Business transformation is all about identifying techniques, new processes, and technologies that aren't being used to their maximum capacity. Did you know that many transformational projects fail? It’s not due to a lack of funding or commitment from the organization either. If you ever worked on a project that faced hurdles, this article will provide some perspective and concrete actions you can leverage and apply to your projects.

On January 6th, PMI Toronto's Canadian Online Event committee covered the topic of digital transformation. Using the success story of a transformational project—implementing a data democratization program at a pharmaceutical company—our guest speaker, Kristian Gravelle, dove into the critical elements that drove the successful implementation of a transformational project. He discussed the strategies others can apply to avoid the usual pitfalls. Kristian spoke to having the right conversations with stakeholders and sponsors, finding the right partners, and how vital having good communication and change management can be to any project. 

Meet Our Guest Speaker

Kristian Gravelle is a transformational champion. His career spans many industries, including pharmaceuticals, regulated industries, consumer packaged goods, and data analytics services. Kristian has excelled at helping organizations overcome complex challenges by applying his creative and strategic approach to problem-solving. The ARF and MRIA have recognized him for his excellence in marketing strategy and execution. Kristian is currently the Vice-President of Marketing for Adastra North America, where he combines two areas of his passion: marketing and data strategy.

 

What Is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business to create value for the organization. Let’s walk through a few different types of digital transformations.

Data Democratization

Data democratization is the next level of digital transformation. It’s an ongoing process of bringing everyone in an organization, irrespective of their technical expertise, together to work with data comfortably and feel confident discussing it. This will allow team members to make data-informed decisions and build better customer experiences powered by data. From a project management perspective, to be part of data democratization projects, you need to start to hone your skills to understand what the organizations are looking for while trying to implement data democratization. In addition, you need to get familiar with low-code/no-code development platforms, one of the vital tools required in this process.

Cloud Enablement

For an organization to keep data on-premises can be incredibly costly to manage. However, moving everything to the cloud is a great way to minimize organizations' data management costs, and it’s fast and scalable. Moreover, a cloud tenant can unleash significant analytical computing advances if implemented appropriately. Nowadays, large organizations aren’t necessarily going for one cloud but implementing multi-cloud strategies. Thus, as a project manager, you want to understand how the clouds integrate. What are some of the benefits of one cloud versus the next from computing power? Upscaling yourself with some courses is essential; you don’t need to become a cloud engineer. Nevertheless, it’s important to understand the fundamentals of the cloud environments and how applications can be part of the cloud environment.

AI and ML

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are other emerging trends for digital transformation. As a project manager, you need to guardrail around your AI workloads and ML workloads to make sure that you remove as much bias as possible. Thus, the decisions and information coming out of your workloads can be explained and not just a black box coding. The key is the operationalization of machine learning workloads.

Data Governance

Data governance is competency and capability within the organization that helps to accelerate its data value within its environments. Master data management, data quality evaluation, metadata management, etc., are some examples of data governance. As a project manager, you want to familiarize yourself with the above concepts. Understanding these things and implementing them with excellence helps create value for the organization, remove inefficiencies, and accelerate decision-making.

Critical Factors that Lead to Successful Transformation Projects

Focus on the Problem

Before going into a business transformation project to tackle challenges, you need to understand the extent of those challenges for the organization. Depending on the scope of your business transformation project, it may be necessary to evaluate all current workflows, procedures, policies, and practices used by the various business functions, units, divisions, or departments you’re looking to transform. Once you have a clear picture of your current processes and bottlenecks, you can better understand how new technologies and processes can eliminate the biggest challenge faced by the business. Focus on your business problem. Try to have conversations within the organization and ask questions including

> What is the business problem we are trying to solve?

> Once the business problem is solved, how will it benefit the organization? 

Get Management’s Skin in the Game

Business transformation initiatives can be a hard sell to management as they are complex, and resource driven. If the leadership is not invested in the project, all your hard work will eventually fail. As the project manager you must focus on getting management’s buy-in—explain the benefits of the project and why it applies to them. Once they are convinced, they are more likely to be a powerful ally in communicating about the project's benefits across the organization and making your project a success.

Identify the Biggest Impact

Kristian says, “Don’t try to boil down the ocean; try to distill the ocean by focusing on the significant path”. As the project manager make sure you understand what the big bet is. Identify activities that will make the most significant impact for your organization and make sure that these activities are part of the scope of the transformation project.

Find the Right Partner & Execute with Excellence

Before initiating the project, do you have the right people on the team. Make sure to speak with your business sponsors. Understand if you have the right folks with the proper certification, experience, and training to execute the tasks required. If you don’t, you need to find a partner.

Organizational Change Management 

Ensure that proper change management is in place. Business transformation means changes within the organization. Therefore, effective change management is crucial during these projects. Effective change management allows you to track, measure, and analyze the implemented changes and understand how they affect the entire workplace. For example, how will you get line employees and managers to understand the implications of the changes to the organization fully? Remember that the teams responsible for change implementation have to be excellent communicators. Ensure the correct information reaches the right employees at the right time. Employees need to understand why any change is good for them and the business. Only then can you expect employees to work toward the same goals. Proper internal communication is essential here. Employees need to feel informed and aware of how the changes will influence their jobs and lives.

Ready to implement these strategies to your projects?