Published on the 10/03/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
For the last five years, Gary O’Brien has worked with some of the world’s largest enterprises on their digital transformation initiatives and he’s identified five key blockers…
O’Brien, principal consultant with Thoughtworks, a leading Agile and transformation business, spends his time shuttling between Melbourne and Boston, working with “really large corporations trying to be responsive” and deal with upstart organisations that are small, nimble and unconstrained by legacy. Among his clients are Telstra and Fidelity.
He says some enterprise departments – particularly HR, legal and financial – designed to embrace standardisation and efficiency, can get in the way of transformation programmes. Similarly enterprise leaders who want to know exactly what is going on in the organisation at all times, and prize project completion, can inhibit progress.
But beyond that he has identified five key threats to success and shared them this week at the ThoughtWorks Live conference in Melbourne.
Losing sight of the customer; “Organisations can lose sight of the customer through the transformation,” said O’Brien. He offered the example of a bank which sought to update its mortgage platform to provide a better service for customers. “But customers don’t want a mortgage – they want a home,” said O’Brien. Understanding that took more organisational empathy – but was essential if the transformation programme was really going to deliver what customers really want.
Fixating on roles not skills: O’Brien said that employees often fixated on what their role would be in the transformed organisation, rather than on the skills that they could bring to the programme. He said that focusing on roles tended to reinforce hierarchical stereotypes, and made it harder to establish the multi-skilled loose teams that were needed for successful transformation. “Instead of viewing people through the lens of their job title, expose the talents of people,” he said.
Overbalance on exceptions: there is a temptation to allow certain functional (supposedly horizontal) parts of the business to opt out of the transformation programme. “In a whole of business transformation there’s a temptation to compromise…but everyone has a role to play in change,” said O’Brien.
Feeding the engine: Because managers responsible for driving change programmes don’t want to “freak people out,” according to O’Brien, there’s a tendency to slip back into old ways – to use hierarchical charts to map the new organisation in order to make people feel more comfortable, for example. Or to retain management KPIs that relate to completion of a project rather than successful outcomes. This can lead to what O’Brien described as a “frozen middle” in large organisations where middle management were encouraged to try new approaches by senior executives, and had staff keen to be part of more collaborative teams – but the managers were still hampered by old fashioned reporting demands, leaving them frozen and unable to move.
Stuck in transition: O’Brien described this challenge by recounting the story of a couple who buy a couple of acres with a lovely view. They plonk a caravan on the site, then create some garden beds around the caravan, then a gravel road, and eventually add onto the caravan instead of building the home that they had dreamed of. “They have lost sight of what they are trying to achieve.”
