The 3 P’s of Digital Transfromation Project Success

What do Hershey, Miller, Coors, and Revlon have in common?

Unfortunately, they all have costly Digital Transformation failure stories to tell.

When these companies went live with their new solutions, things went south fast. After investing hundreds of millions of dollars each, these companies were left with a completely non-functioning process as the result.

There is an expression “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” This saying means that you are inherently safe when buying the well-known brand. You can replace IBM with any “safe” brand of your choice – Microsoft, Oracle, OnBase, Salesforce, or in the cases above, SAP. But in all four cases, the platform wasn’t the issue.

The 3 P’s of Digital Transformation Success

If you have done your due diligence to make sure your technology solution can meet your requirements, a transformation going sideways typically comes down to one of these three P’s:

1. People

Your digital transformation is about people, not technology. Adding the word “digital” to transformation can make you lose sight of the importance of people and change management. And if you don’t appropriately manage the people and change at the center of the process, you will fail. Even industry-leading tools can’t deliver on their promises if they are not properly adopted and optimized over time.

Here are three key areas to focus your change management efforts to ensure that your digital transformation focuses on both people and technology.

👁 Have a clear vision and share it early and often to ensure every employee understands WHY the change is happening and what is in it for them.

🗣 COMMUNICATE constantly about the progress and learnings coming from your efforts. Make sure your team is invested in the success of your project.

🥳 Celebrate wins along the way! Your transformation will take time. To keep the momentum going, you need to recognize the milestones along the way.

To learn more about the importance of people-driven transformation and change management, check out this short video.

2. Process

I sat down with Kyle Kumpf, seasoned PMO leader, to discuss the importance of taking a process-led approach to implementing technology within an organization.

He shared that a process focus is at the center of projects that he and his team drive. Simply applying technology to a broken process is like putting lipstick on a pig. The pig gets prettier but is still a pig.

“Layering technology onto a broken process, so a process that shouldn’t even exist, doesn’t create efficiency and value, at best it will efficiently produce defects and waste, at worst it won’t work at all.”

-Kyle Kumpf

Process-Led Digital Transformation

Watch the whole interview to learn more about a process led approach to digital transformation by watching the whole interview with Kyle here.

3. Partner

It may sound like a no-brainer, but you NEED to find the right partner for digital transformation. A partner will help you:

1. Solidify your vision.
2. Ensure you are re-designing your processes with a fresh set of eyes.
3. Help implement your solution.
4. Help you navigate challenges that may arise.

The right partner should:

• Guide you through setting an overarching strategy
• Lead your team through process re-design
• Work with your team to ensure that you are bringing employees along on the journey
• Assist with knowledge and change management initiatives to allow for user adoption
• Have a proven track record of success

Finding a partner that will stick with you when the process is going well can be easy. However, be sure to talk with your potential partner about their process for incident resolution and other challenges that are likely to arise during a long-term partnership. Digital Transformation comes with ups and downs, and you want to ensure you have a partner that will stick with you to solve problems, not strictly implement technology.

At Naviant, we have portfolio of industry-leading content and process management tools that can be implemented to make a big difference! But more importantly, we have a time-tested methodology that allows us to confidently walk our customers through each step of their Digital Transformation, from initial planning to solution go-live and ongoing support.

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