Case STudy: How Do Organisations Digitally Transform?

In this blog article, I'm going to outline the key steps required to help transform a medium to large organisation.  Digital Transformation is the ability of an organisation to change their culture, in order remain competitive.  By using new technologies more effectively than their competitors, this leads to greater market share, lower price points, improved product and/or service quality and constant innovation for clients.  Notice that I start with culture, not technology.  

I'll draw on my 20+ years of hands-on experience as a solution architect and professional technologist with DXC Technology and Santander, as well as my expertise in running cultural change and technical courses at ALC Training & Consulting.

Here are the key steps and they are in order:

• Use an Agile framework to help structure the entire transformation.  My recommendation is to use the Scaled Agile Framework or SAFe as it's the number 1 agile method. Couple this with The Open Group Architecture framework or TOGAF to reduce solution risk.  This will involve sending all the senior leaders on a Leading SAFe 2-day course and your architects, engineering and development functions on TOGAF Part 1 and Part 2 courses (4 days).  It's important here to align your initiative to value streams, not projects or programs.

This is the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe):

And this is the top slice of TOGAF.  You would use TOGAF as part of the architecture functions in SAFe.

• Understand what business objectives you'd like to achieve in the next 3-5 years.  There are techniques in both TOGAF and SAFe for helping flesh these out.
• Work with all the key stakeholders to develop a common mission and vision.  Lots of great information on how to identify and manage stakeholders in TOGAF.  This was the most important skill I gained in my career.
• Send your security experts to become certified on the Certified Cloud Security Professional certification.  This will ensure they have a good all-round grounding in cloud security specifically. Because it is different.  The diagram below shows the Top 12 Cloud Security Threats, and they are in order.  Data Breach is No.1....no surprises there really!

• Identify key execution leaders, usually the program manager, a senior project manager and the lead architect, to go onto the 4-day Implementing SAFe course to become SAFe program consultants.  I wouldn't recommend relying on outside consultants unless you want to hire someone.  3 would be the minimum for a large organisation (5000+ employees), minimum of 2 for a medium (100-5000 employees).
• Run a value stream workshop with the key stakeholders to determine the best value stream to take forward that will deliver your first epic and the associated top 5-10 features.  Very important here to involve the business really early and start thinking about security and safety early in the piece.  Both TOGAF and SAFe have components that you can use in a workshop.  

• Start running internal Leading SAFe workshops to ensure everyone know how SAFe works and outline the value stream that we're going to take forward.  Use the workshop to seek feedback and help improve the decision-making process.
• Think about training for your technical resources.  Unless you've been living under a rock, you're probably looking at Office 365 Security & Compliance (2 Days) and either AWS Quickstart (1 Day) or Azure Fundamentals (1 Day). 
  • My personal pick is to stay with Azure.  It's the most popular with my students in Australia. You could also consider Google and Oracle.  I've had a handful of people use Google and only 2 use Oracle.  I think they were from Oracle. 
  • I would recommend the Office 365 Security & Compliance course, as it helps people understand how Office works on Day 1 and then walks them through the security components on Day 2.  It's a great course for non-technical people who want an appreciation of security, relevant to a product suite, they're used to using.

• Identify the first Agile Release Train, be clear on what success looks like and ask your people to self-organise across the train, using the SAFe principles.  Blend in the principles from the enterprise / solution architecture function and seek feedback from the teams.
• Perform a training needs analysis workshop, by involving all those people that are required to build and deliver the solution.  This is where you'll need to identify the technical and soft skills that will be missing.  This will include specific vendor product training, probably through eLearning methods and vendor training.
• For soft skills, start thinking about cultural change programs for everyone on the trains.  I'd recommend DevOps Foundation for everyone, DevSecOps Engineering for security and lead developers and DevOps Leader for the key leaders managing the train.  The diagram below is from the DevOps Foundation and outlines 3 cultural principle for success.  

• Don't forget to bring the business on the journey too, so I can recommend the Cloud Computing Foundation (2 Days), designed for non-technical professionals and leads to an accredited APMG certification.
• Almost certainly your transformation will contain a significant data component, so I can recommend training for all your technical resources on the newly released Enterprise Big Data Professional certification.  Here is a slide outlining how the MapReduce framework works in Hadoop.  

• At this stage, you'll be very close to deploying your first Agile Release Train, so you'll need to ensure the relevant people have attended the SAFe Product Manager, Scrum Master and SAFe for Teams courses.
• Finally, launch your train through a face-to-face Program Increment (PI) Planning workshop and allow your SAFe Program Consultants and Scrum Masters to coach the teams to success.  Don't forget to measure at every step to show progress.  This is all explained in the SAFe implementation roadmap.  If followed correctly, you'll be delivering multiple features in the first 50 days.

• Over time you'll launch more trains, that are aligned to value streams to deliver more epics and features.  As you grow, the trains will become much faster and with a team of 125 people or more, you'll delivering features much faster than ever before.
• Importantly, constantly track where you are in your business objectives, your mission and vision, to ensure you keep the trains on the tracks.  There is where the Lean Portfolio Management components in SAFe that helps with the governance piece of this.

​Do you have questions with these steps?  Feel free to reach out to me directly:

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Have an awesome week, beautiful people.