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when embarking on a successful digital transformation there are a number of key project deliverables and artifacts that are critical to ensuring that you're successful and effective in managing your transformation but what exactly are those deliverables and artifacts that's what I want to talk about here today [Music] my name is Eric Kimberling I'm the CEO of third stage Consulting we're an independent consulting firm that helps clients throughout the world reach their third stage of digital transformation success and when we are planning for a digital transformation oftentimes we're focused on what the overall digital strategy is what the plan is how we're going to execute how we're going to Resource it all that good stuff very important stuff but one thing we often don't think about is what are those key deliverables the key artifacts the key outputs the tools we need to manage the implementation and track the success of the implementation and even before that provide a foundation for the success of the overall transformation so what I want to do today is talk about the 10 most important deliverables and artifacts that are critical both as outputs and inputs into the digital transformation and for more best practices on how to make your digital transformation and your implementation successful I encourage you to download our ebook called lessons from 1000 digital transformations in that ebook we talk about some of the best practices tips and lessons learned from having worked with over a thousand different Transformations throughout the years and within that white paper or that ebook you'll also find some more information about some of these deliverables that I'm going to talk about here today so be sure to check out the links below to download that the first important deliverable that needs to be created as part of a effective digital transformation strategy is the project Charter and the project Charter is sort of a Playbook or a guide for how the digital transformation is going to go and it includes a number of strategic considerations and strategic decisions that are meant to guide the overall transformation so for example in the project Charter you will Define what the overall implementation plan is how you'll resource the project more importantly you'll Define what the overall strategy for the project is what the results in the ROI you expect to get out of the project you'll also include in that project Charter key decisions and key variables that are going to guide your overall digital transformation so the project Charter is really that Foundation that overarching plan that overarching vision and strategy for how your digital transformation should go and the reason this deliverable is so important is not only because it provides that direction and that Clarity of Direction but also because it forces you to come to decisions on what it is you're trying to accomplish how you'll accomplish it how you'll resource the project how you'll make decisions what the project governance will be throughout the project and it really allows you to take ownership of your project so be sure you have a solid project Charter as one of your first key deliverables another key foundational deliverable for digital Transformations is the documentation that outlines the future State business processes so these are the documents that Define the way you would like to see your end-to-end processes work it defines some of the pain points and opportunities for improvement that you'd like to address and it also provides some clarity on how you'd like the software to ultimately be configured built and deployed to support your digital transformation now let's consider what happens if we don't adequately Define the future State processes and let's just say we instead defer to the software we assume that the off-the-shelf software is going to give us the best practices and the workflows that we need to run our business while that may be true at the granular transactional workflow level it's not going to be effective if we don't have that overarching macro end-to-end business process definition defined a big part of this is because today's modern technology is so flexible you have so many different ways and different options that you can configure basic workflows that if you haven't taken the time to Define your strategic end-to-end business processes season then you'll end up with sort of an aimless Project without clear Direction so having those future State end-to-end business processes is a really important foundational blueprint for how you'll deploy technology going forward now another deliverable that's somewhat related to the Future State business processes is a document that's often referred to as a key decision document now a key decision document is exactly what it sounds like it's a deliverable that captures and clarifies key strategic decisions that have been made as part of your digital transformation and the reason this is so important is because a big part of the challenge of digital transformation is that organizations and stakeholders and Executives oftentimes aren't on the same page they're not aligned they're not heading in the same direction they're not clear on what decisions have been made they're not clear on what decisions they need to make and they're also not clear on how those decisions ultimately will affect the overall digital transformation so this key decision document is a great way to get us all focused on these key decisions that we're going to be making and allow us to have Clarity on what the future state vision of the operations in the organization and ultimately the technology are going to be it also gives us a solid input to help us guide and direct the technical implementation of new software another key deliverable that's also related to your future State business processes is your business requirements document and this is very important not only in helping you evaluate and select potential Technologies to help you with your digital transformation but it's also important during the design phase of the project to ensure that you're designing and Building Technology in a way that captures and addresses those business requirements that you've defined now oftentimes what happens is organizations will identify some of the higher level or higher priority requirements to help them select the software then once they've selected the software and they move into implementation as part of the pre-implementation or the implementation planning they might flush out those requirements in more detail now the key thing here though is to make sure that we don't view requirements just from the perspective of how to build software we need to define the requirements from the perspective of how we're going to build our business so in other words the business should drive the requirements piece of it and those requirements should ultimately dictate how we develop and build and deploy new technologies for our business so business requirements are very important it's something that allows us to select the right software it helps us implement the right software and as we get closer to go live and even post go live that requirements traceability is a great way to make sure that we've addressed all the requirements that we wanted to capture and if we didn't it allows us to optimize the business benefits and trying to figure out how we can better use that technology to address more of our business requirements when we're embarking on a digital transformation we are moving from point A to point B our current state to our future State and oftentimes we're focused almost solely or exclusively on just Building Technology to address that future State we might look at the current state in terms of what technologies we have now and what technologies will go away and how we're going to replace those Technologies with new technologies but what more often gets overlooked is the impact to the organization the impact of people so in other words how is my job going to change now that you're deploying new technology to my part of the business so this is where I need to understand as an employee I need to understand exactly how my job is changing the way things work today how they operate today and how I can connect the dots between current state and future State business processes and roles and responsibilities now this is a big deal for organizations that are going through significant changes not just in terms of digital transformation but if you're trying to integrate operations or you've grown considerably since your last technical deployment or if you've grown through murders and Acquisitions it's really important in those cases that you define clearly how people's jobs are going to change because one of the biggest reasons why people resist change is because they don't have Clarity and understanding of what their future job is going to look like and if we don't clearly articulate that for them fear will get the best of them inevitably and they will inevitably push back on the changes so it's really important that we clearly articulate and understand and document what the change impacts are who's impacted and how and ultimately what we're going to do to help transition the organization through that change and the change impact assessment by the way is one of the most important inputs into the overall change management strategy and plan something I'll come back to later in this video another key deliverable from a change management perspective is going to be the stakeholder analysis stakeholder analysis is a way of looking at all the key Executives the key influencers within the organization and the key stakeholders the people that have the most to gain or lose by a successful transformation it also considers the people that if we don't have alignment and buy-in from these people they have the power organizationally to potentially derail the project and this is another tool that's critical to ensuring that we have alignment and focus as an organization and that we have buy-in from the organization so the stakeholder assessment is really a way for us to get a lay of the land of the organizational Dynamics for the key stakeholders and Executives and also the key influencers the people that again could impact the project positively or negatively it allows us to gauge where each of these people are in the process are they Advocates are they resistors are they neutral how important are they to ensuring that they're on the same page with the overall transformation and ultimately what's our stakeholder engagement strategy for each of these people it's a very targeted one-on-one sort of change management activity that's very critical to ensure that we don't overlook some of the key considerations and key needs of these stakeholders and it's also a great tool to mitigate neutralize some of the change management resistance and misalignment that often comes from digital transformations another change management deliverable that's critical to digital transformation is an organizational Readiness assessment and this is really an assessment of where the organization is today what the culture is what some of the strengths and weaknesses of that culture are what the areas of alignment misalignment are just as a way to understand what the strengths are of the organization the things we can build on to enable a more effective digital transformation and the things that are weaknesses potential problem areas or potential areas of resistance just as an example one of the things we often find when we do organizational Readiness assessments for our clients is that the organization doesn't communicate well across silos you have people that are operating in their own silos they're not used to collaborating they're used to throwing things over the wall to the other departments to handle and they don't necessarily have that visibility and understanding of how the end-to-end processes work this isn't a terrible thing a lot of organizations operate that way but if we're going to deploy new technology that's going to give people that visibility of end-to-end processes and the transformation is going to allow them to collaborate more effectively that can be a good thing but it's not just going to happen because we give them the tool set we know that people might resist that change because they're used to the way things are today they're not used to having to collaborate or worry about what other organizations do so that would be something we look at within an organizational Readiness assessment and say that's a finding from this organization now let's figure out what our change management strategy and plan is to address that reality so the organizational Readiness assessment is something that's very critical to providing an input into an effective change management strategy and plan and actually I have other videos on my YouTube channel that I encourage you to check out that cover change management in more detail and I also encourage you to download our guide to organizational change management if you'd like to learn more about some of these deliverables within change management that I'm talking about it's a guide that covers these and other deliverables and provides best practices for how to manage change within a digital transformation so I encourage you to download that and other resources I've included links to below now one of the key transformation deliverables that really reflect the rubber meeting the road of a transformation this is where the vision of the transformation now becomes reality is test scenarios and test scripts those are something that allow us to ensure that the way we've built the processes and the Technologies and roles and responsibilities and the way we've loaded data in the system in the future State it's a way for us to make sure that all that stuff we've built and spent all this time deploying or getting ready to deploy it's a way for us to ensure that we test it and that we mimic reality and we sort of run through scenarios and test of making sure that we've worked through all the Kinks and the nuances of the new technology and the new processes now what often happens here is that software vendors system integrators and Technical implementation Partners will Define the scenarios more from the perspective of what they need to know to make sure that the technology works the way they expected it to this certainly is an important part of test scripts and scenarios but really what's most important is the business aspect of things looking at your business scenarios some of the exceptions that create problems or could create problems in the new system and making sure we've thought through all the different scenarios too often the Simplicity of the test scenarios and test scripts lead us to a false sense of security that the system works we haven't found any major bugs the processes are working the way they should we've tested everything it looks great but the only problem is we're misled by the fact that we only looked at a small subset of the possible scenarios so what we need to do is make sure that we looked at all the scenarios and developed scripts that address all of those areas now in today's agile environment where organizations want to move fast and get a minimum viable product in place and aren't necessarily interested in Perfection that's fine but what often happens is we tend to gloss over this important testing process so making sure that you have clear scenarios that Define the end in processes and document the way we test and the outcome of those tests is something that's very important and usually we go through multiple iterations of testing using those test scenarios and scripts so make sure you have a complete set of scenarios and scripts you want to make sure that they're well documented and you ultimately want to make sure that these become tools for managing changes and improvements that need to be made before you go live with the new technologies another important deliverable that's more important from a governance and risk perspective is a risk assessment a risk assessment is something that should become part of the DNA of the way you manage your overall digital transformation and a risk assessment is really exactly what it sounds like it's an assessment of where the risks are and more importantly the mitigation strategies that we're going to use and employ to mitigate those risks now the tricky part here is that oftentimes your software vendor and your technical implementer are not the best inputs or the best candidates to identify risks for you reason being that oftentimes if they identify risks and they identify problems with the project that oftentimes reflects poorly on them or they at least feel like it might reflect poorly on them so there's sort of a self-preservation bias that comes into this when you ask your software vendor or technical implementer to manage risk management this is why oftentimes organizations either manage that function themselves if they have a strong pmo and they have strong experience with digital transformations in their past they might opt to manage the risk piece of it themselves or they might hire an independent third party like my team at third stage to help identify and mitigate those risks but regardless of how you do this you want to make sure that the risk management process and deliverables and outputs are separated from the system integrator and Technical implementer and you just want to be realistic about the risks too and you want to be proactive about the risks you don't want to wait until you feel the risks and you feel the pain because by the time you do it's oftentimes too late so you want to anticipate where the risks are likely to emerge based on what you're seeing ahead of you and that's where organizations like my team can help so risk mitigation is something that's often overlooked but very critical from a project governance and risk management perspective one of the last important deliverables that come later in a digital transformation is the go no-go assessment and this is huge from a risk management perspective to ensure that you know what you're getting yourself into or about to get yourself into as you think about going live with new technology and the go no go assessment or checklist as it's often called is a way to look at all the things that we know need to be done and in place and fully understood and completed by the time we go live so things like you know what percentage of our test scenarios have we worked through and solved the problems for what percentage of our staff has been trained what's our level of user adoption so it's meant to be very quantitative assessment of where we are in the project and it's a way for executives and the project team and other key stakeholders to really look objectively at data to say maybe we're not 100 comfortable with going live next week or next month or whenever it is but we're at some minimum threshold of comfort and we're willing to take the risk that we're about to take on now it's not uncommon by the way to do a go no-go assessment and decide that we're not ready and we're going to delay go live a lot of organizations don't like to do it it's not the most Pleasant thing to do but if we base it on data we have an objective assessment of our go no go Readiness then we're at least making a solid quantitative objective business decision so rather than going with gut instinct rather than just assuming that we can throw up a Hail Mary and everything's going to be fine we want to use the go no-go assessment deliverable as a way to ensure that we're ready and we know what the risks are with our digital transformation so I hope this has provided you some guidance and some ideas on key deliverables that you want to make sure you include and incorporate into your digital transformation for more information and more best practices on how to manage your digital transformation and how to manage your software implementation I encourage you to download my ebook called lessons from 1000 digital transformations in that ebook I talk about many of the deliverables we've talked about here today as well as other tips and best practices so I encourage you to download that in the link below I've also included links in the description field for other resources that I think will help you in your digital transformation so I hope you found this information useful and hope you have a great day [Music] and you end up deferring too much to the software and waiting for the software I know you're going to do that cut how you'd like them to look in the future then you're going to have uh no I'm gonna have what it's something that's not good then that's bad as part of your overall let me say that again my English my English is my English is ungood today now a key decision document is exactly what it sounds like it's a document that document it's a document that documents the document that'll document the document