CIOInsider India Magazine
8 Effective Ways To Communicate Your Brand's Delivery Strategy In 2019
With over two decades of experience in IT and product development services, A Nandini plays an instrumental role in GlobalLogic’s presales process and also has extensive experience ramping up large engineering labs.
Organizations need to evolve to address the changing business landscapes. Digital transformation is a foundational change in how an organization delivers value to its customers. Digital transformation isn’t a choice anymore but a critical element for business survival hence it is also termed as Business transformation. Today, it is a battered term however as a process digital business transformation is a complex undertaking and the success is elusive. Delivering digital products or services requires a novel approach and a tailored strategy, no wonder the success rate is low as it is a challenge to shrug off traditional working methods and embrace new strategy.
Technological innovations lead to what we call technology disruptions. But transformation is not just about technology innovations and their disruption on the business. It is also about how these technological innovations are adopted and used. Building a digital product or a service involves building a hybrid integration platform that integrates diverse technologies and connection to ecosystem supported by API approaches. Most of the times, it involves multiple vendors coming together to deliver the digital product or service. Here is what transformation justly entails, along with tips to ensure your company is on the right progression.
Macro Program Structure Design - Critical to know and understand the boundaries between business and the various vendors coming together, for the hand offs to be smooth and the roles and responsibilities clearly documented and agreed. The process through which the baton gets passed through the development lifecycle from one vendor to another with clear cut expectations and no ambiguity is paramount. For instance, who manages the various environments, configuration for the various environments, integration testing should be clearly understood, documented and communicated to all parties involved.
Micro Program Structure Design - While the above provides for a macro level separation of responsibilities between the various vendors, important to also have a clear micro level view. Hence, important to understand, document and communicate the roles and responsibilities by building a RACI matrix between the various teams of a vendor and this should be done for every
vendor. One vendor may only be responsible for providing content while one vendor may be responsible for integration testing and may need content of various types. Explicit call outs on who expects what, why and when does not leave any room for ambiguity and is a key enabler for program success.
Effective Program Office - A centralized and strong Program Management Office to manage the transformation program across business and vendors must be constituted. Recommended to have representation from the different participating vendors but the leader must be clearly identified and ideally should be from business. They steer the program, watch over the risks and mitigation, implement learnings from retrospectives, seek help from executive sponsors as needed to ensure program success.
Digital is here to stay, and successful digital delivery needs effective strategy more than disruptive technologies or innovative thinking
Success Criteria- Needs to be defined, it should be objective hence measurable and also should be agreed, documented and communicated to everyone. It needs to be defined for every stage – be it a Sprint, a Program Increment, a release and across dimensions – in terms of scope, outline which Capabilities/Epics/Features/Stories must be delivered, at what defect density etc.–ensures quality product or service will get delivered on time and all the time.
Digital Lingo - Everyone who plays a part in building the digital product or service needs to be trained, from the executive leadership team to the junior most developer. The training imparted of course will vary basis the role, seniority and position but will ensure everyone speaks and understands the digital lingo and the basic tenets of what it takes to build a digital product or a service. For instance, everyone will understand and appreciate the need to build in quality, the need to embrace agile and dev ops culture, the need to invest in digital skills and so on.
Engineering Rigor - Delivering a digital product or service requires engineering rigor and discipline. Clear definition, workflows, processes should be available to everyone all the time and communicated effectively for consistent implementation. From definition of ready to definition of done to the workflow of a defect, the defect priority and severity definitions, acceptance criteria etc. should be clearly documented and available to everyone, communicated and reiterated from time to time.
Tool Strategy - A well-defined clear strategy of tools to be used for every activity – requirements capture, knowledge management, defect management, test case management, collaboration, monitoring and alerting should be discussed, debated, agreed upon and followed through. Strategy on critical elements such as test environments management, code progression and quality gates through the environment pipeline, infrastructure provisioning, branching strategy should be agreed and communicated effectively.
Cognitive Communication – Digital needs cognitive communication at every level. Making use of the data that is generated while executing the transformation program should be used to feed into the program and provide predictions and inputs that should be used for effective communication. For instance, story point velocity (scrum development teams) is on a downward trend, capacity utilization is on an upward trend, defect density is improving, performance of a microservice is poor etc. Using data to communicate best practices or shortcomings is a very effective way to ensure action items from retrospectives are implemented.
Digital is here to stay, and successful digital delivery needs effective strategy more than disruptive technologies or innovative thinking. Successful delivery strategy is linked to effective communication and reiterating these above-mentioned practices consistently. Integrating these project delivery practices into one’s digital transformation journey will surely stack the deck in one’s favor. Not forgetting, of course, to keep adapting as you go!
