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If you have missed part one or part two of this three-part blog series please check them out!

Smoothing out the bumps in the road

Keep an open mind and understand that there will be hiccups. The key to success is to identify those potential areas of improvement and anticipate a remedy and quick pivot.

Successes/Challenges:

• Challenge: Change management recommendations for your audience to ensure a smooth transition from existing familiar application and data systems toward the new approach.
• Remedy: Keeping strong lines of communication open with parties involved. Understanding environmental and business limitations, timelines, and adjusting to those needs to maximize value to the customer in a “Version 1” approach.
• Successfully communicate the challenges of local/cultural business and organizational practices, local laws and policies pertaining to the customer’s operations, privacy and consent policies, and in-flight changes to data and records management standards.

Change is constant but that doesn’t mean it makes it easy.  Change is inevitable for an evolving business, but everyone may need time to adjust to big shifts. Change management smooths the transition process and makes sure everyone feels supported and comfortable with the change.  Through careful planning, communication and feedback, your business will see all the benefits with minimal discomfort to staff and other stakeholders.

• Challenge: Deliver on staff, customer, or member experience goals from project to planning.
• Remedy: It is easy to lose sight of functional goals in exchange for progress when delivering on a transformative project. (Example: Prioritizing project timeline over functional end goal) Work this into regular project cadence in order to achieve project goals.

When a business makes changes, we really need to dig deep and ask questions such as, “how is this change going to affect our projects, teams and departments?”  “What do staff need to continue to work efficiently?” To manage everyone efficiently for this change, ensure that your teams have adequate support and resources.  Priorities need to be aligned and communication needs to be prioritized.

• Challenge: Collaboratively gathering complete requirements from many different audiences.
• Remedy: Provide pragmatic functional solutions based on gathering influx business and technical requirements and documenting them into user stories and designs. This should be inclusive of designs for front-end and back-end user interfaces, data model schemas, workflows and lifecycles, and integration designs for complex functional business and technical data requirements.

Stay positive during the transition.  The work involved should not be underestimated, but neither should the benefits! Identify your concrete benefits and goals that a solid digital transformation roadmap will offer and use these benefits and goals to be the driver to motivate and lead your business.  Some of your benefits and goals will vary depending on your industry, but most companies will see reduced costs, increased responsiveness and flexibility, better customer service as well as more innovation and security.

Change of any kind takes time. Be realistic and thoughtful about your timeline and how long your business will need to adapt and execute a smooth digital transformation.

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