Skip to content
Tiatra, LLCTiatra, LLC
Tiatra, LLC
Information Technology Solutions for Washington, DC Government Agencies
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Services
    • IT Engineering and Support
    • Software Development
    • Information Assurance and Testing
    • Project and Program Management
  • Clients & Partners
  • Careers
  • News
  • Contact
 
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Services
    • IT Engineering and Support
    • Software Development
    • Information Assurance and Testing
    • Project and Program Management
  • Clients & Partners
  • Careers
  • News
  • Contact

Digital transformation’s fundamental change management mistake

Over the past decade, CIOs have invested significantly in digital transformation initiatives in an effort to improve customer experiences, build data analytics capabilities, and deliver productivity enhancements with automation. Underpinning these initiatives is a slew of technology capabilities and strategies aimed at accelerating delivery cycles, such as establishing product management disciplines, building cloud architectures, developing devops capabilities, and fostering agile cultures.

Unfortunately, the business impact of many digital transformations continues to fall short of expectations.

For example, KPMG reports that 51% of technology executives have not seen an increase in performance or profitability from digital transformation investments. HBR’s “The Value of Digital Transformation” reports, “While 89% of large companies globally have a digital and AI transformation underway, they have only captured 31% of the expected revenue lift and 25% of expected cost savings from the effort.”

Ask CIOs about their biggest digital transformation challenges, and they’re likely to cite people issues or what experts identify as gaps in change management practices. When CIOs can’t drive change, new digital products and technology capabilities can become shelfware, and the business value is delayed or diminished.

Martin Davis, CIO and managing partner at Dunelm Associates, says not to declare success too early: “Too many projects prematurely declare success at the point of process or system implementation and fail to recognize that change management efforts must continue for some time after implementation to realize the full value.”

Orchestrating change

Change management in digital transformation initiatives includes engaging stakeholders in planning, easing adoption with employees, and improving experiences for customers and all those involved in the program.   

At the start of any transformation initiative, there’s a dip in momentum during the planning phase when executives must be convinced to invest in digital transformation and business stakeholders must be worked with to develop a prioritized roadmap. Organizations with long, complex, and expensive upfront planning processes due to executive and stakeholder alignment issues can result in missed opportunities if competitors bring capabilities to market faster.  

But the bigger challenge is often downstream and occurs when digital trailblazers, the people assigned to lead digital transformation initiatives, must work with end-users on process changes and technology adoption. When devops teams release changes to applications, dashboards, and other technology capabilities, end-users experience a productivity dip before people effectively leverage new capabilities. This dip delays when the business can start realizing the value delivered.

While there are a number of change management frameworks and certifications, many treat change as separate disciplines from the product management, agile, and devops methodologies CIOs use to plan and deliver digital transformation initiatives. That’s a problem because the mismatch in terminology, philosophies, and responsibilities can lead to process gaps or worse, process wars between different leaders driving incompatible methodologies.  

Joanne Friedman, PhD,  CEO, and principal of smart manufacturing at Connektedminds, says orchestrating success in digital transformation requires a symphony of integration across disciplines: “CIOs face the challenge of harmonizing diverse disciplines like design thinking, product management, agile methodologies, and data science experimentation. It’s like trying to get a jazz quartet, a rock band, a classical orchestra, and a DJ to play in harmony.”

Reducing productivity dips and easing end-user adoption then are practices that must fit the digital and transformation operating model. Let’s consider three areas where CIOs and digital trailblazers can inject change management into their digital transformation initiatives in a way that brings greater effectiveness than if change management were addressed as a separate add-on.

Product managers must start with why

There’s a good reason bestselling author Simon Sinek advises great leaders to start with why.

“When collaborating with peers, focus on the why and not the what,” says John Milburn, CEO of Clear Skye. “While the CIO sees the big picture, their peers need to know how the change will benefit them.”

While CIOs must take steps to ensure their peers understand the importance of digital transformation initiatives, they must rely on their digital trailblazers to do the same with their stakeholders and teams. 

We’re asking employees to implement many changes and to continuously improve results. Employees see this as added work and stress unless they understand an initiative’s importance, where it will deliver business value, and why they should care. Janette Gleyzer, transformation advisor and coach at StarCIO, says digital trailblazers should address the why by answering reflective questions such as what defines success and what patterns emerged from past failures.

The top of the funnel for change management in digital transformations is the responsibility of the product manager or the program manager in some organizations. They must start the process by communicating a simple-to-understand vision statement that defines the targeted customers, value proposition, and strategic importance.

Large organizations will go beyond ideation workflows, vision statement writing, and developing roadmaps to value stream mapping to help connect strategy with execution, delivery, and change management. Value stream mapping can be an important tool to help illustrate to employees the value of their work.

“Savvy digital transformation leaders will rely on value stream mapping to familiarize each decision-maker and stakeholder with how the technology works every step of the way, demonstrating a clear vision of what it can do for the business and the individual,” says Paul Wnek, founder and CEO of ExpandAP. “A digital trailblazer’s best chance for success happens when they consider all the stakeholders they will touch and approach each stakeholder’s concerns separately.”

Agile teams must commit to change management during sprints

Change management isn’t just the product manager’s responsibility. They should set expectations for their agile teams on simplifying end-user adoption.

Agile and scrum methodologies put most of the emphasis on delivery activities when teams focus on completing user stories every sprint. Product owners and scrum masters must also engage the team in planning activities, including writing user stories, estimating work, and grooming backlogs.

John Ottman, executive chairman of Solix Technologies, says, “Beyond driving the cadence, orchestration, and ceremony of the scrum, the scrum master needs to work closely with product owners to validate that the epics, users stories, and tasks are all clear and properly documented such that the expected outcomes meet the expectations of each sprint.”

Documentation and well-written user stories guide teams in completing the work and meeting requirements. They can also be used in change management activities when product owners share the requirements with stakeholders, subject matter experts, and employees participating in user acceptance testing.

Showing end-users all the details in a user story can be overwhelming, so agile teams should look to simplify them to support change management activities. Tools such as Atlassian Confluence can pull sections of user stories from Jira Software so that product owners can simplify the presentation. Another option is to use a generative AI tool to summarize the user stories completed in a sprint and to aid in writing release notes. The best option is when the product team reviews requirements in open sprint review sessions, inviting key stakeholders and end-users to attend.

Taking this one step further, I like to see agile teams take on change management activities as another form of work they commit to every sprint. This should include participating in training activities, interviewing end-users, reviewing performance metrics, and capturing other forms of feedback they can use to improve their work. 

Devops must not undermine change management

How often should agile teams release code into production?

Many teams adopting devops best practices have automated their deployment pipelines with CI/CD,  implemented continuous testing, and are confident in their security and operations to implement continuous deployment.

The automation improves quality and reduces toil, but frequent deployments may not be ideal for end-users and can burden change management activities. Devops teams must consider the impact on end-users, and they have several options to reduce affecting end-users with too many changes.

Below are four devops recommendations for increasing deployment frequency without complicating change management and negatively impacting end-users.

  • Automate continuous deployment for only small fixes and minor changes that have a low impact on end-users and minimal change management requirements.
  • Instill a more controlled release management process when deployments change workflow, user interfaces, and new capabilities.
  • Create feature flags and decide which users can provide early feedback on a new capability before rolling it out to more people.
  • Leverage canary releases and control rolling out new capabilities to small user segments.

Ottman adds, “By implementing new features to a selected, small part of the users first so they may test it and provide feedback, assurance may be gained that once the change is accepted, the update will be successful for the entire user base.”

Change management practices are integral to delivering business results from digital transformation initiatives. To ease adoption, CIOs and digital trailblazers should look to fit change management practices into their digital operating models so that end-users learn, experience, and adopt changes through all phases of the journey.

Change Management, Digital Transformation


Read More from This Article: Digital transformation’s fundamental change management mistake
Source: News

Category: NewsApril 2, 2024
Tags: art

Post navigation

PreviousPrevious post:How to power intelligent enterprises with SAP on Microsoft CloudNextNext post:US and UK sign agreement to test the safety of AI models

Related posts

Barb Wixom and MIT CISR on managing data like a product
May 30, 2025
Avery Dennison takes culture-first approach to AI transformation
May 30, 2025
The agentic AI assist Stanford University cancer care staff needed
May 30, 2025
Los desafíos de la era de la ‘IA en todas partes’, a fondo en Data & AI Summit 2025
May 30, 2025
“AI 비서가 팀 단위로 지원하는 효과”···퍼플렉시티, AI 프로젝트 10분 완성 도구 ‘랩스’ 출시
May 30, 2025
“ROI는 어디에?” AI 도입을 재고하게 만드는 실패 사례
May 30, 2025
Recent Posts
  • Barb Wixom and MIT CISR on managing data like a product
  • Avery Dennison takes culture-first approach to AI transformation
  • The agentic AI assist Stanford University cancer care staff needed
  • Los desafíos de la era de la ‘IA en todas partes’, a fondo en Data & AI Summit 2025
  • “AI 비서가 팀 단위로 지원하는 효과”···퍼플렉시티, AI 프로젝트 10분 완성 도구 ‘랩스’ 출시
Recent Comments
    Archives
    • May 2025
    • April 2025
    • March 2025
    • February 2025
    • January 2025
    • December 2024
    • November 2024
    • October 2024
    • September 2024
    • August 2024
    • July 2024
    • June 2024
    • May 2024
    • April 2024
    • March 2024
    • February 2024
    • January 2024
    • December 2023
    • November 2023
    • October 2023
    • September 2023
    • August 2023
    • July 2023
    • June 2023
    • May 2023
    • April 2023
    • March 2023
    • February 2023
    • January 2023
    • December 2022
    • November 2022
    • October 2022
    • September 2022
    • August 2022
    • July 2022
    • June 2022
    • May 2022
    • April 2022
    • March 2022
    • February 2022
    • January 2022
    • December 2021
    • November 2021
    • October 2021
    • September 2021
    • August 2021
    • July 2021
    • June 2021
    • May 2021
    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    Categories
    • News
    Meta
    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.org
    Tiatra LLC.

    Tiatra, LLC, based in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, proudly serves federal government agencies, organizations that work with the government and other commercial businesses and organizations. Tiatra specializes in a broad range of information technology (IT) development and management services incorporating solid engineering, attention to client needs, and meeting or exceeding any security parameters required. Our small yet innovative company is structured with a full complement of the necessary technical experts, working with hands-on management, to provide a high level of service and competitive pricing for your systems and engineering requirements.

    Find us on:

    FacebookTwitterLinkedin

    Submitclear

    Tiatra, LLC
    Copyright 2016. All rights reserved.