The Declaration of Digital Transformation Success

How do you achieve digital transformation success? Some might answer that it varies, since no two success stories are quite the same. Failed projects, however, seem to posses all too many commonalities, which actually implies that we should be able to arrive at some principles for success as well. Or at the very least for avoiding complete failure. Right?

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The rise and upcoming fall of customer experience

Recent years have seen a lot of hype surrounding customer experience, but without anchoring the concept within a deeper digital transformation, it’s just another overhyped buzzword.

I am always interested in looking beyond the hype and trying to understand what is really happening, which is why I seeked out Michael Bednar-Brandt who is Director Digital EMEA at Oracle.

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Two steps in delivering value to your customers

Many CEOs are looking to turn their organisation into a customer-focused one, but let’s take a step back and look at what that actually entails.

Does every CEO perceive customer experience activities the same way? Is the CEO familiar with all the possibilities we have to choose from when trying to become a customer-focused organisation? These are difficult questions.

In many organisations, Mr. Marketing thinks about improving the website to increase sales while Mr Product Manager thinks about reducing production costs by getting rid of features customers don’t appreciate. They are both right, but there are also many other ways of increasing customer value. The question becomes how to identify the potential and implement it throughout the organisation.

Boye Aarhus 16 conference keynote speaker Claudia Urschbach has spent the past 18 years of her career helping organisations such as BBC, Siemens, Carl Zeiss, the German newspaper giant Süddeutsche Zeitung and many others to become customer-focused. In her experience, developing and implementing a strategy sets off a chain reaction of changes in many different corners of your organisation.

1. Identifying the value potential in your product

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Claudia emphasizes that the first step in providing value to your customers is identifying how your product is actually currently providing value. This analysis needs to be in depth, which is why Claudia believes the recently published 30 elements of customer value will be a game changer.

This table expands upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and breaks down concepts into their fundamental building blocks. If the customer describes the product as convenient, often it will really mean a combination of time saving, simplifying and effort reducing.

The table operates with four general categories that provides you with a great overview. It can help open your eyes to those areas where further development of your product and organisation could provide increased customer value. Perhaps your product is already providing functional value, but could be providing emotional value as well.

2. Implementing it throughout your organisation

Once you have identified the value potential of your product, it is time to turn you organisation into one that is able to provide that value.

Claudia points to change management as being vital for this to work. Where you should start the process, becomes extremely important:

“As always with change management you have to be clever with your decision where you start. You want to reach momentum quickly and without the effect of demotivation in your teams.”

You want to ask yourself which activities have the biggest positive impact, cause the least tension and bring return of investment quickest?

Becoming a customer-focused organisation is much easier and cost-effective when you have a dedicated customer experience strategy that clearly points to specific ways and areas where the product and organisation could be providing more value to it’s customers.

Learn more about customer experience

Customer experience is on everyone’s lips and professionals are going at it from different angles. In two other recent postings I have spoken with professionals who deliver perspectives that might also prove to be food for thought:

Two steps in delivering value to your customers

Many CEOs are looking to turn their organisation into a customer-focused one, but let’s take a step back and look at what that actually entails.

Does every CEO perceive customer experience activities the same way? Is the CEO familiar with all the possibilities we have to choose from when trying to become a customer-focused organisation? These are difficult questions.

Read more

The usual disconnect between strategy and execution

Strategies never succeed on software alone. On the contrary, most of the actions involved in implementing a new strategy has to be performed by people. Still, formulating and ensuring deadlines are met might be aided by visual management tools as well as simple, well worked routines that focuses on honest assessment of every employee’s ability to execute tasks.

Read more

The usual disconnect between strategy and execution

Strategies never succeed on software alone. On the contrary, most of the actions involved in implementing a new strategy has to be performed by people. Still, formulating and ensuring deadlines are met might be aided by visual management tools as well as simple, well worked routines that focuses on honest assessment of every employee’s ability to execute tasks.

Read more

Banking has changed. Soon it will change much more

A recent study by Viacom Media Networks shows 71% of Millennials said they’d rather visit the dentist than hear what a bank has to say.

If you couple this with the fact that transactions performed at physical bank branches are on the down, and in many countries bank branches are closing, it is clear that what we know as banking is in for a wild ride over the coming years.

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Needs versus requirements

Much has been written about why projects, and in particular digital projects, don’t succeed. Be it lack of executive sponsorship, poorly documented requirements, technology problems, simply lack of follow-up and the list goes on.

At a recent Boye group meeting in Munich, Claudia Urschbach from Süddeutsche Zeitung took a different approach by looking behind stakeholders and their requirements and trying to get to a deeper understanding of their needs and anxieties. Might our lack of appreciation for these basic human emotions be exactly why projects gets stalled and too often fail?

Understanding needs

In most projects that I’ve been involved in there has been a reasonable understanding of key requirements. Some also have a carefully developed requirements specification detailing functional, design and technical aspects of the project. But what about the needs of the executive sponsor, the needs of the project manager, the needs of the designer and everyone else involved?

Claudia has worked with user experience since 1999, incl. a few years at the BBC in London before moving to Munich and joining Süddeutsche. In her workshop at the group meeting, Claudia referenced American psychologist David McClelland and his work on motivation need theory. As shown on the illustration, the driving factors of human actions are below the water.

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Some usual needs involved in projects, incl. the need for being heard, the need to get a promotion, the need to be seen as competent. If your projects fail to address those, why should your stakeholder invest time and resources in the project?

As the famous management quote goes from Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt:

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!

To paraphrase Claudia, my take away from the workshop, was that most probably don’t want a drill nor a hole, but instead we have to think deeper to ensure that our digital initiatives stay on track.

Understanding fears and anxieties

Taking a step deeper from the needs are the fears and anxieties. What might go wrong in a project? Could I get fired? Might the project make me look silly or even incompetent? Might I miss my annual bonus?

In my experience, these fears are rarely made explicit during a project. Instead they reveal themselves indirectly, when people delay projects, make it difficult to move forward and in more or less subtle ways try to distance themselves from a project.

Making it work in your organisation

The advice from Claudia was not necessarily to spend much time with the entire project team on what you might consider pop psychology, but rather use your deeper understanding of needs and fears, to have 1:1 conversations at the onset of the project to help drive the project forward.

According to Claudia, it is worth for a project manager to systematically think through each stakeholder group’s perspectives on the project focusing beyond their requirements on their needs and fears. This process should be part of a project managers risk assessment of a project and ideally is repeated and reviewed throughout the project.