis is an opportunity.
Mar 31, 2020
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Face-to-face with the agile manifesto... Working with remote team members
Mar 17, 2020
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Coaching Distributed Teams
Mar 16, 2020
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Project vs Product
Mar 9, 2020
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Identifying the bottleneck
Mar 2, 2020
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Continuous improvement of work and psychological safety
Feb 24, 2020
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How to scale the transformation
Feb 17, 2020
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Making Digital Transformation Stick
Feb 10, 2020
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Minimum Viable Bureaucracy
Feb 3, 2020
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Application Modernization and Complexity Debt
Jan 27, 2020
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Locality, Simplicity and Flow
Jan 20, 2020
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First steps in making your Digital Transformation matter
Jan 13, 2020
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Reflecting on 2019
Dec 22, 2019
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Overcoming Organizational Barriers to Change: Part 3 - Dealing with silos
Nov 20, 2019
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What throughput can tell you about your team
Nov 3, 2019
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Be the change
Jun 13, 2019
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Overcoming Organizational Barriers to Change: Part 2 - Not seeing the system as a whole
Jun 3, 2019
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Different leadership styles
Apr 27, 2019
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The decline of Open Space
Apr 16, 2019
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Assessing maturity of a technology department
Apr 4, 2019
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Overcoming Organizational Barriers to Change: Part 1 - Blame Culture
Apr 2, 2019
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My journey: Corporate or Startup
Mar 31, 2019
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The Queen's Hyperloop Design Team: a lesson in Systems Thinking
Mar 7, 2019
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Importance of Criticism
Feb 14, 2019
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Understanding DevOps
Jan 18, 2019
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Applied Coaching
Jan 13, 2019
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Reflecting on the year
Dec 20, 2018
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Build powerful roadmaps
Dec 4, 2018
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Satisfying controls at speed
Nov 28, 2018
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Making every team thrive
Oct 16, 2018