Does your business have room to breathe when it comes to available resources? Are you and your staff running at 100% (or more with overtime)? If this sounds like your business then implementing Digital Transformation will be hard, but here are a few ideas on how to find some time.

Being busy in a business is good, having plenty of work to keep your staff occupied and more importantly earning money for your business is a great problem to have. But this needs to be sustainable, this needs to be tempered with having time to invest in your business, especially if you are looking to introduce digital changes.

How to find time

Investing time into Digital Transformation to speed up or even fully automate your processes should pay back in available time, many times over if done correctly. Here are a few tips on how to find the extra time for Digital Transformation.

Employ more staff

On the face of it this is the easiest option, but in reality employing new staff should never be taken lightly. If you do go down this route then make sure your staff are truly going to make a difference for Digital Transformation. If you simply get a new member of staff to duplicate a current role in the business, then it is likely that within a few weeks they will have work offloaded to them from other members of staff, which after a while will put you in the same situation you were in before you recruited, this may be great for your business growth but not necessarily for your Transformation targets.

Employing someone with a skill set that you are missing or someone that is dedicated to Digital Transformation without being overloaded with day to day tasks will give you a much greater return. If you are truly committed to transforming your whole business and really want to introduce a continuous improvement mindset within the business then this is the way for you. If you are starting out with Digital Transformation then I would not recommend this as your first step.

Contractors or Consultants

The warning for this is the same as employing more staff above, although the risks are slightly less as you can release them quicker. Additional risks are their lack of business knowledge, but that can also be there greatest strength as they will not be influenced about how a process has been done in the past and should bring with them experiences from other businesses.

Other benefits include getting a specialist in Digital Transformation with no long term commitment to you and in the long run at a fraction of the cost compared to a full time member of staff. Their time would be dedicated to transforming the business and they would not get caught up in the operations side.

Use your own staff - quiet times

OK so your current staff are up to their neck in work, but is that 100% of the year? If you have any sort of downtime then maybe you could arrange for some time to dedicate to Digital Transformation.

If you have a few weeks or months where workload is quieter (e.g. you are a seasonable business) then focusing your staff on this and getting them to put the same effort they do throughout the rest of the year should pay dividends throughout the rest of the year. Spending 2 weeks improving your core processes to shave even just 5% of time off could save you 1000's of staff hours throughout the year!

It is typical for seasonal businesses to relax a little during the off periods, but I would argue this is one of the most important times of the year!

Use your own staff - close the office

Not always possible for every business and you may read this and laugh, but could you find a way to run on minimal staff for a short while as long as it was planned? If you really think about this you may find more flexibility with this idea than you first thought.

Investing just one day a week for 3 months could transform you business!

Remember why you are doing this

This article started off asking if you feel you are running at capacity. It is usually the businesses that are running at capacity that are in the most need for change and Digital Transformation can bring about that change. But you need to first find the time, otherwise your only solution to an ever growing workload is to employ more staff, which can bring more problems and certainly brings more overhead. Digital Transformation can be a smarter way to solve increased workload.

Finally, remember that Digital Transformation in much more than the responsibility of your IT Department. It is something that crosses the whole business and without a clear message to every department that this is a business priority then even the most well funded projects will struggle and some may even fail!

If you need help with starting your digital transformation project then please contact me

This post was originally posted at https://digitalforleaders.com/how-to-find-time-for-digital-transformation/

While listening to a podcast recently (for the life of me I cannot remember which one!) one of the hosts said "in 10 years time, every business will be run by someone technical". I nodded to myself when hearing this and the more I think about it the more I found myself in agreement, well with the sentiment at least.

Digital Effects Every Business

I struggle to think of a business that is not effected by digital, especially if that business is looking to stay current in its market. Whether it is the computers they are using, the marketing channels they use to reach their customers, the process of completing an order, their internal accounts and even their HR department.

Every aspect of a business will use some sort of system or online platform to function, and importantly they will engage with their customers using technology and systems. The ability to ensure these systems are integrated with your businesses processes is key to ensuring a business survives. It is this fact that leads me to believe that someone with a technical background should have a central position in leading a company.

Digital thinking at all times

Having an IT Manager, CTO or IT Director is all well and good, but if they are compartmentalised where they're only consulted on decisions where business leaders believe they are needed, then you could be missing out on opportunities.

If you are looking to launch a new service to your customers, expand a department in your business, trying a new marketing channel or even changing the supplier for your businesses milk orders in the morning. At first glance you may not think there would be a need to involve IT in all of these areas, but they will have an insight into the possibilities that non technical leaders may not have.

Just as every current process can be improved with Digital, every new process should be optimised for digital from the beginning. Changing it later will be much more costly!

If a business leader uses the phrases like "All this technology 'stuff' baffles me but I have a great team who does that for me" then it should ring alarm bells.

Culture is everything

A business is heavily influenced by its leaders. If a business leader has a certain style that see's digital as an afterthought, you will find that filters down into the business and creates a culture that does not see technology as a driver for improvement. If your business does not have a culture for digital then your investment in that area will drop and it will come at a cost to you in the future.

A business leader that is confident in digital thinking will encourage a culture of change and improvement. They will focus on making the business efficient as possible with technology, they will ensure your customers demands for 24/7 access to data can be met. Most importantly, the will encourage this thinking throughout the business.

So when next picking your leaders within a business, check if they see technology as an enabler for growth, or risk your business being left behind.

This post was originally posted at https://digitalforleaders.com/every-business-should-have-a-technical-leader/

I was first introduced to the term 'busy fool' by an old finance director when he was explaining how the business needed to focus on selling our products (we were an IT & Consumables re-seller) to fewer people at the correct margin rather than lots of people at a lower margin. We wanted to avoid being 'busy fools'.

Some of you out there may argue his logic, but the term has stuck with me ever since, and more recently I have taken to applying it to situations in the Digital Transformation arena and in particular business practices and processes which digital is trying to improve.

How to spot the 'busy fools' in your business

Most of these should be easy to spot, they are the person who prints the same thing out multiple times to send to different people. They are the person who is filing something twice (either paper or digitally). They are the person who is copying a template email and sending it out 20+ times a day to different customers and just swapping out the name. They are the person who is copy typing information from one system to another.

Any person who is doing a task that could easily be replaced by a small amount of automation or connecting 2 systems together and frankly could be spending their time doing something more productive is a 'fool' in a digital age.

A task that could easily be replaced by a small amount of automation...is a 'fool' in the digital age

It's not the people!

I used the word 'person' above but actually I don't feel that is fair , I do not think people who I may term as busy fools, are actually fools. Most of the time the problem is with the process and not the person, you could read all my statements above and swap out person with process and it still works.

An extremely common response I get when I challenge a process is "this is how I was told to do it" or "it works so why change it". The person may already know there could/should be a better way, but they don't feel they have the authority to change the process or the process may have been the best way when it was devised, but technology advancements may have provided a better way without the person being aware. However you have reached this state of a busy fool, I am a firm believer that you are where you are, no matter how you got there, lets move forward!

How to banish the 'fool'

Once you have identified some processes to review, speak to everyone involved to improve it, if needed draw up some story boards of the current process and get your clever people from IT to look at how your current systems or a new system can be used to improve it.

Stop being busy and start being productive!

Remember to calculate the time the process currently takes and compare it to your solution. This is key to really seeing if you are removing this busyness and being more productive.

Some 'fools' may be more tricky to spot, they may be so ingrained into your business that you start to believe they are your business. Don't be afraid to look deep into every process that your business operates on, especially the one's you are afraid to touch! These are the one's that even small changes can have a huge impact.

Sometimes it is useful to get an outside view on these processes, being so close to the problem can blind you to new solutions. Hiring in an external digital consultant to advise in this area may be the kick start you need to bring about real change.

This post was originally posted at https://digitalforleaders.com/is-your-business-full-of-busy-fools/

So you have decided that you want to start to embrace digital within your business but are struggling to know where to start. Digital transformation can feel like such a large task - and it is - you can feel overwelmed to the point where you take no action.

Below I have detailed a few stages on how I approach Digital Transformation:

Find your why

The very first thing you need to do is identify why you want to go through this, why are you looking to disrupt your business and go through all of the pain of changing things within your business, why do you want to change the way your staff or systems work?

Are you looking to streamline your operations to save money, are you looking to enhance your 'product' to offer it to more customers, are you hoping to launch a whole new product that will be the next big thing in your industry? Whatever your why is, you need to be clear what you want. Do not worry about the implementation details at this stage, do not worry about whether you 'can' do it, worry more about whether you should even try.

Until you can write down your why in no more than a few lines and when you are able to explain your why to someone else, you are ready to move to the next stage.

Find a champion

Pushing through change is much easier when you have people with you, do your peers/direct reports see the same need for transformation as you? If not, convince them, also listen to them as they may have a perspective on this that you do not.

Once you have other people on board, try and agree on a single person to be the one to push through digital change, this person does not have to be the one to come up with all the ideas - in fact there should be no single person who does this - but they should be the one to ensure momentum is kept up. This person needs to be a real champion for digital transformation, if no single person is pushing through the change then it is easy for it to drop off the priority lists as everyone thinks someone else is working on it.

Finding a champion can be difficult if your business does not have a great culture for Digital Transformation, if this is the case then you may have to be one to take this role until others start seeing the benefits.

Find your 'what'

So if you have followed my first 2 stages, then you will have an understanding of what you are hoping to achieve - the 'why', and you will have an idea of who will be working with you to bring about this Transformation.

Next you need to start thinking in more practical terms on how you are going to implement change to achieve your 'why', you need to think of the 'what'.

Now it is time to sit with your team and come up with a rough idea of how you will achieve your 'why'. Finding the 'what' for some will be the easiest step of them all, while other will struggle, especially when you are looking to add something new to your business.

If your why is to produce something new, then discuss what is stopping you from producing this 'something' and plan what needs to be changed to fix that. If you are looking to introduce efficiencies to save your business time and money, then first identify what you need to improve, what are your biggest waste areas at the moment.

Come up with a rough idea on how you get from the point you are at now to where you want to be. Only with the 'what' will you know how to move forward.

Measure everything, then measure some more!

Digital provides the capability of measuring almost every part of a process, and to truly transform something you are looking to see a change. I believe Digital Transformation and Data Analysis go hand in hand and without measuring and analysing the change you achieve you cannot be sure you are doing the right thing.

"Digital Transformation and Data Analysis go hand in hand"

Measurements and statistics needs to be easily available, I would recommend some sort of shared dashboard where everyone involved can see the difference they are making.

Be careful on the type of statistics you use to measure how successful (or not) your changes are. If you are measuring signups to a new SaaS application, don't measure how many users you have as your primary statistic (although that number has value), measure how many signups you have had each week! This way you know how the work you are doing is effecting signups.

If you change is aimed at replacing or improving current processes, then measure or at least estimate the current resources the process uses (time/budget) and use this as a baseline to compare your changes too.

Free up some resources

Any change within a business takes resources, this may be time from existing staff, budget for outsourced staff or maybe a budget for an off the shelf package. You need to accept that change does not come for free.

In a perfect world, I would recommend committing at least 20% of your resources to bring around serious change in your business, in a timely fashion - i.e. in a time frame that will give an immediate effect. I appreciate this is a lot to ask for from a business, especially in situations where digital transformation is being brought in to turn around some sort of decline in your business. But if done properly, resources you invest now for Digital Transformation will free up more resources which you can reinvest into the project and should generate a snowball effect for continued improvement.

Validate everything

The single greatest piece of advice I can give you for Digital Transformation is to validate everything all of the time. You will learn something new as you progress through each stage, constantly ask yourself and your colleagues, "should we continue". Do not get caught in the trap of thinking "well we have come this far...", if you truly believe something is not working then don't waste your resources on it. But don't just base this decision on a gut feeling, if you have been measuring things correctly then you should have evidence that your current path is not working.

Finding out that you are not on the right path should not be seen as a failure, it is a perfect opportunity to Pivot your ideas and refocus based on what you have learned. Being good at repeatedly validating your idea and pivoting will mean you never fail, you keep improving your idea until it succeeds.

"Pivoting will mean you never fail, you keep improving your idea until it succeeds"

By the end of this process you will have a strong understanding of how digital transformation can benefit your business and how you see this coming about. The next phase is to start coming up with solutions on how digital can be used solve problems and to implement them. Expect another post on that shortly, follow me on twitter to know when it is published

If you would like advice on how to begin the process of Digital Transformation then contact me

This post was originally posted at https://digitalforleaders.com/where-to-start-with-digital-transformation/

Adapting to digital within your business takes more than just installing a new CRM or launching a new website for your customers. It takes an underlying thought process from everyone involved. Depending on the business, some will find it easier than others to benefit from digital. Digital Transformation provides the opportunity for your business to grow but you must have the right culture to take advantage.

Below are some key points in a business which shows how ready you are for Digital Transformation.

What Drives Change?

Most businesses say they are open to change, but in my experience it is when you come down to individual departments that you start to see problems. The most common response I get from departments when talking about change is a general sentiment of "we are open to change, but we don't need to change, if only 'that' department over there would do their job properly then our problems would be solved". The it's not us it's them mentality.

I like to think a good gauge of how open a business is to change is to review your last 5 medium to large changes in the business and how they came about. Did they come out of necessity to solve a problem or were they experiments on ways to improve a current task or process? If you only change as a last resort to solve a problem then you are misusing the power of change and not using change as an improvement mechanism for your company. If you are experimenting with new ideas for change then you have the correct culture of change for digital.

Digital Transformation requires change and a top down directive of change does not always work, staff at all levels need to buy into the process to get the maximum benefit.

Do you Listen to your Customers?

Do you find yourself saying things like "our customers do/don't do this" or "our customers work this way"? If you know all your customers well enough to make general statements like that then great, but can you back any of this up? If it is because this was your experience dealing with a single customer, or worse still it is because you were told by someone else when you first started at the company, then be ready to challenge these assumptions.

Customers are (usually) people, no 2 people are exactly the same and people change. Digital Transformation asks you to look at your customers needs & wants and requires you to analyse and measure them. Digital Transformation can give you the tools to analyse your customers in detail greater detail than you have ever had before so you must be willing to use that information.

Are you Open?

I don't mean extending the business working hours (although in some instances that is an option), I mean how open are you with information within your business, is your culture one of Mushroom Management where you keep things on a need to know basis, or is your culture one of empowering staff with information to make their own decisions?

Digital Transformation can provide your business a wealth of important information, too much for one person or department to handle and information that will help you make decisions on a daily basis, if you are willing to share that information (with appropriate level of controls if needed) then your staff will be empowered to make decisions quickly and accurately without having to wait for a management report at the end of the month!

There is Still Time

However you answered the above questions, you can always benefit from Digital Transformation, it will just be your starting point that changes. If you are worried that you cannot answer 100% yes to all of the above then start thinking about what changes you can make within your business today to improve things.

As always, if you would like some advice then Contact Me.

This post was originally posted at https://digitalforleaders.com/do-you-have-the-culture-for-digital-transformation/

Every business should have clear goals and assuming you have shared those goals with the rest of your business (if not why not?), then every department should be aligning their strategies with the overall business goals, IT is no exception to this, in fact I see that IT is usually core to unlocking the potential of each and every goal.

Below are a few ways for business leaders and IT managers to make sure their IT Strategy is aligned with the business goals

1. Communicate Priorities

This sounds obvious but make sure you communicate what exactly your aims are this month/quarter/year. An IT department will usually have a backlog of fixes, enhancements or new features that have been requested from the wider business. Help your IT department prioritise that workload by making them aware of your immediate, short & long term goals for the business.

You would not want your developers working on a new feature for Website A when your business goal is to increase user engagement on Website B.

Don't be afraid to ask your IT Team why they have chosen one piece of work over another, if the answer is "I don't know" or "because that person shouted loudest" then you have a clear priority issue and IT is not as effective as it could be.

2. Analyse & Feedback

Your business will create lots of data, whether that's how well your products are selling, the time it takes to quote a customer, the number of complaints you have received or maybe even how many sick days your staff are having off each year. Whatever that data is, you can bet someone in your IT team has access to it.

Make sure that you have the proper tools in place (speak to your IT team) that let you analyse that data and produce meaningful conclusions from it. Very rarely are business goals a simple yes/no piece of information on a single day, usually they are something that can be measured over time and you can see how far you are from achieving your business goal.

Use your conclusions to feedback on your progress towards your goal and keep tweaking your efforts to make sure the goal is met.

3. Embrace Technology

Technology is a great enabler and provides new ways to do task you have been doing for years.

For example, if one of your goals is to simply have more contact with your customers, then you may look to increase your current methods of phonecalls, emails or maybe even face to face meetings. But in this day and age you will almost certainly find them on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook or maybe they hang out on Minecraft or are avid users of Instagram! Keep an eye out for emerging technology your customers may be using. Or maybe you are aiming to sanitise your customer data within each organisation you work with, you could look to perform a huge round of cold calling or maybe buy a list from somewhere, but what about having your customer portal pop up a simple "is Mr Smith still at your organisation?", to let your customers sanitise your data for you.

Technology can offer you new ways to solve old problems. Ask your IT team how they would do it!

4. Involve IT from the beginning

I truly believe that gone are the days where IT is seen as an outside resource which can be called upon when needed.

Ensure to include someone who has a complete understanding of you current IT capabilities and more importantly has the vision to see how improving your IT capabilities could take your business forward.

Involving IT at the planning stage will do more than just sanity check that your Goal is achievable, they will be able to propose things you never may never have even dreamt of. Let's say you have a process that takes 3 weeks to complete, that could be bringing a new customer on-board, or implementing a new pricing structure across multiple stores. A good IT Manager/CTO (or whatever their job title is) could propose to speed up that process to less than 30 seconds, this might sound like wishful thinking but that is now a requirement for many startups that deliver mobile apps or SaaS (Software as a Service) and is already happening today!

The earlier you involve IT the more impact they will have on your business.

5. Invest in your IT Team

A final point is one of how a business leader looks at their IT Team. If your team are under resourced and spend the majority of their time keeping the lights on then don't be surprised when they are not able to help you complete your business goals.

Don't be afraid to look at your IT Team and ask yourself if they are delivering the above 4 basic requirements to help complete the businesses goals. If not then speak to your managers and ask them what you can do to help.

This post was originall posted on LinkedIn by me https://digitalforleaders.com/5-was-to-align-your-it-strategy-to-your-business-goals/

Technical debt could be restricting your business in ways you may never have imagined. Have you ever asked your 'tech guy/gal/team' for something and they said it will take weeks to implement for what seams like a small change? Do you wish you could move your business into a new market, but your systems or website either can't or are too slow to adapt? Your business may be suffering from technical debt!

For those that have not heard the term before, lets quickly recap on what Technical Debt is (from Wikipedia):

Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt) is "a concept in programming that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that is easy to implement in the short run is used instead of applying the best overall solution".

You can think of technical debt as the 'baggage' your tech team needs to wade through whenever they want to do something new. Whenever you ask for a new feature or to improve an existing tool, Technical Debt is the thing they have to work through before they can even begin working on the feature you asked for, every...single...time!!

It is not just a problem for your IT team

Don't be fooled from that description that this is a problem for your IT team. You yourself might be contributing to the problem.

Lets look at the part of the definition above "when code that is easy to implement in the short run is used". Whenever pressure is applied on your developers to deliver something quick, they inevitably will need to take shortcuts to deliver it. This will mean you tech team will implement code which is easy to write to allow them to meet the short deadline. Easy and short are never great words to use if you are hoping for something that will work reliably over a long period of time.

Code written in this way will also mean it will be difficult to maintain, meaning when you ask for something again, the last piece of Technical Debt you have contributed too is compounded with all the 'baggage' the team already has, making each request that little bit harder.

Technical Debt will cost your business money

Hopefully that has your attention! But it is true, there is no doubt with this, technical debt costs the business money. That cost could be a direct cost i.e. as your technical debt grows so does your head count of developers to manage the debt, or it costs you indirectly in limiting your business growth, as your current developers spend more of their time maintaining and less time innovating.

Either way this debt has a cost to your business whether you can easily see it or not.

How you can limit technical debt in your business

The bad news is, technical debt is impossible to 100% be rid of. But it can be limited to the point of it having very little impact on your business.

The simple answer is to throw more staff at it, although this will help and your number of developers will impact your potential innovation and growth, it is not the best long term solution to handle technical debt. The solution only needs to be a small change, that change is time.

Give you developers that extra bit of breathing room when it comes to requests, give them time to figure out the best solution. Give them time after the launch of a new feature to tidy up the code they have written, to write tests against the code (if they haven't already) to make sure future changes do not break the code they have just written. Give them time to look at the systems you already have running and remove or replace the problem areas.

The small amount of extra time given at this stage will save you a multiple of that time later down the line. But make it clear that this extra time you are giving them is to manage technical debt and not working on new features.

Your developers will work faster not slower

Although I am asking for more time for your developers, this does not mean your development department needs to work at a slower pace, in fact by removing your technical debt you will actually increase the pace of your developers, they will be able to become more agile in their approach to delivering solutions for you.

An effective team of developers will have the agility to experiment in new areas and deliver features fast, this can be achieved by ensuring your business adopts Lean practices, but that is a subject for a different post.

Finally

I have talked about technical debt for your developers and tech teams, but where else in your business are you paying a 'debt' for not implementing the correct solution or process in the first place. How long does it take to bring on-board a new customer, does invoicing a customer involve too many steps, do customers have to phone to get status updates taking up your staffs time? I ask you to think, how much of your staffs time taken up on tasks that, with a little work, could be shortened to give your staff more time to innovate and help grow your business?

This post was originally posted on LinkedIn by me https://digitalforleaders.com/business-leaders-is-technical-debt-crippling-innovation-and-growth/