This blog is adapted from an interview with T5 co-founder Anna Broadhurst.
Weary of the words ‘digital transformation’? You’re not alone. Many organisations know that improvements are there for the taking, yet don’t know where to start and need a ‘partner-in-transformation’. Here, I unpack digital transformation and give you 3 key ingredients for the transformation magic sauce.
From process automation to full shifts to the cloud, my take on this is that truly digitally transformed organisations are ones that deliver better digital products to their customers. So customers, or end users must be at the centre of digital transformation – and you don’t need to be technical to understand your users. Technology is simply your enabler to deliver better experiences through digital. Every day you can see examples where the disruptors do this very well – think Monzo. They take a very lean approach to delivering value in slices, or what we might call increments, and then they iterate and improve. In this way, they test their market with new ideas, and they constantly do this. It’s a mindset of trying to understand the user more and more.
1. Start with the customer and work backwards.
With the mindset of trying to understand the user, mapping out the value stream is the first step. This isn’t about working out what you can or can’t automate or about what you can cut out – it’s about aligning your teams and your organisation around value streams. This will minimise dependencies and create self-sufficient end-to-end teams. These cross-functional teams will have more focus, fewer handovers, silos are broken down and you will optimise the flow of value and reduce the gap between you and your customer.
2. Pick up the pace…increase release cadence.
This is about improving your ability to get value faster – by speeding up your releases. The outcome here is to get your new digital products live as quickly as possible, reducing your time-to-value gap. Ways of tackling this are shortening the lead time by automating processes or perhaps going right back to the start and thinking about this when you’re first building things: think about how you’re going to release a service rather than just building technology.
3. Take an incremental, iterative approach.
We don’t want ‘big bang’ huge releases. Even if you’re doing a large cloud migration project, you want to figure out how you can do that incrementally. That starts to de-risk the whole transformation, gets things live and allows you to learn really quickly. We lower risk by taking an incremental, iterative approach – breaking things down and trying to release value quickly. And that is what the disruptors do – and we can bring this philosophy to so many organisations.
A stellar example of all this is our work with the Cumberland Building Society. Our client Paul Halliday was pleased to report that as a result of working with us.
“Our fast-paced, full stack delivery teams now deliver innovative and iterative change at a far quicker cadence than we did previously.”
