First steps in making your Digital Transformation matter

Jan 13, 2020

Peter Maddison

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.

Telescope

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”?

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?

Conclusion

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