To Be or Not To Be - Digital

 I had to step away from my role for a period of time and as such did more reading than I have in a while and realised that businesses are going through the hardest changes and decisions that they have seen in a long time. Most businesses have realised they need to change, in fact in a recent survey by BCG[1] it was shown that 89% of Managers globally are involved in digital transformation. The challenge we face is transformations are often compared with any other business decision we take, linear, a or b, left or right. A true transformation is just that, ceasing to be what you were before to become something new. Think about the Caterpillar who becomes a butterfly, this is what business leaders should have in mind when they are seeking to transform, at the end of the initial transformation (because once you start to evolve, your team should continue to keep looking at how that journey can continue), you should be able to see the marked differences from how you operated before to what you are doing now.

Lets stay with that Caterpillar analogy, if a business decided to glue wings on the caterpillar, change its colour, it would not be a transformation, it would still do what it did before, it might look interesting, but actually we would have just made things harder by bringing new complexity to an organism that was built to do what it does (crawl and eat). Many businesses are stuck in this pattern, looking at new technologies, bringing in exciting consultants, however the way of working and the processes and roles and responsibilities all remain exactly the same. Whether there is a new app or website, without these broader changes those businesses – like it or not – will remain a caterpillar. A caterpillar who spends a significant amount of money and whose Board, Senior leaders start asking why are they not becoming a Butterfly.

This brings me to my question – “To be or not to be digital”. Many people will say that being digital is having digital channels to engage with your customers, or having an app to support your employees, these in all honesty are the cosmetics. Imagine a butterfly racing a caterpillar to get to the next branch above, now the caterpillar can eat more but how long will it take to get there and is it worth eating when it does? When we look at Digital native businesses – i.e. those who were born digital, the way they work, they way they create and continue to evolve, just think about some of the apps you use. How many of those are the same as they were a year ago, or even 3 months ago?

Being Digital requires the thinking within an organisation to change, a rewiring if you will, its really hard, but hard things done well is what will effect real change going forward for an organisation. If the organisation can go digital, then the technology can follow. Its amazing in fact there are so many technology options that if a business can transform itself it will realise that it can test ideas, and then decide what works or doesn’t as they continually evolve with low risk and high reward through a fail fast and continually learn approach.

The caterpillar puts in a lot of energy to first builds its cocoon then expends so much energy through its transformation that it loses nearly half of its weight in the process. The same is for businesses, when you are truly transforming you need to ensure it has everyone’s focus and commitment to make the change, if one part of a cocoon wasn’t ready then perhaps the transformation might not look complete or could be eaten by predators crawling in.

Ok I know enough about the caterpillar, but it is a great example for us to consider as we all seek to “Be Digital”. Use it as a measure of how much is actually changing within your organisation, are people taking on new roles, are teams working in different ways? Are outcomes being realised incrementally faster? It isn’t easy, but big changes should never be easy, choosing to be digital brings with it, risks, challenges, emotions, learnings and a commitment that many won’t have experienced before. Hence when you are thinking about embarking on your transformation, think about what it will look like on the other side for your people, your customers and yourself. How bold will your transformation be, because at the end of your journey only you can decide whether you will choose to be or not to be digital – as likewise for any transformation that remains the ultimate question.

[1] BCG Global Survey on Digital Transformation  engagement - https://www.bcg.com/press/3july2020-digital-transformation-survey

Confessions of a Neophiliac

 First of all yes that is actually a real word, but don’t be frightened just yet. I didn’t know what this was until I started to try and understand what some of the traits of a Digital leader are and the first trait listed was that Digital leaders are Neophiliacs. I was like what in the world is a neophiliac? ... well, apparently it is someone who has a “love of or enthusiasm for what is new or novel”. This immediately resonated with me, I have a good friend who always referred to me as the “Blue sky boy” his take I guess on always coming up with something new, whether a new way to solve a challenge, a new product idea, new partnerships or simply a new idea to be discussed and assessed for consideration to execute. I love the fact that this has a definition, I can see myself introducing, “Hi I am Nathan Bell and yes I am a neophiliac”. On second thoughts that might simply scare the hell out of people as they take two steps back. 

Over the years I have learned that the “guy” with the new idea can quickly be side-lined if they haven’t thought through the implications, the value and investment required to see it through, simply identifying something as being “cool” is not enough when you are dealing with the continual constraints of time, budget and resources to execute with. Sometimes I reflect that this lesson for me took a while to sink in as I was fortunate to work with teams who were willing to see my ideas through, whether related to a product, customer segments, customer experience or even designing organisations.

As leaders it's important that we are always open to new ideas, these ideas can come from anyone, those with a fresh perspective, voice of the user / customer, or those facing the challenge they have a solution to on the frontline. As I shared though the idea alone is not enough, in fact, having a great idea is like showing someone a picture of a car I have drawn when I was five and the response being, “well yes that’s nice but how is it actually going to work?”.

When we are supporting our teams with the ideas they bring to us as leaders it is a joint responsibility. Challenging the individual or team to come up with the answers to how the idea would be executed and the value that would be realised, equally important is your commitment as a leader to see through the execution of that idea either with funding, resources or time. Many businesses today talk about ideation, and how any idea can be brought forward, however without the commitment to see it through or sharing a framework that team members can understand, collaborate around and ultimately realise the personal satisfaction of driving change within their own business, will only lead to frustration, disillusionment, and negativity. 

Therefore it is important that while we want to encourage our neophiliacs to engage with the business, leverage them to help solve problems, drive real change, without the right framework to support such thinking, we can end up with neophiliacs becoming pessimistic. Hence let’s think through the framework for ideation, how will we encourage people, teams to thrive but in a way that is transparent and drives accountability and ultimately hope in how change within a business will be driven from within rather than top down or externally.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas, and if not at least given you pause to consider how you could help guide your idea people to their full potential.

Your truly,

A Neophiliac

How Fragile is Agile?

I have been reading a lot of articles lately about whether Agile actually works, or whether it’s simply a dream for businesses looking to accelerate business outcomes. Ultimately, the growing view seems to be that Agile doesn’t work – that it is a hype that consulting firms are thriving on, and we’re actually better off going to traditional delivery methods that provide predictability, consistency and the ability to hold someone accountable to get things done.

This debate stems from a need to find the ‘magic answer’ – the silver bullet to take all of our worries away, especially when we are looking to transform. We like Waterfall because we can allocate responsibility to someone else, whereas Agile requires us to get more involved through evolving design, constant prioritisation, showcase presentation, and ultimately owning the outcome (scary stuff). Waterfall means I can document everything I want and then point to someone else to deliver the outcomes. Any delays, errors or increased costs are totally on them, right? (ahem). However, with Waterfall delivery we tend to forget the wonderful concept of change request, where it tends to have a growing number of change requests over time, and then finishes with a resignation of taking what can be delivered with the remaining budget. Now, some might say that if you plan things right you don’t need change requests, but in today’s era of constant change, avoiding it is challenging, to say the least. Historically, in a market where market change was measured in years and for the most part manual (or at best, half yearly) the scale of change was manageable, today however, we are faced with two types of businesses: those that were born digital and those that aspire to become digital. In this dynamic, the extent and scale of change is huge and the challenges this brings to Waterfall delivery means we constantly ask for changes to our delivery plans to evolve with the market.

On the other hand, Agile provides a degree of unpredictability and tends to shift directions based on the priorities set by the business and, more specifically, the product owner themselves. The timing of when a specific capability is completed can be a little vague, as the definition of ‘done’ comes down to when the product owner is actually happy with the capability, and whether they feel it’s fit for purpose. While there can be a desire to go fast with Agile, the concept of minimum viable is always in the eyes of the product owner and thus velocity is determined by the business. For those looking to test in-market quickly, you could achieve a faster launch, but with the knowledge that there might be errors or adjustments to make ongoing. For others who like a capability to be holistic and low risk, it can mean numerous sprints are necessary before it is deemed “done” and as such ready to share with colleagues and / or customers.

I am not going to say that Agile is faster or cheaper – in fact, it can be more ambiguous, frustrating, and lack accountability, which ultimately means there’s no one to point the finger at in pushing toward an outcome. However, this is also why I believe Agile is our future.

Agile represents the cultural change a business needs to go through. We need to be comfortable with a degree of ambiguity and we need to share ownership of the outcome. One aspect that Agile does outperform Waterfall on is the ability to learn faster – and if a business is willing to learn through quick tests and recognises that early failures ensure a program is on the right track overall, then Agile can be a great vehicle to achieve business outcomes. My concern is that Agile has been branded in the tech market as a vehicle to move faster, which means the expectations are wrong from the get-go. Agile will help you learn faster and pivot as the needs of the business evolve or the market drives change, which can create a sense of speed, however it is simply an ingredient in the recipe for broader business agility.

The challenge we keep facing is that our world is not the stable working environment it was before. The predictability of having a three-year outlook that could merely be followed through with minimal disruption is rapidly diminishing, with software that felt more like hardware because it was very much standalone and constant. Today, change doesn’t happen in a two or three-year cycle; it’s happening in months and, if you are really unlucky, in weeks. This is why Waterfall is struggling, as the changes we need to make means we would need to constantly raise change requests and our costs keep going up.

This doesn’t mean I have suddenly prescribed to Agile as being the answer to everything, but it’s about knowing what has the right outcome for your business. If you are doing a migration to the cloud of premise-based applications with fixed scope and deliverables, then Waterfall is likely a better path. On the other hand if you’re developing capability that you know will continue to evolve, then Agile can actually help drive a better outcome.

So, to answer the question in the headline of this article, Agile can appear fragile because it means accepting that we are all accountable for its success. When we struggle to accept ambiguity, the need to change the way we work, or accept joint accountability in partnership of realising outcomes, we make the process fragile.

All of this is simply leading to one key reason - We are the reason why Agile is fragile. We don’t like change, we don’t like being responsible for things which in a traditional IT world was always the ownership of others. In fact, I remember my first project with Agile ways of working, I was constantly asking the delivery partner if this is going to work. My big realisation was when one of the team leads from the delivery partner turned to me and asked me back, “I don’t know, you tell me.” After my heart skipped a couple of beats, I realised this was the difference, and what I didn’t like was that there wasn’t the same clarity that I felt I had before. On the other hand, following our initial delivery, I realised it was that constant ability to keep improving, evolving our tools and external facing systems that was giving us the ability to continue to evolve.

I look at Agile as being a reminder that the business needs to take accountability for the delivery of projects. The time of simply pushing the problem to someone else is over. The introduction of Agile has added another tool to our bag to support our business in become increasingly digital. In doing this, we can enable the business to be less fragile and more adaptable, innovative, disruptive, and, well, agile.

Climbing the transformation mountain

Two years have passed since someone suggested to me to work with them on transforming Telstra’s B2B business.  In those two years we have been on an amazing journey of understanding what it means to perform a heart and lung transplant on a patient running a marathon while also leading the pack.

 

In two years, we have not only established a set of end-to-end integrated systems, from product definition to customer billing, we have also launched what is one of Telstra’s most holistic offers to market as a true paperless proposition –it has been awesome to see the positive impacts to our customers and partners.

To many of the team, delivering all of these aspects in our transformation program has felt like we have climbed a mountain. That said, we have a long way still to go to realise the scale of change that will ensure a sustainable change for the business.

 

There have been many examples of change that our transformation program is bringing, including the automatic flow of information between systems without any human intervention. This might seem obvious, but any business or IT person involved in managing system handoffs, will appreciate that it’s these integrations that are the hardest. Hearing from one of the team how data is now populating automatically between systems without any need to request it is music to my ears.

 

One of our key realisations is that while a digital transformation is enabled by software, it is very much a business transformation and not just a technology transformation.  Digital transformation needs to guide a business to actually change the way it works - the support of all of these new capabilities will be the real validation of a sustainable change.

 

This was reiterated by Telstra’s recent Disruptive Decision-Making report, which found across the globe businesses are too focused on the role of technology in digital transformation programs. 

                                                                
Transformation does not mean only internal business change, but also change in the way a business engages with its customers. It is interesting to see the way we embrace digital interactions for our personal needs, but when it comes to businesses, we are more comfortable in using traditional channels of calling or emailing someone from a service desk. It has been inspiring to see what teams have achieved in the past two years in building our first native business app, co-developed with customers to realise a new digital-first strategy to serve their customers.

Why on earth am I talking about these achievements, though?

Simply put, for us, these achievements were more of a realisation that we tend to be so focused on what is next that we don’t pause to learn from what we have achieved, struggled with, or missed delivering.

It is very easy to forget about accomplishments to date as we reflect on how far we still have to go. Recognising these outcomes both within our program and in the broader organisation are important - it highlights that progress is being made toward the top of the mountain, and acknowledging and reviewing progress, ensures continual learning and improvement as we move closer to the summit.

As we start with the next phase of our climb, there are three key challenges that now arise: scale, customer migrations, and data.

 

Scale in the form of ensuring the majority of the business’s transactions to support B2B customers are enabled on a new digital stack. Without this volume of transactions, the efficiencies targeted to be realised through this new capability won’t materialise. The work to date has demonstrated the scale of change that is possible, but our business won’t feel it until volumes are reached that result in true business change. 

 

Customer migration might sound obvious, but when a business engages with its customers in a certain way for a long period of time, introducing a new way of working can be disruptive - collaborating on that journey with customers to understand the value of the change for their businesses is critical. 

Data is the most critical element of any transformation program. I always find it interesting when people talk about data scientists or big data, but for me personally, I would just be happy with a single source of data that ensures our teams are not having to double or even triple check that data between systems is consistent. As we learned with our first orders, without accurate data we create unnecessary work for ourselves and we lose the value from the integrated systems we have established.

 

On the flipside, where we know data is accurate, teams can quickly focus on high-value tasks with customers. Workflows can become highly automated from opportunity through to in-life service management, driving efficiency to levels previously not seen.

Of course this is in the future - to achieve these next wave of outcomes we need to climb this mountain, bring all of our people, partners and customers into this new world of integrated and digitised capabilities.

 

Sometimes that new world can seem challenging given how high we need to climb, but it is the diversity and strengths of a team that can achieve the outcomes a business is looking for - just like those climbing the highest mountains. With the right team in place, any peak is possible.