Recognize the signs of looming problems to keep your digital transformation projects on track.

Digital transformation projects create daily opportunities to deliver value to engineers and their organizations. However, like other projects, digital transformation projects routinely face the risk of disasters. With awareness of the source of digital transformation disasters, projects can mitigate their impact by:

• Listing the associated risks in detail in the project charter to educate stakeholders.
• Including specific tasks in the project plan to avoid or minimize the impact of disasters.
• Conducting parallel projects to address these situations before they turn into disasters.

Here is a list of the most common issues that cause digital transformation disasters. Anticipating these issues will position your project for success, allowing the organization to squeeze more value from its data.

You can read the previous five disasters to avoid at this link.

1. Ignoring people change management

Some digital transformation projects pay little attention to people change management. Some engineers forget that their intended audience does not have intimate knowledge of the revised business processes and the technology they accumulated during the project. Sometimes, teams wrongly assume that everyone understands information technology sufficiently so adoption will be easy.

At a minimum, paying insufficient attention to people change management leads to slow adoption. Sometimes, it can lead to costly misunderstandings. In extreme cases, it leads to rejection of the new digital functionality and skepticism about the value of digital transformation.

The best way to build buy-in for the digital transformation is with people change management project tasks that include:

• Engaging end-users in project tasks such as design reviews, software accepting testing and data quality improvement.
• Offering formal training in the new business processes.
• Providing in-person support to staff as they switch to the digital way of conducting business.
• Ensuring that adopting the new business processes with their digital tools is a component of the annual review process.

2. Prioritizing technology

Some digital transformation projects prioritize work on information technology instead of business value. Various situations, such as the following, can trigger this problem:

• Senior management is impressed by information technology implemented by a competitor and mistakenly believes that a specific technology enabled the digital transformation advance.
• The project team is dominated by information technologists who want to build their resumes by building experience with new technologies. Technologists mistakenly believe that stakeholders will be impressed by sophisticated application architectures, creative use of technologies and artful user interfaces.
• An effective vendor sales team sells the organization on their information technology as the basis for a digital transformation.

The impact of a technology-dominated digital transformation project is to deliver a sophisticated, robust system with functionality that provides only limited business value. In extreme cases, the project ends as a no-value disaster.

Digital transformation projects that prioritize business value over technology are more successful. They prioritize the development of process improvements, data integrations and software based on development complexity, the number of end-users who will benefit and an estimate of annual business value. This approach will prioritize high-value items and repeatedly defer high-complexity development to future releases. Some proposed functionality may never be developed using this prioritization.

3. Ignoring business process changes

Some digital transformation projects ignore addressing required business process changes, erroneously believing:

• Advanced data transformation can overcome process issues.
• There’s no value or too much resistance to revising long-standing business processes.
• Such changes are outside of the scope of an information technology project.

Not considering business process changes significantly reduces the business benefits that digital transformation can deliver. For example, replacing manual capture of product test results with an identical Excel workbook ignores an opportunity to improve productivity and data quality by introducing standard codes and values.

Project teams deliver more value when they view business process changes as an opportunity to use digital data to reduce cycle times, improve quality and reduce costs.

4. Ignoring stakeholders

Some digital transformation project teams ignore collaboration with stakeholders, arrogantly thinking they understand more about digital technology and business requirements than most stakeholders.

The impact of ignoring stakeholders includes misunderstanding of business requirements leading to:

• An inadequate or useless digital transformation.
• Poor adoption of new digital functionality.
• Stakeholders ignoring the project, which is cancelled as a disaster.
• Missing the high-value opportunities or investing in low-value opportunities.

Successful project teams recognize that they don’t know everything. For example, when project teams design digitally enabled business processes such as fabrication or logistics in collaboration with engineering experts, the result is superior, and the implementation is more straightforward.

5. Proof of concept paralysis

Some digital transformation project teams conduct too many proofs of concept (PoCs) and never advance any digital applications to production status.

While PoCs build understanding and reduce risks, they do not deliver business value. Multiple PoCs also consume resources, create a scene of paralysis and become demotivating for the staff.

Instead, conduct one for two PoCs directly related to the application you expect to advance to production status. For example, use PoCs to confirm technology choices and deepen understanding of proposed changes to business processes. Use the learning from the PoCs to build the project plan to develop and implement the production application.

Addressing the most common issues that cause digital transformation disasters will position your project for success. For additional ideas that will enhance your digital transformation, please read Here’s why your digital transformation project is struggling.