Some thoughts on Business Transformation efforts

First of all I think the term "Business Transformation" is somewhat overused therefore let's first clarify what Business Transformation means.

Definition from the business directory (see this link) : In an organizational context, a process of profound and radical change that orients an organization in a new direction and takes it to an entirely different level of effectiveness. Unlike 'turnaround' (which implies incremental progress on the same plane) transformation implies a basic change of character and little or no resemblance with the past configuration or structure.

Who is responsible to drive the Business Transformation?
There are different thoughts on this which range from CEO, CMO to CIO. You can search the web for various points of view. In any case it should be very clear at the beginning of a business transformation effort who owns it. Whoever it is in your company they should actively support it.

Define in what environment a business transformation takes place.

• In case of a growing business
• Most likely the old processes and tools are no longer sufficient to deal with the challenges of a growing business. See this link to explore that in more detail
• In case of a mature business (and a growing business as well)
• Check this excellent article from McKinsey
• Key Points are
• Set clear objectives
• provide strong leadership support from the top
• setup a clear organization structure for the transformation
• maintain energy and involvement throughout organization 

Who (System Integrator) can help you with the Business Transformation?

• Check this link to get a general idea about the challenges with System Integrators
• Make sure that not only cost dictates what you plan to do! You will work with this team for a considerable time and hence you need to be certain that there is a fit with your companies culture.
• Do you want to work with only one system integrator (SI) or consulting company or do you want to involve multiple SI/consulting companies?

Here are some signs, from my experience, that a business transformation effort has serious challenges

• Large parts of the organization don't understand really what the business transformation effort is about or what it tries to achieve
• Leadership does not actively and frequently support the business transformation effort (an occasional email or video on the intranet is NOT sufficient)
• It takes too long to see any progress (e.g. "PowerPoint transformations" can go on for a year or longer before any real progress can be shown to end users) --> this might remind you of a "Waterfall" Project

Here are some key to-dos, from my experience, that I would propose to any business transformation effort

• Ensure the whole organization understands WHY the business transformation is needed. The majority of company employees should clearly understand and support this effort (see also John P. Kotter "Leading Change" for basic Change Management guidance). This means COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE !!! --> everyone should be able to recite the elevator pitch for this transformation.
• Have active, visible and regular Senior Leadership support! (e.g. CEO, CMO, CIO)
• Assign clear Roles & Responsibilities at the beginning. This will require considerable time but is well worth the effort! Instead of stepping on each others toes teams can collaborate instead
• Break the business transformation effort into "digestible pieces"! e.g. a new ERP implementation can be overwhelming and should be broken up into smaller pieces so that the impacted stakeholders better understand what is changing and why it is changing (and hence increase the likelihood of a successful project/program)
• Have 3-6 month release cycles for the business transformation changes. That way it's easier to see and buy into the changes
• Have dedicated Change Management resources assigned to ensure impacted teams understand early on, how they will be impacted (and what the benefit is)
• Actively support team behavior between Business and IT Teams ! They are on the same team and should behave that way! Make sure this actually happens.
• Measure where the transformation effort is compared to the final objective and COMMUNICATE this regularly (e.g. quarterly) to all stakeholders 
• Do NOT build "exclusive groups" of any kind - this is a team effort and needs to be treated as such!

Change Management - Do you do it?

"Change is the only constant" Herclitus, Greek philosopher

For this blogpost I refer to Change Management as the Methodology that is used to execute organizational change (vs. personal change).  There are many more definitions for Change Management (e.g. check these Whatis.com or the Oxford Dictionary etc.) on the internet so go ahead and check it out. In any case a well thought through Change Management approach is key to any successful organizational change effort! What do you do in your programs/projects to deal with change? Do you have a dedicated team or team member to think about change management? How do you ensure support for the changes that you and your team are implementing?

Based on my experience it seems that many organizational change efforts are not living up to their potential because the Change Management efforts are not really fully thought through, supported and implemented. Let's look at an example: A tech company wants to change their CRM System from salesforce.com to SAP CRM. The change has been discussed between executive Managers and some other senior leaders. This specific change effort will have a  big impact on the Sales Team (and other teams like Sales Operations etc.). In order to make a change like this successful we need to spend considerable time and effort to come up with a clear plan on how we plan to make this change management effort successful. We need to determine what success looks like and this does NOT only include that we have all the required functionality in SAP CRM at the end of this program/project. This needs to include much more than gathering the business requirements for the new system, determine what functionality will change for the Sales Reps (e.g. instead of the Sales Ops Team entering a value in a field now the Sales Team will do it) and how we plan to educate the Sales Team (and others) about these changes in the most effective way (Training / Enablement).
The most popular change management approach probably comes from John Kotter, in his book "Leading Change" but there are many others approaches (see this link). As you would expect the big consulting companies have their own change methodologies as well and many practitioners add their own flavor to these methodologies. This is not an exact science but more an art that needs to be mastered.
Bottom line is that many companies still treat Change Management as an afterthought or something that is just not as important as many other tasks (e.g. in the example above it seems to be more important to have the functionality in SAP CRM instead of having the Sales Team on board to use the system afterwards).
I suggest that if the change management approach is not well thought through every project/program can still fail. Hence Change Management is something that should be front and center for every program or project that requires considerable changes and should have dedicated resource(s).
What does your company do in this area?