Leicester city and the art of transformation...

There are very few instances that warrant a great tribute. A Leicester Win is one such event, and it shook the sporting fraternity by surprise. It was a sustained effort over a full season to win the premiership title. Their approach articulates what Transformation is all about: Focus, Persistence, Dogged Passion through incremental efforts. A successful transformation need not be an expensive affair or time-consuming. What is required in a true transformation is incremental effort(s) towards a long-term vision.

Delivering a truly radical transformation or turnaround requires solid focus on short term imperatives whilst keeping an eye on the long-term vision. But how do we achieve both the short-term goals and long term vision with balance.  The key lies in structuring the transformation programme into small projects/phases. Each project/phase is an "incremental effort" towards a long term goal. Secondly, achieving short-term wins deliver secondary benefits: validation of business case at regular intervals, embedding positive culture within the organisation to name a few.

Take the case of Leicester city - when the season began, Leicester's objective was not to win the premier league, but to keep the team safe from relegation. They focused their efforts on getting the first 40 points to keep them safe from relegation zone. Then they focused on standing in the top-10 teams in the league. At the end of the season, they were proud winners of the season that no one believed possible. Transformation programmes should be structured in a similar way; small incremental efforts towards the end-goal.

It is said that 76% of the transformation initiatives fail to reap the benefits. There are several reasons behind such failures: lack of leadership, lack of communication are few reasons why transformation efforts fail. But if I look at the underlying dynamics in a transformation, the main reason is that the transformation team/manager is unable to provide a clear strategy, approach, plan to reach the end-state. If there is no clarity in strategy, approach, and plan, the leadership buy-in will be very difficult. Secondly, the communications will at best be muddled if there is no clarity.  If transformation team/manager is able to provide clarity on the programme, there is increased chance for leadership buy-in.

To that end, structuring the transformation programme into phases with clear deliverables becomes a critical activity. The structuring can be a high-level project plan and should be highlighted in one or two slides. The deliverables should all be aligned to the next stage or the end-state. Once we have the phases and deliverables defined, we can develop a detailed stage plan(s) as we progress through different stages.

Now finally before I close this blog, one might ask whether structuring the transformation programme leads to a successful outcome. The answer is NO. It is merely a critical first step in the transformation programme. A successful outcome depends on leadership involvement, communications, use of appropriate technology, processes, org structures, and importantly effective change management and embedding positive behaviors in the organisation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No Non-Sense Transformation

‘Context’ Many years ago, when we first started setting up shared services in a major technology firm, we embarked on a journey that had many unknowns. Whether it was scope of work, projects, technology, or processes – nothing was clearly outlined. We had few excel sheets to guide us through the process of setting up shared service organization. It was no more than a simple ‘lifting’ of processes from each entity into a regional centre. The initial days were tough – It was about power, control, and other hidden aspects in organization. The lower end resources who managed the day-to-day operations struggled to meet the expectations from the internal clients. We had ‘all fingers pointing at one direction: shared services’, and always for the wrong reasons. ‘No defined parameters’ Now, when I look back to the unwieldy phase – it appears that there were number of interventions that could have been employed to mitigate the organizational resistance. In my experienc...
Read more

Patrick Pichette and Art of Corporate Finance in IT Industry

I was reading through Patrick Pichette's interview with Mckinsey Quarterly last week, and it was perhaps one of the few interview reports that made me sit back, read, read, and read through again. Its quite an old interview, but worth looking given its relevance in today's fast changing IT landscape. The report certainly made me to think about many aspects of corporate finance and strategy. Patrick's  ideas are certainly commendable and thought provoking - From managing Short Term metrics to Start-Up culture. Here are some excerpts and my thoughts... 'Managing Short Term/Tactical metrics' Managing short term metrics is part of corporate life once an organization goes public. There is a general expectation from investing community to meet/beat analyst estimates and that puts a lot of pressure on C-Level executives. Nevertheless, it is required of C-Level executives to meet short-term goals as well as long-term vision. In the report, Patrick suggests that short...
Read more

The RASSP in IT Architecture

The QUALITY Attributes are those that defines how the system should perform over a business cycle/Time Period. Fundamental to good IT design is forecasting the business peaks and troughs and how the system should behave over the business cycle. When there are peak loads, systems should automatically be able to scale and perform with consistent service level agreements. However, there are several cases in the past where such quality attributes were ignored leading to loss of revenue. Quality Attributes can be either run-time or non run-time attributes. Clearly, from a business standpoint, the run-time consideration is of prime importance as no one would want to lose business because of a system downtime or a performance lag. The blog post focuses on the run-time considerations an architect should adhere when making architecture decisions. The following attributes are considered the most important run-time attributes when designing new systems. Reliability (R), Availability (A), Sca...
Read more