Here we dive deep into the third key consideration when embarking on a digital transformation: organisation.
In our latest podcast, Clarasys’ own Ben Lover, Helen Morgan and Moray Busch explore what organisations must focus on during a digital transformation and the four-stage model of change to enable success. Listen here or read on for an edited transcript.
Welcome to another episode of CX talks.
Ben Lover: My name is Ben Lover, and I’ll be your host today.
Ben Lover: I’m an Associate Director here at Clarasys and I’ve been involved in several large scale digital transformations over the years.
Ben Lover: I’m joined by Helen and Moray who will introduce themselves in a second. This is part of a podcast series that we’ve been running over the last few weeks. We’ll be discussing the four key areas that we believe are crucial to a successful digital transformation. So those factors being the customer, the business, the technology, which you’re going to use to support your transformation and the organisation.
Ben Lover: Today we’re going to be focusing on the organisation itself. Before we dive into the detail of that, Helen and Moray, do you want to introduce yourselves, please?
Moray Busch: Hello, Ben. Hello, Helen. Great to be here. My name is Moray I’m one of our product managers and service design specialists at Clarasys. Previously, I’ve done quite a few mergers and acquisitions and post-merger integrations where we focused on bringing multiple small organisations together and embedding a change, forming a large organisation. As part of that, I’ve also focused on designing, building, launching, and embedding new products and services.
Helen Morgan: Hi, I’m Helen. Formally before joining consulting, I was a teacher, so that meant that change management and that capability was a natural alignment for me to want to develop and brought through a lot of the same transferable skills.
Helen Morgan: Currently, I’m a managing consultant at Clarasys. And since joining Clarasys, I’ve helped develop our change capability internally and be involved in a number of global transformations, both for technical and process change in the private sector organisations. And more recently I’m working on a service transformation in the public sector.
Ben Lover: Welcome, both, thanks for joining me. So today let’s dive into the detail then.
Ben Lover: So when an organisation embarks on a digital transformation what really matters to them, what’s going to enable them to be successful? Why does it matter? And ultimately, what can we do to help our clients be successful?
Ben Lover: Let’s start with the what then. So one of the key elements for me is to be clear on the value that you’re trying to achieve from the digital transformation and you get buy-in from all of the parties, both internally and externally to the organisation.
Ben Lover: So let’s have a short conversation about that. Moray?
Moray Busch: I think from my perspective, it’s really important to ensure that everyone pulls in the same direction and having that clarity on the value and the outcome that you’re trying to achieve gives everyone that north star to work towards. Also, the value that you’re trying to achieve, isn’t normally articulated from the business case of actually introducing the change as well.
Moray Busch: So the good news is that hopefully, you have clarity on what you’re trying to achieve and the value, even before you embark on your change journey.
Helen Morgan: I think one thing that’s important to note here, as well is being honest with the parties involved. So quite often everyone talks about transformation as being a great thing that’s going to happen and that’s going to make their lives a lot easier, but actually, not always. There are going to be some things that are a bit more of a challenge, particularly initially.
Helen Morgan: And I think a good way to get this buy-in is to be honest about the pros and cons and the challenges that people will face as they’re going through the journey.
Ben Lover: Yeah I’d agree. I think it’s really important to be clear on the value that you’re trying to achieve. Of course. Technology digital transformation is going to allow you to shed some of those outdated processes. And it’s going to allow you to shed some of the legacy technology you’ve had in place, but it’s also about adopting the new technology and re-imagining what you can now do as part of it.
Ben Lover: It’s not just a case of ‘Okay, the workaround that you had to do in your old system are going to go away. That’s going to make your lives easier’, it’s actually, ‘what can you now do as a result of the new technology’? And I think it’s really crucial in presenting that vision, being clear on the value to your organisation, which is gonna allow them to re-imagine the future, as opposed to removing some of the pain that they’ve already had over the last few years.
Moray Busch: Yeah. I was just thinking, when we talk about organisations, I think it’s important to remember that that organisation is made up of individuals. So people have to understand what that value means for them.
Moray Busch: So the standard question of ‘what is in it for me?’ is really important to consider as well, because we might talk about the value to organisation and stakeholders and talk about it on quite a grand scale, but sometimes it’s difficult to translate in the front line of what that means for the employees.
Moray Busch: And I think it’s really important that they understand the value the digital transformation is going to bring to them as well, so that there’s less friction in actually introducing that change and embedding it correctly.
Ben Lover: Yeah, I agree. And that actually brings us on to the next point around really understanding the people that are involved and the current pain and the feeling around the organisation before you embark on this transformation. For example, what’s the general success rate of the previous projects that the organisation have undertaken?
Ben Lover: Is there a good feeling of momentum that actually we’ve had a really good successful project that went live a few months ago and then you have the momentum and the backing of the people to go into your next one. Or actually has there been some bad experience around which means we should take our time and make sure that we’re operating at a pace which is comfortable for people.
Ben Lover: What what’d you think about that, Helen?
Helen Morgan: Yeah, I agree. I think also the current pain and feeling element of it for stakeholders is quite often they have a very sort of centrist view of what they’re looking at.
Helen Morgan: So they might not understand this current pain in other areas of the organisation. That this particular change or transformation is trying to help. So I think it’s important as a way of communicating that back out to the organisation to say, look, maybe you’re not feeling this particular pain, but there are colleagues of yours that are, and by you doing things slightly differently, you’re going to help them.
Helen Morgan: Even if you don’t see an immediate value or change to your way of working.
Moray Busch: I think that’s a really good perspective because actually what you’re doing then is you’re focusing again on the individual.
Moray Busch: And I think whenever we introduce change, it’s important to think about how the individuals can experience the change because that person could be going through 3, 4, 5, 10 different changes that we might not be aware of, especially in very large organisations. You could just be one of 10 programs that is introducing change and that person is being pulled into 10 different directions.
Moray Busch: And as a result of that, I think change fatigue can be a very real thing and we have to be very mindful and show empathy and understanding that the individual that we’re introducing the change to might be going through multiple journeys.
Helen Morgan: Yeah. And if you’re experiencing change fatigue, even if you’re delivering something that’s going to make their lives incredible, they’re still not going to be warm and open to adopting it. If they’re at that point in their journey.
Moray Busch: Yeah. So there’s an element around prioritizing then as well. Even if you think we have all these great initiatives and they deliver tons of value. If you try to do too much too fast, it’s not going to be able to actually embed, which is the core because you only really get a good return on investment once those behaviours and changes embed.
Helen Morgan: It’s quite an interesting point at this point in time because agile principles and agile way of working is such a current way of approaching any work that businesses do and particularly how they evolve. And part of agile is sort of delivering little and often and delivering value.
Helen Morgan: Whereas if you look at that from a change perspective, the interesting thing is then that could lead to change fatigue as a natural outcome of delivering lots of things regularly. So I think there have been some investigations into this about how you could probably mitigate the challenges of agile delivery in an organisation and help alleviate some of that change fatigue. Because instead of it being like a big rollout every time or a huge big transformation, it can be little things that aren’t such an impact to the individual to help minimize that overwhelming feeling of significant change.
Ben Lover: Going on to the next point, and I think that this is often underplayed, actually. So having an honest conversation with yourself around whether your organisation has the required capability to deliver the change. So often large organisations will ask for the help from firms such as ourselves, to get a consultancy to fill crucial roles, but we don’t know the business as well as the business does, and we do need key people around the organisation to be available to support us. And we also need those people to know enough about how to deliver successful change in a project world as well. So I think having an honest conversation with yourself about whether you have the required capability to deliver successfully is crucially important.
Moray Busch: I completely agree. And I think what we often find is that as you rightly said, we never know the business better than the business does. And also we don’t try to. But being experts in transformation and embedding change is a slightly different skill set. Because often what we find is that when we work with organisations, they have excellent internal support services.
Moray Busch: So they might have their internal training, internal comms, people partners, et cetera, but there’s a difference in providing ongoing support to actually introducing something large, new, that cuts across the entire organisation. And some large organisations have these functions internally, and they’ve been very successful.
Moray Busch: But more often than not, especially with the rapid amount of change that we’re experiencing through technology disruption, but also Covid – it’s very important to find partners or the skills internally that allow you to keep up with the pace and also respond to changes.
Moray Busch: One example could be Helen and I some time ago, worked on a post-merger integration where COVID hit halfway through the project and actually through our experience in delivering change programs globally, across multiple different time zones allowed us to very quickly adapt the delivery of the project and actually do that successfully as well.
Moray Busch: Whereas some organisations might not have had that experience across multiple time zones and different geographies, and they might’ve found it more difficult to respond to it. So it’s about finding the right skills and making sure that that gives you confidence to navigate the uncertainty. And it essentially then comes back down to a question of what level of risk you’re willing to accept because the reality is most organisations probably can do the change project, but it’s then a question of how quickly did you want to realize that value? What risk are you willing to take and what investment do you want to make as well?
Helen Morgan: I think also on that point whether or not the organisation has the capability internally to deliver this is not always the challenge. I think quite often, these areas or these functions have a day job. So they have to be able to support their staff and their employees in their ongoing day-to-day activities.
Helen Morgan: So when you’re asking them to do on top of that, some of these larger transformation projects, it can be a real stretch for them and they don’t have the capacity, rather than they don’t have the capability, to deliver what is required for the scale of some of these transformations that are ongoing.
Moray Busch: Completely agree.
Ben Lover: Great. Okay. The final point before we move on to the how. How you can be equipped to overcome some of these challenges and be successful here is around the alignment across the organisation. So making sure that actually before you embark on a change you’re very clear across the organisation of what you’re trying to achieve, who are the decision-makers, what is the right pace for the change as well. And just getting the basics right around the governance to make sure everyone is completely clear of where we are or where we’re trying to get to. And when it’s going to happen.
Moray Busch: I find that often, when we build a plan, obviously those plans change and the reality is that we learn new things, things happen and we need to adapt. And actually, good governance allows you to stay on track and stay connected and navigate the uncertainty with confidence.
Moray Busch: If you don’t have that governance, what can easily happen is that you get different interpretations of the truth or that different parts of the organisation move in different directions. And the cost of recovery for that gets larger the longer the project actually continues. So by having good governance, you ensure that any kind of divergence in what you’re trying to achieve is minimal.
Moray Busch: And that allows you to actually reduce any kind of risk as much as possible, but also reducing the potential cost implications of diverging in your delivery.
Helen Morgan: Yeah and I think one of the elements that can really help is having that agreed vision upfront, that we talked about, the value that you’re aiming to achieve and the buy-in from everyone.
Helen Morgan: If you can translate that into a way that can be communicated effectively, and you’ve got almost sort of a gatekeeper of what messages are going out to the organisation, that can really help in making sure that there is a single truth going out, everyone’s aligned on what to expect and therefore can all pull together in the same direction.
Moray Busch: Yeah, that vision I think then also translates into the importance of re-prioritization and decision-making. Because what will often happen is that something unexpected will happen and then you have to potentially make a compromise and being very clear on your vision allows you to make a compromise in the right way while still achieving the outcome.
Moray Busch: If you’re not clear on the outcome that you’re trying to achieve and having the governance around it, you could then increase the risk of making the sub-optimal decisions, which lead you down the wrong track. So I think having that clear vision is absolutely key.
Ben Lover: I think the point around decision-makers is key. I think in order to be successful and operate at a pace that’s going to allow you to stay in touch or get ahead of your competition you need to make decisions quickly. But they have to be the right decisions for the right reasons.
Ben Lover: So yes, you do need an appointed decision-maker for various areas of the transformation to be available and to be visible. But I think it’s really important to bring those decision-makers together as soon as possible. Because when we think of systems thinking, actually we can’t just make decisions in isolation without making sure that the decision you’re making doesn’t detrimentally affect another team or the ultimate vision we’re trying to achieve.
Ben Lover: So where we’ve been quite successful previously is yes, we do need appointed decision-makers for specific parts of the solution, but let’s get them together regularly and talk about what the decision means in the scheme of the overarching vision and make sure we’re making the decisions for the right reasons.
Moray Busch: I think that ties well into a point where I’m thinking end to end. And the point you mentioned around systems thinking because especially in large organisations, if you look at a specific department or a specific function, it could be that anything you make for them is optimal just for them but it’s actually detrimental to someone further down the line, like finance operations, for example, or servicing.
Moray Busch: So you need to be really clear in making sure that your decisions are in line with the outcome you’re trying to achieve and that they work end to end. And that might mean that some individual team might get a slightly less optimal decision output but it’s the best thing for the ultimate goal you’re trying to achieve.
Moray Busch: And it’s in those governance forms and as you said Ben, where you get all the senior leaders together to ensure you have an end to end view and a common version of the truth is absolutely key in enabling that.
Helen Morgan: We talked about the fact that this is part of a wider series around CX. And I think one thing that’s probably quite important to mention here is that we’re focusing probably on the change management for internal users or employee experience.
Helen Morgan: The project that Moray referenced previously that he and I worked on a few years ago was around their vision, was about delivering an excellent customer experience.
Helen Morgan: But we were accountable for delivering a good employee experience to make sure that they could facilitate a good customer experience.
Helen Morgan: So to your point Moray about making sure that you’re not just doing a change that’s optimal for one particular group, actually a good way of looking at that is aligning it to that original vision.
Helen Morgan: So for example, if your vision is to make an excellent customer experience, and we’re looking at the employee experience of how we can facilitate them to do their jobs brilliantly, to then, in turn, deliver an excellent customer experience, you’re less likely to end up working in silos and you’re less likely to be making decisions that only benefit one or other groups within the organisation. And actually, you’re looking at the end goal of that customer experience vision.
Ben Lover: Yeah. And I think that’s a really important point. And as our listeners will be aware from the series in order for a digital transformation to be successful, we’re not just looking at the technology. We’re not just looking at the customer. We’re not just looking at the business, the whole organisation needs to be pulling towards this change and aligned to the vision that we’re trying to achieve.
Ben Lover: And actually one of the key success factors is are: our people, your people able to make the most out of the transformation. So will the transformation equip the team to make the right decisions with the customer in mind? Do they have all of the data at hand, which makes sure they can focus on the customer, they can deliver an even better experience and all of those pillars have to land in order for the organisation to be empowered to do that.
Ben Lover: So I think It’s a really good segue actually into talking about what we can do to help. And we tried to keep it quite simple here at Clarasys and we have a four-stage model that we try to implement. Really just to give us that north star that those guiding principles to make sure that we’re asking ourselves the right questions to deliver a successful change.
Ben Lover: Helen, I know you were quite involved in the evolution of the model. Would you just give us a quick overview of the simple four steps and then we’ll dive into some of the detail.
Helen Morgan: What we looked at was trying to articulate what we do as an organisation in the simplest way possible for our clients to be able to understand what value they would be getting from us were they to ask us to support any of their big transformations from a change management perspective.
Helen Morgan: So those four steps start with: shape. So shaping the change, which is looking at the vision, aligning the business, making sure we’re all headed in the same direction and we’ve got the same end goal.
Helen Morgan: Creating the change. That’s our second step. And this is sort of understanding the current state of the organisation and how ready they are for the change, as well as then looking at some of our broader change management tools, which we’ll talk about in a minute and making sure that they are tailored to the organisation and nature of the change. And designing what would be required to then enable this transformation.
Helen Morgan: Then we move on to delivering the change. So this is once we’ve designed all of our approaches, we start implementing against these and we’re aligning with the technical and strategic delivery work streams to make sure that we’re supporting each other in the right way.
Helen Morgan: And we’ll be iterating at this point to make sure that the interventions and strategies that we’ve designed upfront are actually effective. And that we are providing the right interventions for the business at the time.
Helen Morgan: And the final one we have is: embed the change. So we want to make sure that if we leave from a transformation, once the project is closed down, that all of this great work isn’t lost.
Helen Morgan: So we want to make sure that there’s a good transition into business as usual and that the organisation is ready to continue working in the new way.
Ben Lover: Great. Thanks Helen. So maybe we can bring this to life a little bit and talk about some of the examples that we’ve used through some of those stages and where we’ve been successful using that.
Ben Lover: So if we look at shape the change to start with. Moray, in your experience today what have people done around this area to really set the project on the right standing to be successful at this first shape stage.
Moray Busch: In my experience, the starting point and Helen alluded to this is to start up with the change vision. So obviously this change will be part of a larger transformation. And from that, we will articulate a specific goal and outcome and a vision that we’re trying to achieve.
Moray Busch: And that vision will essentially enable everything else that comes afterwards to ensure it’s tailored to that outcome.
Moray Busch: So normally what we would do is we would work with the senior leaders within the organisation that are impacted by the change or that have invested interest in it to help shape that vision. And then test it as well with individuals in the organisation to make sure it’s meaningful to them as well, and that we can rally around it.
Moray Busch: And once we have that, we can then go a bit more into detail of the landscape, the needs, the problem we’re trying to solve, et cetera.
Ben Lover: I think the vision is crucial, but I think being able to measure the vision is also really important. In my experience previously, organisations have gone off into four or five day visioning workshops, et cetera, set a beautiful vision, which is on beautiful presented slide decks, et cetera and that’s the last time you see it.
Ben Lover: So actually, what are the key results you’re going to measure yourselves against along the way to make sure that everybody that’s contributing towards the project along the way can say ‘let’s really measure ourselves against the strategic impact. So is it revenue growth? Is it the lifetime customer value? Is it the time to market for new products, et cetera, making sure that whatever we’re doing throughout the state of the project, we can make sure that we’re making decisions that are based on those key results that we’re trying to achieve. I think that helps with the buy-in as well.
Moray Busch: Yeah, absolutely. I think when we go into an organisation, we need to start by understanding the leavers of the organisation that drive those KPIs and the metrics. Because through introducing that change, we would normally have success metrics.
Moray Busch: We would look at what are the dials that we want to change? And of course, as part of looking at the landscape we then look at the as-is and then jumping ahead a tiny bit now, but once we’ve delivered the change we then, want to look and see how we’ve actually changed the dial on that.
Moray Busch: But that’s why it’s really important at the beginning to make sure that we understand the key metrics, the objectives and key results early on.
Helen Morgan: One thing as well at this point is that you’re validating the need for change. So you might have an input or an impetus that leadership feel they want to do this thing, but actually, this is the point where you can actually check that the direction you’re trying to head in is the right one, or that there is a need for this to be this transformation in the organisation.
Ben Lover: So we’ve got a very well-defined vision and we’ve got some key results and metrics that we’re going to measure ourselves against. Then we’re going to create the change. So what do we do now?
Helen Morgan: This is around understanding the organisation at a more granular level. So you’re then getting onto the ground and talking to people, working day to day, understanding the stakeholder groups that will be impacted by this transformation and then understanding how their work will be impacted.
Helen Morgan: So we quite often use a change impact assessment. We have standard tools for this. This is quite a common change management tool. But I think at this point as well, it’s important to understand that there are certain things that you will always want to know, like how the specific processes of somebody’s work is going to change, but you also might need to know a few other more specific things, depending on the organisation.
Helen Morgan: For example, the customer impact might be something that you want to layer in as well. And then from that, once you’ve understood the gap from the current state of the world, to what you think it’s going to look like you can then start to design the approaches and the strategies. We call it a change approach, which is a high-level view of all the things that you would need to consider.
Helen Morgan: So for example communications and training are a very common thing that people think is the be-all and end-all of change management. We tend to prefer to call it engagement and enablement engagement because it’s two way. So what’s your approach or your strategy for either getting messages out to the organisation and it also getting their feedback back to you so that you can incorporate that into your designs. And then also enablement. So how do you make sure that the capabilities, the skill sets, the technology, everything is there for users to be able to actually be capable of doing their roles in the new world?
Ben Lover: Yeah. And I think this is crucial. I think the change impact assessment that we’ll be producing here. Yes. It should reference the customer and how the change is going to impact the customer. It should portray the impact that the change will have on the organisation, in their future roles. But actually, what are the mechanics? What do we need to do to prepare them to go into project mode as well? So, are there sessions around backlog management, prioritization, UAT, some of those skill sets that organisations sometimes take for granted, but can really trip you up. So I think we also have to assess the impact and the time taken to train people up to execute successfully on the change as well.
Ben Lover: Okay. So great So we’ve got our vision set out. We’ve got our metrics. We understand the impact that the change is going to have on our customers and our internal customers as well. Then we go into delivery as well. So what can we do to make sure we’re successful at this stage?
Moray Busch: Do everything that Helen just said.
Moray Busch: There are obviously different ways in which this can take shape. So I think the key thing I would say is that delivering the change can happen at the same time as creating the change as well and iterate. So you wouldn’t create all the change and then start delivering. I think one of the key things, and Helen touched on this, is the engagement, and obviously, you want to engage people early on as opposed to a week before you go live.
Moray Busch: So it’s really important to create the right networks, the right change champions, to look at the kind of training that you want to do.
Moray Busch: It’s also worth assessing what kind of launch capabilities, dev-ops capabilities the organisation has as well. So sometimes we would be managing a lot of that service transition, UAT.
Moray Busch: Ben, you just touched on them. The cutover weekends, that kind of stuff.
Moray Busch: But often organisations have those capabilities internally as well, in which case we would work together with them and advise them on how to do it because obviously at some point we will leave and we want to make sure that those capabilities exist internally.
Moray Busch: And we have successfully worked ourselves out of a job. So it’s actually a very good stage to look at the existing capabilities that you’ve identified early on and leverage them throughout the delivery of the project. So that the organisation is not entirely reliant on you and delivering the change.
Helen Morgan: And I think here is where you might see something if you are delivering that technology change in an agile approach, so sprints or scrum work and you’re delivering value in small increments often. This is particularly the point where you would need to align the change management strategy to that cycle of delivery across the technology as well.
Helen Morgan: But aside from that, you can also deliver change with agile principles, which we recommend very strongly as an organisation. Clarasys has agile principles through to its core, but we do like to take something like this and make sure that we are delivering iteratively. So not just designing the change strategy upfront, and then never straying from that approach, but actually making sure that we flex with the needs of the organisation. Testing how our interventions are being received by the organisation and making sure that we’re doing the best job we can throughout.
Ben Lover: And then lastly, in our four-stage approach and often the most neglected stage of the digital transformation is embedding and monitoring the change as well.
Ben Lover: So we’re live, we’ve successfully delivered a new project, but then the work isn’t done there yet, is it Moray?
Moray Busch: No, I think, and this goes back to the key metrics that you mentioned earlier Ben. I think we want to measure the impact that the change has had and often you’ll find as well that we’ll have launched dashboards to actually look at how have we completed the training. What performance indicators have changed as a result of the change?
Moray Busch: And when are we actually exceeding the baseline. Because normally what we’d expect is that performance or beliefs will go down directly after introducing a change because people have to get used to something new, but through good change management, that dip is very shallow and very short.
Moray Busch: If you don’t have good change management, then what can happen is that the performance actually, sinks below the baseline as a standard, which is obviously the worst-case scenario that you’re trying to avoid.
Moray Busch: So measuring the impact of the change is really key and then embedding it so that the organisation isn’t reliant on you as a consultant, is absolutely key.
Helen Morgan: Yeah. I think that one of the primary steps for this is making sure that there are owners. That’s the thing that often gets dropped. It’s like, okay, we’ve got all the processes documented, who is going to be the one that’s maintaining these live documents in theory, rather than them becoming static reference materials that never change as the organisation then continues to develop.
Moray Busch: Yeah, I found on the project where Helen and I worked together, one of the really good tools for this was to look at the roles and responsibilities, or even like a RACI matrix to look at yes, during the transformation, maybe the program or the project held some of these responsibilities and some of this change, but we need owners in the organisation to monitor, develop and grow the things as well once we have left. And we found that actually a phased approach where people in the organisation slowly pick up more responsibilities in order to drive that change forward long after we’ve left has worked really, really well in really embedding the change.
Ben Lover: And, and on that point around ‘long after we’ve left’, it’s probably time for us to think about wrapping up today.
Ben Lover: So thank you very much for listening. This has been an overview of the key considerations from an organisational perspective for digital transformation. So we’ve discussed the what and the, how, ie the tools and techniques that you can use to be successful in your transformation.
Ben Lover: This is the penultimate episode within our series. So the next one that you’ll hear from us is how to ensure you think about the right technology decisions as part of your digital transformation. But finally, I just want to say thank you to Moray and to Helen for joining us today. And I hope you’ve enjoyed the show. Thank you.
Moray Busch: Great to be here, thanks, everyone.
Helen Morgan: Yeah, really fun. Thank you guys.
This podcast series started with four key areas to think about to ensure a successful digital transformation. This episode gave a deep dive into 3/4: how to consider the organisation in digital transformation. You can listen to 1/4: ‘Why is considering customer experience in digital transformation essential?’ and 2/4: How to consider the business in a digital transformation‘ now. If you’d like to speak to Ben, Helen or Moray about anything discussed, please get in touch!
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