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Your investment in digital transformation is vital – make sure it delivers!

2023 will provide challenges for every organisation accelerating their digital transformations and mobilising their sustainability agenda. Don’t assume that just because you have individual change initiatives under control then your overall change portfolio will successfully execute your strategy and deliver on your promised business outcomes.

2023 is going to demand increased agility by all organisations to mobilise and land change right across the business, while controlling the pace, impacts and costs.

Without control of the end-to-end investment in change, across all portfolios, e.g., technology, sustainability, shared services, supply chain, the following is likely:

Poor or delayed decisions will be made from incomplete or incorrect information, without a single version of the truth running across the portfolios
Dependencies will not be understood and tracked, resulting in unexpected delays and frustrations from your business when expected improvements don’t arrive
You may execute your combined programmes in a way that negatively impacts the speed of value-delivery to the business
As programmes impact each other value will erode, and as overall cost increases, confidence decreases, and change becomes increasingly difficult to land across the wider business.

There are a number of steps that must be taken to avoid this. A small, but highly effective, portfolio management process, built with agility and control can:

Drive timely decision making based on one version of the truth

Make sure that you can roll up information across the portfolio by creating delivery and reporting standards. This doesn’t mean imposing the same delivery method, as you will no doubt have a mix of agile and waterfall delivery, but it does mean agreeing some common terminology. You then need to put in place the required governance forums to ensure that the right people are accessing this information at the right time to drive decision making and democratise this across the organisation.

Prioritise new and changing demand

Prioritisation is not a once and done; there needs to be a frequent cycle of ensuring your current change programmes are still relevant and delivering what you expected, while balancing these against new ideas and demand coming through. This will require an agreed prioritisation framework, and strong decision making from the Exec level across the organisation.

Ensure cross-functional dependencies are managed

Invest time up-front to map out the dependencies between your change initiatives. This requires discipline, hard work and a very collaborative approach across your delivery teams. It will also help if you have an overall target view of where your business is trying to get to and how each initiative feeds into that. Often, a portfolio tool will be helpful to track these dependencies and understand the impacts when things move.

Distributed portfolios

Get an independent view across all change portfolios to make sure that you are using your resources in an optimal manner. This also includes federalising the governance so that, for example, there is innovation within a framework for business areas to instigate and implement their own change, including digital enhancements.

Do you need to improve your change Portfolio management?

At Project One, we recognise that expert transformational assistance is often required. We have experienced practitioners to help you put in place the right level of portfolio control. This often starts with identifying quick wins alongside an assessment of your current landscape. We then design and implement the solutions needed to deliver the improved control, optimising this for a period of time with your internal team, building up your team’s knowledge and transferring capability. If you would like to discuss it further, then please get in touch.

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