Transformation initiatives typically aim at ambitious goals such as maintaining a competitive edge or driving revenue and growth opportunities.
This article gives a summary of four chapters of the digital cookbook which explain how the ambitions on the program level can be broken down to individual projects.
Regardless of the concrete methodology any project undergoes several typical phases in a more or less iterative and dynamic way:
- Ideation: understand the value of what is being developed
- Development & Design: understand how the product shall work in detail and deliver its functionality
- Testing: apply quality assurance measures to ensure the proper functionality before it’s released
- Implementation & Deployment: put the product and processes into operation and make sure everything runs smoothly
- Evaluation: ongoing analysis of the results in ongoing operations
Implementing a project which is part of a large initiative requires a few adjustments to traditional project methodologies For example, traditional project methodologies can be limiting due to rigid planning structures and funding constraints.
1. All Projects Must Contribute To The Strategy
In order to achieve the goals of a large transformation initiative, its goals must be implemented via a sequence of smaller yet coordinated transitional steps in the form of individual business projects. Those projects must meet several criteria: Most importantly they must deliver results in a quick and agile way, and prove their strategic contribution at any time. Furthermore, the projects must be capable of reacting to changes and new insights on the level of the transformation program. In addition the projects must interact efficiently with many parallel projects and coordinate tasks and deliverables.
How do companies manage to find the best way for them when traditional project methods are often not suitable for meeting these criteria?
Let’s take a look at the different methods. For example, the so-called waterfall model emphasizes linear processes and cannot support the necessary speed and coordination required by simultaneously executed activities. While purely agile approaches may also have their limitations in supporting strategies or implementing innovation at the enterprise level, the ability to adopt agile into your digital project methodology is key to running a successful digitalization project. By pursuing planning as a series of smaller, reoccurring activities to ensure that the product or service can deliver on the highest business value, it can improve processes and performance, increase speed and team efficiency, elevate user experience and, above all, drive customer satisfaction.
In the article Modeling At The Project Level, we highlight in detail why we recommend dividing every important project into three phases, each with increasing granularity.
2. Start With Business Modelling
A method for iterative business model development is required. This starts at the highest level with the business model of the entire company. Since the business model is changing in the course of a transformation, the individual projects contribute to this comprehensive change.
A suitable technique here is the Business Model Canvas (BMC) by Osterwalder [1] or the St. Gallen Management Model[2].
The BMC, which we will focus on here, enables a simple visualization and step-by-step clarification of an otherwise rather “cloudy” subject of discussion – the elements of a business model.
The method is based on the concept of dividing a business model into nine core building blocks – customer (segments), value proposition, channels, customer relationships, revenue, resources, activities, partners, and costs.[3]
The BMC approach helps to systematically and structurally substantiate the business model and enables the evaluation of new ideas and their differentiation from the status quo. It shows competitive advantages as well as customer benefits and thus helps to estimate the potential success of a new business idea. The application of the BMC methodology is in line with the idea of an agile approach and can contribute significantly to reaching agreement on a “start set-up” for the business model discussion. The implementation scope is already well defined by the BMC and the “start set-up” can be used as a basis for further, more detailed specifications.
In the article Modelling Business Ideas we show how this technique can be applied in detail.
3. Service Modelling - Breaking Down Of Business Goals Into Business Services
In the next step the analysis becomes more detailed and the business services are broken down into discrete services using a service-oriented analysis. It is crucial to design manual as well as automated services with one common comprehensive approach. This avoids both a split between the analogue and the digital world, and between a business and an IT perspective.
Ultimately, we want to ensure that the business purpose is decomposed into implementable components, both in the business organization and in the IT application landscape.
The determination of the business service building blocks must be done quite quickly, using a light and agile approach in the first step. This requires an informal ‘whiteboard-enabled’ methodology that allows for seamless collaboration among different stakeholders.
Based on the functional target structure, once it is aligned within the enterprise, the IT services are modeled. This includes mapping onto existing or new back-end systems, data and security architecture, and message design. We recommend distinguishing between the layers ‘Front End’, ‘Process’, ‘Composition’, ‘Basic’ and ‘Back End’ due to different characteristics of artifacts within those layers.
With the help of various graphics, we outline the different steps and the detailed process in the Service Modeling article.
4. Customer Journey Mapping: Maximizing Customer Value And Understanding Customers
We have already learned that a “digital project methodology” is urgently needed for successful enterprise transformations and highlighted that such a methodology must start with defining the business purpose and customer value. Having derived services, designed a service hierarchy, and discussed the importance of remaining agile in service modeling, we conclude the topic of digital project methodology and now go into more detail about the customer value already examined at the beginning of the process. As mentioned earlier, customer value is at the heart of the Business Model Canvas recommended for modeling the business purpose.
At this point of the project process, we devote our focus to the customer journey. The term “customer journey” refers to the comprehensive experience that the customer has with the offered products or services in all his interactions across all suitable interaction channels. It begins with the customer becoming aware of the offer, then exploring and comparing the offer, and finally selecting, purchasing, and using the product or service.
To address the customer journey and also the associated emotions, we need to understand who the customer is in the first place and the context in which they interact.
Our article Customer Journey Mapping gives a description of the underlying concepts including – for example – the persona concept. We explain why this strategy brings customer and company closer together through new understanding conditions and why such a human-centered methodology fits perfectly with the concepts of design thinking.
