PART TWO: Delivering a Digital Transformation Process:
Following on from part one in this series, where we sought to explain what is digital transformation, this next article will deep dive into a case study of a pilot project that was delivered for a nonprofit organisation based in the Global South, covering the mechanics of how the digital transformation process was set-up and run.
Here’s how we worked together…
Step One - The Team:
Like any significant organisational change, in order to succeed a Digital Transformation (DX) process requires a common understanding of the basic principles, a clearly articulated and widely agreed vision of what is trying to be achieved, and buy-in across the organisation.
Identify your Champion:
To begin with it’s critical to define a “champion” for the project. Who is the senior leader that is going to take ownership and responsibility for the initiative? Ideally this should be someone within the SMT, perhaps the CTO if you have one, or the Executive Director.
They will be required to engage deeply with the work, ensuring that it is smoothly incorporated with other strategic processes (e.g. 3 year strategic planning) as well as clearing any blockers in terms of organisational resources and releasing funding.
Establish a Core Team:
Then a core team needs to be identified. Since DX needs to be thought of as a “whole organisation” process from the very beginning, this should incorporate voices from across the different business units, from HR, Finance and IT, to Fundraising and Campaigns, to Communications. Even Service Delivery if that is a relevant focus.
Also, while key decision-makers need to be involved, the core team should involve perspectives from staff who are practitioners of business systems, who understand the day to day experience of doing the work and interacting with supporters.
Although it will be important to have clear and transparent communication about the project with all staff, and to offer moments for everybody to input into the project, or even to co-create with supporters, this core team will be expected to play the primary role in carrying the project forward from the initial stage through to the point where a DX action plan has been agreed.
Bring in the Experts:
You will also need an expert in DX who can support your organisation through the project. This is quite a specific area of expertise and having someone who can effectively facilitate a structured process to help unpack your DX vision and journey is essential. In this case we were able to leverage the organisation’s relationship with Salesforce as a strategic NGO partner to take advantage of their “Spark” initiative, and we engaged the consulting services of Brani Milosevic from Digital Leadership Ltd to act as an overall facilitator of the process.
With the team in place it’s important to have a common baseline of understanding, which can be as simple as providing some reading materials for the group, or could involve organising specialised training. What’s important is that there is a shared basic knowledge and a common lexicon for the concepts of Digital Transformation and Agile and what potential benefits they can offer. Even better is to provide examples of how other organisations have delivered DX, how they have changed people, process and technology, and where they chose to focus their efforts.
Once you have your team set-up and prepared, you’re ready to start developing a DX vision…
Step Two - Maturity & Vision:
To be successful, Digital Transformation needs to be an integral part of your organisation’s strategy, it cannot be seen as a side project or something happening “over there”.
For this, there needs to be a clear vision for the process, one which meshes with and/or extends any existing vision statements. Finding our way to this “north star” begins with a series of interviews with senior stakeholders, with questions designed to dig deep into the nature of the organisation’s operation and explore what an ambitious vision of the future might look like.
With the results of these interviews, along with a comprehensive reading of existing strategy papers, your consultant should be able to propose a vision statement for DX at your organisation, along with an expression of the specific value you will be seeking to achieve.
With the support of the Salesforce team, our pilot office was able to identify 7 key focus areas:
Single Source of Truth
Data Driven Decisions
Single Minded Focus
Driving Impact
Actionable Reporting & Insights
Efficiency of Digital First
Innovation Mindset
With one example of the kind of value to be sought being:
“Use data-powered insights to identify valuable supporters, potential leads, lapsed supporters (etc) with the aim to customise outreach. Leverage artificial intelligence to assess supporter propensity to engage.”
While these interviews are underway, this is the moment to perform a digital maturity audit, to help define the key areas for improvement and set a benchmark against which to measure your organisation’s future progress.
Maturity Framework:
Digital Leadership Ltd provide an excellent framework for digital maturity with an online assessment which will help you to understand your organisation’s digital maturity across 15 competencies, producing a report that provides overall results across 4 key areas:
Attitudes and foundations
People, skills and processes
Systems and information
Outputs and experiences
While this is a self-assessment, you’ll be able to see how your perception of maturity matches the average of other organisations, and more importantly, it will provide a focus on the areas where your staff feel there is improvement to be made, helping with buy-in.
You should endeavour to ensure that every staff member completes the questionnaire so that you can be confident the results are a true reflection of how the organisation sees itself.
With these assets in place you’re in a position to start to dig a little deeper, pulling the threads together with the help of the core team.
Step Three - Towards a DX Action Plan:
It’s time to get collaborative! Working with the core team, a number of DX planning workshops will be required. This is where the DX vision can be tested and ideas can be thrown around in a creative process. In our case Brani organised and facilitated this process, and since the work on the project was all happening virtually, we used MIRO as a space for
our virtual whiteboard and inevitable post-it note brainstorming exercises.
The goal for these sessions is to:
Get consensus on the DX vision statement and unpack its key themes
Answer the question: “where will digital transformation add the most value to our business in the next two years?”
Discuss what needs to happen to achieve the vision across technology and data, skills/training/culture, and processes/planning
Identify success criteria by which progress could be measured
Develop a top-line action plan for the next 3/6/9 months
It was at this point that we first started to encounter some turbulence with the project. Early on in these workshops we found that the proposed vision statement did not resonate with the group and that there remained confusion on what digital transformation really meant. Participants also felt that they hadn’t had enough time to meaningfully digest the inputs from step one before being asked to contribute to these discussions.
Focus and Prioritise:
Despite this challenge it was still possible to identify some key themes and unpack what they meant for the organisation, and we were able to reveal what an all-encompassing digital transformation might look like for them. The next step was to focus and prioritise.
The results of the digital maturity audit provided us with the model we needed to achieve this prioritisation as it indicated key areas for development (competencies) that, when combined with the outcomes of the workshops, helped us to laser in on the most important topics to carry forward to unlock a digital transformation for the organisation.
Additionally, Brani suggested at this moment to run a survey with all staff to get their inputs into what they thought should be the focus for each competency, asking the question: “What is the problem in this area that digital transformation can solve, over and above any other process or initiatives?”
Overall, the DX process that had been designed between Digital Leadership Ltd and Salesforce was starting to look like this:
With all this information in hand, we were ready to start taking the final steps towards a comprehensive DX action plan - it was time to build a house!
Step Four - Let’s Build a House:
Brani taught us that a coherent digital strategy has a number of layers, all of which work together toward achieving an organisation’s goals. This can be seen as a house:
The “roof” of the house Is defined by the organisational strategy and brand, i.e. what are the strategic goals that have been defined for the next few years, what is the overall mission and vision of the organisation, and what are the values that define how it aspires to operate.
These are fundamental pieces of the jigsaw that need to be in place before a conversation about digital transformation can usefully happen.
The next layer (perhaps we’ll call it the insulation!) is the “digital purpose”, i.e. what is the vision for the change that digital will deliver across the organisation. This may come in the form of the DX vision statement we discussed earlier, or an answer to the question: “where will digital transformation add the most value to our business in the next two years?”.
Then you need to decide how many “rooms” your house will require. With our pilot office there were three competencies from the digital maturity audit we decided to focus on: project management; data and insights; and innovation - so our house had one room for each of these areas.
How many Rooms?
When considering your own house and thinking about how big it should be, it’s important to keep in mind what is achievable - what can be managed in the proposed time period given available resources and the necessity to continue business as usual? It’s much better to focus on key areas of benefit than to have an overly ambitious plan that tries to fix everything.
For each room in the house you then need to develop a practical implementation plan, broken down into a “Now, Next, Later” structure over a set period of time. These actions should be concrete and realistic to deliver, with clear, measurable KPIs to define what success looks like.
This is where the core team will need to put their heads together and really think hard about what practical steps will be required to achieve the vision. This is a detailed planning process and the organisation needs to be ready to commit to delivering on its outcomes, so you should think about how you will fit it in with other planning processes that may be happening, e.g. your regular annual or 3 year strategic planning, where resourcing decisions are typically made.
For the pilot office the DX action plan was emerging at just the same time as their annual planning cycle was kicking into full gear, so this meant alot of work from leadership, and particularly the DX champion, to ensure that outputs from the DX conversations were fed dynamically into the strategic discussions on resource and budget planning, and that this workstream was prioritised in the overall decision-making across departments.
Landing the Process:
With the DX action plan shaping up it was time for me to wrap up the pilot project and report back to the global organisation on what we’d discovered. We hadn’t achieved all we’d set out to do at the beginning, but over the 6 months allotted for the work we’d learned a great deal, and we had certainly experimented our way to a coherent, repeatable process for initialising a digital transformation process in one of their regional offices.
At this point you may be feeling a bit cheated. “This is all talk! Where is the digital transformation I was promised?!” I hear you ask. Well, one big learning from this pilot was that we started out way too ambitious, or perhaps we were just a bit naive. We really thought we'd be able to get hands-on with bringing DX concepts into technology delivery pretty quickly, but that was wide of the mark. We underestimated the complexity of the topic and the size of the learning curve required for the people involved.
In the end what we delivered, and what we were able to offer as a standardised practice for the international NGO to use globally, was in effect a DX discovery process...
The 4-step Process:
That’s not to say that our pilot office stood still during this time. Projects to deliver key technology systems important to the organisation’s strategy proceeded as planned, including implementations of SalesforceCRM and the ControlShift distributed campaigning platform, with members of those delivery teams also sitting on the DX core team to ensure we had feedback loops between the parallel workstreams.
We had thought that these ongoing technical delivery projects could be rolled into the DX process, but in truth we weren’t ready for that, and it would have been impractical and disruptive to try and force it, so keeping an open dialogue between the teams was the approach we took to try and maximise the benefits to the organisation across all the technology work.
I’ll talk more about this in the final article of this series, where we’ll look at how you move beyond the discovery phase and into the delivery of your DX action plan.
Working on this project together, Brani and I recognised that our skills and experience compliment each other well, and we had fun! That’s why we decided to pool our skills to support organisations in digital transformation
If you’d like to know more please get in touch.
Cover images courtesy of Gratisography
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