Can you pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time?
There is no sin in imagining your shiny new operating model, delivering lots of wonderful customer experiences and internal process improvements that make your place of work so much more interesting than your competitors.
And imagining the benefits out the other side of the journey is part of the fun in business.
So you can ‘pat your head’…but can you rub your stomach at the same time?
Don’t be ashamed if you can’t. Not many people can…and not many organisations can either. It’s a great contributor to why 70% of organisations fail to deliver on digital transformation projects.
In other words…most companies focus on hitting milestones in projects in order to reach their goals, whilst no one is stitching the new state of the organisation together…and then wonder why the milestones aren’t being hit.
Isn’t that the job of the project manager?
Most people would think to avoid the problem, you should appoint ‘one throat to choke’…the poor old Project Manager.
She or he…is responsible for everything! Even for filling gaps where they might exist and mitigating risks like the little boy with his finger in the dam wall. Only the poor bugger has run out of fingers and toes now…
The PM can’t hold on much longer…and now you open the flood gates and the poor old Project Manager is swept downstream where they try and make it to shore so they don’t drown.
They keep swallowing water and you’re on the sidelines, pushing them back in as they try to get to shore. ‘Heck…it’s their job to keep things on track…that’s what we pay them for!’
All the time the rest of the team is watching from the top of the dam wall, instead of getting in and helping out.
Little does anyone know, their own expertise and even just a little ownership from each of them can recover this situation, as they all watch the PM drown.
We’d better get a new one…
This problem very much sounds like the sacrificial lamb in the 3rd habit…only this time it’s contract labour, so we can treat them like crap and not worry about it, we can always get a new one!
And so you do…
You pick up the pieces of what has been delivered and you pay a bit more for the next one, as you all think…‘surely that should get us a better outcome!’
Only this time, this project manager…being more senior than the last…is well aware of their strengths and weaknesses and tells you they can’t mitigate all of the risks on their own and you need to hire in more expertise, as your own people are not taking any accountability for anything.
Your head is in a spin… and you come out with…‘WHAT’…do you mean to say that you can’t manage this project!
And the orchestra continues to play…
This time you just hold this PM’s head under the water to kill them off quickly…
What your rage is completely blinding you to, is that no one in your team is willing to step outside of their coffee routines to roll their sleeves up, pull the PM into the lifeboat and all start rowing, by sweating the detail together.
And by the way… you are the orchestrator of the problem as your coffee and lunch meetings are far too important for getting your hands dirty. So your leadership rubs off on your employees.
You’ve turned into the maestro on the deck of the Titanic, whilst your people are playing in the string quartet and the ship just continues to go down.
Digital Transformation Strategy: Do you keep searching for the magic bullet?
If you keep searching for the magic bullet to ensure your projects are delivered well…think again. There isn’t a ‘singular’ answer to getting the outcomes from your digital transformation projects delivered to your original expectations.
Getting everyone outside of their comfort zone to deliver a project well, is not easy. But when did anything good come out of anything easy? Sweating the detail in projects and in your digital transformation strategy that transforms the way you do business is a core element to ensuring your success.
Want to learn how to sweat the detail and your digital transformation strategy?
A core part of the A2B Digital Adoption Framework™ focuses on the collective state of consciousness needed to transform a business effectively, before embarking on the journey so that everyone knows what they are in for.
Contact us @ www.a2btransformation.net/contact for a free coaching session on how to align your organisation to transform effectively.
Talk to a2b today about setting up your digital transformation for success, growth, and operational efficiency.
