Transforming people is not for faint-hearted managers
One of the biggest challenges in transforming a company is to keep a workforce up to date with the current skills needed to be part of this change.
To achieve a true digital transformation, you need a team of passionate, curious and mission-motivated people. It is important to understand that an organization, in addition to a clear strategy on technology, needs a strategy for people. Transformation can be significantly disruptive for customers, employees and end users alike. Beware the impact of change or your initiative may suffer consequences.
A possible way is to embrace the Agile methodology. This helps the whole team not only to think for successive evolutions (sprint cycles) but also to create a culture of learning based on feedback.
The Agile methodology aims at opposing the waterfall logic, i.e. the linear processes, with the introduction of small teams called “scrums” that work on different processes with a duration of two or more weeks called “sprints” which allow to evaluate and continuously reassess the status of the project and the direction itself.
At the end of each new evolution is important to analyse what went well and what didn’t. This phase in Agile methodology is called Retrospective.
Promote collaboration between teams
Often, an organization drops technology on an employee’s lap without helping them understand utilization and incentivization patterns. That leads to resentment, and ultimately, the technology doesn’t get used.
While technology teams are focused on specific areas and trends is necessary to create more transversal teams that can discuss innovation and represent all areas of the company in order to foster greater collaboration. For example, development teams in the technology area can focus on how to adopt an agile approach to different projects and how to use continuous delivery on all products. Finally, share best practices and involve IT activities (DevOps).
All areas can contribute to the innovation of internal processes and how they interact outside the company. For example, in digital transformation, the area of technology is more and more at the centre of business dynamics than in the past.
Adopt a startup mentality
Transforming people is not for faint-hearted managers. You have to be able to break the moulds and keep the bar straight. The path will be neither simple nor lined up.
A startup mentality helps to break the moulds and encourages collaboration between teams by creating working groups that work closely together.
Once these hurdles are overcome, everything can scale and grow globally and be able to make decisions quickly with the consciousness that all areas of the company can follow and change quickly if necessary.
