9 most important rules for successful Digital Transformation Project delivery

Change is the only constant. And, in this digital age where Smartphones are outselling toothbrushes, the only way enterprises can grow is through embracing digitization. Digital focussed strategies have become a necessity than a luxury for all businesses to stay competitive.

Most organizations are at the early stages of adopting this revolution and building interconnected Digital Experience Platforms.

IDC estimates that by the end of 2023, businesses will be spending $2 trillion annually to stay competitive in the market. With time the demands of instant gratification by all the stakeholders will grow rapidly.

Therefore, it will become imperative for businesses to provide unique digital experiences to their employees, partners, and customers. To thwart the growing challenges in project implementation, businesses should follow these 9 rules for successful digital transformation project delivery.

Why Digital Transformation Is Important For Businesses?

Every business follows a different operating model that gets them a great ROI and increase their profitability. The biggest challenge for them is finding the best ways to augment their capabilities and efficiencies within their operations.

The main reason why enterprises strive for Digital Transformation (DX) is to understand their resource allocation and move the entire organization in a single direction. The other reasons are:

Create or Enter new markets
Increase speed to market of products and services
Increase employee productivity
Become more competitive and reliable
Enhance stakeholder and customer experience

What Method Should A Business Follow For Digital Transformation?

Most businesses are at an early stage of DX and they are adopting composite strategies to build digital workplaces by one brick at a time. The most important aspect of DX is to understand that it is not an overnight process. It takes time, efforts, and understanding to successfully implement a digital project. It should follow the digital matrix of:

Estimation
Identification
Conceptualization
Personalization
Implementation

Enabling digital platforms for deeper integration and utilization is a journey. A business must document each and every step to ensure to measure the outcomes at every stage.

Most businesses flounder at managing and implementing digital transformation projects due to multiple reasons. But, if they follow below defined nine golden rules, they can be sure that their transformation journey will be much smoother.

1. Lead From The Top: It is not a one man’s job. It is the entire organization that needs to rally behind the project for a successful implementation. And, the business owners, CEO, and top management must be on board to ensure that everyone is aware of ongoing changes and get trained to perform their duties.

Project managers and the CEO must ensure that the project gets implemented across the business and does not get limited to departments and silos.

A shining example of this approach is digital banking. With the chairman, CEO, regulatory bodies and other top management leaders providing vital inputs in a timely manner makes a huge difference in a digital business model.

Direct support from the top will ensure a smooth journey and overcoming challenges easy.

Read More: Digital Experience Trends and Stats in Banking Sector

2. Creating A Perfect Benchmarking: Crafting an effective digital transformation strategy is of utmost importance for a business and creating a benchmarking is the essence of a project. Ensure that every achievement is documented and celebrated. Set targets and objectives of every task for process improvements from the beginning.

This benchmarking will help in measuring the success of a digital product. This approach is helpful in driving enterprise to digital transformation with DevOps and agile methods.

3. Create A Digital Vision: Draft a vision document outlining every goal and task in detail. Engage with all the stakeholders to get their input to understand their requirements and taking their input to refine and publish the document to map all the transformation efforts.

This will help sharpen digital strategies to eliminate customer pain points to create a great digital experience.

4. Prioritize Project Implementation Milestones: With a blueprint of your DX transformation project, a software development partner will be able to map and draft milestones with deeper understanding.

It will help in measuring ROI for each milestone along with a fixed timeline that will realize a medium and long-term vision for the digital-enabled enterprise.In simple terms, it will allow all the stakeholders to access information easily and keep a tab on the project implementation plan.

5. Automate Processes: Reducing manual involvement of employees means increased productivity from their part as it allows them the luxury of completing business-critical tasks.

Moreover, automating ad hoc processes will result in an overhaul of agile operations across the business. The most successful examples of removing manual efforts and bringing automation to success are in the tech industry.

It is one of the biggest reasons why the insurance industry is embracing digital transformation as it provides great customer experience and instant information availability to all the stakeholders across the board.

6. Smartphone First Approach: As the smartphone market swells to $5 trillion a year, every entrepreneur and business owner understands the criticality of enterprise mobility solutions.

Create online only incentives for customers and provide rapid self-adoption. Creating self-serve options will liberate employees to perform other duties and craft agile implementation cycles to incentivize mobile application use.

Read More: Top 12 Advantages of Implementing Enterprise Mobility Solutions

7. Harness The Power Of Data: Analytics is king. All the data gathered from browsers, customers, partners, and every other device is an unlocked potential for enterprises to acquire more business and generate revenue. Data-driven processes will provide evidence for a number of entry points like:

Device usage and accessibility
Demographics
Geographic Location
Search Patterns and Keywords

This data when cleansed provides all the stakeholders healthy, consistent, and uniform data with various filters.

This data used correctly can become the secret sauce of digital optimization for effective use of data science and machine learning techniques.

8. Defining Cultural Transformation: This is the most difficult part of any business transformation program. Businesses often fail at accommodating or comprehending cultural changes required while developing enterprise portals and mobile applications.

It is of utmost importance that enterprises understand that making DX require a radical shift of mindset. Getting manual processes mapped and automated will create an agile workforce, in turn, making the operations more efficient. A business can:

Craft Training Programs
Create Manuals and Prototypes
Document Processes and Policies
Coach employees to understand digitization

9. Finding The Right Digital Transformation Partner: This is the most critical part of any transformation project. It is difficult to find people who are equipped with the right tools and knowledge to lead a large digital transformation project.

A partner that understands and comprehends business requirements for digitization will ensure smooth project execution. Moreover, getting the experienced digital transformation experts on board will go a long way in the success of your DX project.

In The End:

Most DX transformation projects fail due to lack of vision or delayed deliveries. Enterprises must understand the difference between traditional methods of application development and new agile ways of DevOps that ensure the success of every DX program. Remember, most successful projects are not implemented instantaneously.

They require meticulous calculations of timings and execution. And most importantly they are always on a trial, error, testing and redevelop basis to ensure rapid scalability and user adoption.