Successful Digital Transformation Isn’t About Technology, It’s About People
Successful Digital Transformation Isn’t About Technology, It’s About People
Successful Digital Transformation Isn’t About Technology, It’s About People
Why digital transformation isn’t just about technology
Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology
https://hbr.org/2019/03/digital-transformation-is-not-about-technology
Digital isn’t software, it’s a mindset
Inspired by be more digital‘s post on Simple project management here are some of my far less useful thoughts on managing digital projects.
Because the Internet changed everything. It changed almost every aspect of our lives, it changed how organisations run, and it changed the way we think. Internet-era ways of working from Public Digital and the Digital Design Principles from CAST have lots in common (including a move away from project-orientated thinking, but more of that below). A few of the principles that change how we approach project management from a digital mindset are:
Whether the project work is digital, such as building a new website, or not, the project can and should be managed using these kinds of modern principles and practices. It achieves better things for the people that use what the project delivers.
Is the work you intend to undertake really a project or is it just what you do packaged as a project?
If you’ve got three No’s it probably means the work you want to do either isn’t a project or is a project in name only. Three Yes’s means you should probably be approaching the work as a project. Why does it matter? Because, even though all work is fundamentally about these three things: time, money and people’s knowledge and efforts, a project ties them together more tightly and has extra pressure on all three.
There is a universal law of projects; there is always too much to do in too little time. And there are really only three ways to deal with it:
Actually, in reality, a flexible shifting of all three is most likely to help a project be successful. It might be seventy or so years old, but the iron triangle of project management represents these three things as Scope, Time and Cost. It says that:
‘Quality’ is at the centre of the triangle. A project that is delivered on time, on budget and scope, is considered of high quality. A project that is late, over budget, or doesn’t deliver what it should is considered of lower quality. Project management is about managing the quality of the project. It is done through managing the scope of the work, the available budget and the time and skills people have, but project management is much more then just task management.
You shouldn’t. All of the work that needs to be delivered in a project is the work that need to be delivered. Using Must, Should, Could (MoSCoW), for example, as a means of prioritising the bits of work introduces more uncertainty than it brings clarity. “What do you mean by we ‘should’ do this piece of work? Are we doing it or not?”. There shouldn’t be any uncertainty about the deliverables.
Prioritisation is often used as a proxy to avoid having the difficult conversation about scope, time and people, but all it does is cloud the issues and take focus away from delivering the project. Keep it simple. The project work is all of the work, and all of it is important (if it isn’t important why is it even part of the project). If you can’t deliver it all, for whatever reason, have the conversations that lead to solutions.
Phasing project work is sometimes seen as a means of deprioritising some work. “We’ll do it in phase 2” sometimes means some non-specific future that may or may not occur. If that’s the case, let it go and focus on delivering the current project. If the project is actually broken into phases then you need a means of deciding which work to do in each phase. Assuming that each phase corresponds to work being released to users, then the work should be sliced by what will be most valuable to the people who are going to be using it. One thing finished and delivered in a phase is better than two half finished things over two phases.
All project schedules are a guess. Some guesses are better than others, and having some sense of when the project will finish is important (as I said above, what usually makes projects different from other work is the added pressure which often isn’t sustainable for long uncertain periods). Sometimes the ‘is the project on schedule?’ question is more often a reporting problem-to-solve than it is a scheduling problem. Because no one ever really knows whether a project is on schedule at any point in time until it’s delivered, this question is really asking how confident are we that it will be delivered on time. How that confidence is communicated is more fundamental than answering schedule questions.
For a project manager, managing people isn’t about telling people what to do, it’s about ensuring the project team have the necessary skills, knowledge and experience to be able to do the work required in the project, and that the team has enough time to do all the things. This is often the hardest part of project management, which is why the easier parts of managing scope and schedule are often focused on instead. The people involved in a project are the greatest factor in the quality of the project being delivered, give them the consideration they need.
Good digital project management not only puts users first, it also puts the people on the project team ahead of scope and schedule. (Tweet this)
Simple project management
This week I did:
Or not. It doesn’t feel like finishing any of the things we’re working on has aligned with the end of the year. We’re still in the middle of lots of things and that’s ok, that’s how things work out sometimes.
I sent the first edition of my digital nomad newsletter, titled ‘The end is nigh‘ (with a nod to Red Dwarf) to all three of my subscribers. It’s taken me a while to figure what I want to do with it but I landed on it not being about remote work or the nonsense of the digital nomad lifestyle, and instead being a more thoughtful discovery on ideas about art, life, the outsider, minimalist, stoicism, essentialism.
I did the Research Methods in Business exam and Innovation Management and Policy exam. Six modules done, two modules and dissertation to do.
I’ve tried the simple kanban of To do, Doing, Done and I always found that lots of things stayed in Doing because I was technically still working on them even if I hadn’t progressed them recently, and I didn’t want to lose them in the To Do list. This made it increasingly harder to use the Doing list to focus. So I’m trying a time-focused approach. My columns are ‘Today’, ‘This week’, ‘Future’ (which is effectively To do) and ‘Past’ (which is mostly Done but also some things that had a date that I didn’t do. I’ve added lost of the tasks I want to do next year for all of my projects.
Had a good chat about some of the product advisor work I’ve been doing. Its interesting professional development for me and is giving me some context for formalising some of my product thinking, not least that every product development framework and method is context specific, and that the best way to build a product is to build the process for building the product as you build it.
My digital tools list is now at 600. As a list of tools it seems to have limited value, and that value isn’t going to increase with the number of tools on the list, but how the info used on the list might have some value. Two of my ideas so far are around market analysis (if you’re going to build a video product you could quickly check out all the other video products) and building digital business models by connecting up the tools (a product for creating Twitter threads to promote the product you built in a nocode product which uses a subscription collection product to take payments, and so on).
I thought about:
There is a paradox in how we present innovation as a linear process whilst knowing that it better resembles spaghetti. Obviously it’s human and management nature to simplify things into what can be easily explained and will fit on a PowerPoint slide, but its interesting to think about how to get past those out-of-date mental models.
Having organised my project tasks for next year, it made me think about different approaches to goal setting:
I’ve no idea which approach works best in what context but I bet they aren’t mutually exclusive.
The most valuable person in an organisation used to be the one with the most power. Soon it will be the one with the most knowledge. Knowledge is value (and it doesn’t have to have power).
And I read:
“In 1973, design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber introduced the term “wicked problem” in order to draw attention to the complexities and challenges of addressing planning and social policy problems“. I’d heard the term ‘wicked problem’ before but never knew it had a source like this and so much thinking behind it. It adds to some of my thinking about how charities choose causes and solve (or not) social problems.
“Branches of Co-op in the south of England have been using real-time facial recognition cameras to scan shoppers entering stores.” Interesting tech ethics to consider when an organisation with an ethical ethos introduces technology that others raise ethical concerns about.
“The Third Sector Trends Study has now used data from the Charity Commission register, the Third Sector Trends Study and NCVO Civil Society Almanac to get a much clearer picture about the situation of the local Third Sector across England and Wales.” The report frames the Civic Space as existing between the private sector. the state and private space. In my thinking it’s the private space that exists in the middle of the three spaces created by the different modes of organising people. I also found the power law distribution of charity size and income quite interesting, although not surprising. I wonder how the age of the charity would map against its size and income. There are so many interesting things in the report.
And some people tweeted:
Michael Wilkinson tweeted “Great weekend reading from Harvard on the Work From Anywhere (WFA) future. There are many benefits and challenges that the feature discusses which I thought I’d share here.” The thread has lots of really interesting thoughts about flexible working. The point I would add is about the long term benefits that flexible working has in knowledge transfer between organisations and the rest of society. By making the boundaries the organisation puts up (from Friedman’s statement that a firm’s responsibility is only to increase profits) between it and the rest of the world, more permeable, the way knowledge and information flows will fundamentally change.
Paul Taylor tweeted, “A “digital repository to hold all of your organisational knowledge, that will allow unprecedented access to deep insights with a few keyboard taps” is a fantasy that only exists in the minds of people selling you a Silver Bullet“. Knowledge can’t (yet) be codified, it can only be translated into information to be codified (and then stored digitally) and so much is lost in that process. Turning information and/or knowledge into intellectual assets is a really difficult problem.
Jack Altman tweeted, “Most great companies are built by taking a small number of bold and unique bets, and then being as by-the-book / best-practices as possible on everything else.” The strategy is delivery. Execution wins.
Definition of Digital
Definition of Digital
Digital tools for digital people.
https://medium.com/@sharonodea/digital-tools-for-digital-people-b659be16ee1e#.vcv8sie33