The Digital train has left the station. Its pace has increased exponentially in the last 5 years. The stations of eCommerce and big data are well in the past, as the train ploughs on – disrupting industry after industry, building momentum all the time. For large scale enterprises with traditional technology systems, who missed the train, its progress can be disconcerting and even the concept of “digital” appears increasingly illusive.

Digital, in this context, is technology that connects and supports the interaction between businesses and customers to exchange information. Beyond that, Digital is about understanding users, building interactive and engaging products that meet their needs and being able to respond to their changing demands. It includes all those things that are required to create and take a digital product to market and keep it competitive; from concept to delivery, operation and continuous improvement. It requires a team accountable, responsible, and empowered to improve the product.

The companies that grew out of Digital, like Spotify, Google or Amazon, can adapt and change at speed to delight their users. However, most traditional organisations are not nimble enough to make that change, allowing organisations like Netflix to fill the voids left by those such as Blockbuster.

To catch the train and stay ahead of competitors, you must start with the goal in mind – deliver quick wins, but make changes that will be viable in the long term. Establishing a new Digital function will allow you to grow skills and an innovative environment on a small scale but eventually this capability should be dissolved and distilled throughout the organisation. 

Customer & Product Centric

  • Focus on Customer/User Experience – Customer is King and should be at the heart of everything that is created in a Digital team. Constant feedback from customers and building customer and user experience capability within the department allows products to always meet user needs.

Agile approach

  • Framework – There are many different agile methodologies – investigate them all and adopt the right version of Agile for your organisation based around self-organising, cross-functional teams delivering in an Agile way.
  • Awareness workshops and training – Give people the skills to succeed and reset the many preconceptions on what is and isn’t Agile and learn about how their role can be improved.
  • Measure adoption and benefits realisation – Use KPIs to look at the level of performance of teams as they adopt Agile.

Team & People

  • Empowerment – Digital teams focus on empowering people to make changes rapidly. Leaders shift to facilitators of change rather than decision-makers.
  • Collaboration and team goals – Individuals work towards team goals and KPIs, individual performance becomes secondary to the success of the team.
  • Lead by example - Show colleagues what is working through making the transformation visible, celebrating success and recognising failure.

Culture & Environment

  • Create the right culture & environment - Empower teams to self-manage and innovate for themselves through the introduction of idea management tools, flexible working and hackathons.
  • Celebrate success and failure – By working fast, teams will not only succeed quicker but fail fast too. Failure and the associated learning should be celebrated along with the achievements of the team.
  • Innovation – Foster a culture of innovation that everyone contributes to, not just one team.

Dev Ops & Continuous Delivery

  • Test, deployment and infrastructure automation – implement the right tools and technologies & put the power to test and deploy rapidly is in the hands of your team.
  • Focus on reducing cycle times – focus on removing bottle necks and measure time between releases in seconds rather than weeks or even months.
  • Breaking down barriers between Development and Operations teams – collapse roles, closer collaboration, ensure that everyone is aligned to common objectives and that people are incentivised and rewarded accordingly.

 

By Julia Beaumont and Will Stanger.

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