One of the key questions to address when initiating a digital transformation programme is “What is the best method to adopt for a given situation?” There are many permutations involved in any given programme of work, some bespoke and others atypical. Adopting an inappropriate method for a particular programme can often significantly contribute to lengthy delays and rework, costly overruns, dependency disconnects, and an erosion in organisational confidence.
There are many considerations when adopting your specific programme methodology, including, for example:
- Complexity, size, and scale of your transformation initiative
- What is the size of the user base, how many business units, suppliers, partners and wider stakeholders are impacted?
- What are their individual capabilities, capacity, willingness and operational maturity, and what is their history, if any, on dependency management?
- Funding and budget? What are the payment milestones and are all suppliers commercially locked-down with SMART performance measures?
- What does the technology landscape look like? Is this an upgrade or enhancement to an existing in situ enterprise application, or do changes involve complex new ways of working and new organisational structures?
- What is both the organisation and the supplier(s) track record of this type of programme? Are there multiple vendor/agencies and integrations involved?
It’s important to define the difference between ‘change’ and ‘transformation’ – for example, is this a new software release on a tried and trusted in-situ system? Or are you fundamentally seeking new or different ways of working, thinking and behaving? Is there a need to assess the change readiness of the wider organisation, as well as the maturity of each individually impacted business unit? The technology in question may well be ‘agile’, but is the organisation itself?
Whatever the situation, do not skimp or underestimate the people and cultural aspects of change and transformation. Ultimately, method adoption should be the decision of the appropriate programme governance body, but as a final thought the implementation of new ‘agile’ technologies is not necessarily the same as the maturity of an organisation’s capabilities, flexibility, willingness and readiness for change.
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