Managing Transformation: Connect Strategy to Delivery for Dynamic Business Today

Uncertainty is a constant in today’s business environments, with volatile market dynamics, customer demands, technologies, disruptions, and more. Managing transformation through this uncertainty requires maintaining a line of sight into key initiatives at every stage of the strategy-to-delivery journey. Otherwise, it’s difficult to determine how strategic programs are progressing or whether outcomes are being achieved.

At the same time, teams are exploring new ways of working that allow them to deliver faster. It’s imperative to support the varied ways these teams work with the right level of guidance and guardrails. Organizations now have mixed execution methods that challenge the traditional approaches to top-down planning and governance.

Today’s Hybrid Reality: Transform for Organizational Speed

Managing transformation requires building agility into portfolio planning and funding to quickly reprioritize and shift focus, ensuring both teams and money are focused on in most impactful areas.

Managing transformation to improve the speed of decision making and delivering customer value requires new, more flexible approaches to connecting strategy with execution. You need to maintain visibility as teams adopt new ways of working, navigate change, and increase agility while managing compliance and risk.

Succeeding in today’s dynamic business climate requires adaptive approaches that enable funding and capacity adjustments, as well as bridging cross-functional siloes.

Now is the time for business and functional leaders, Finance, the EPMO, and PMOs to evolve their portfolio management and work management practices and tools to thrive in the hybrid environment, as well as provide the insights for executives and stakeholders throughout the enterprise.

Empower Teams

The way project and delivery teams work is changing, from the rise of different delivery methods such as collaborative, iterative, Agile, Lean, and traditional projects, to moving away from one-size-fits all methodology and shifting to hybrid ways of working. With the recent transition to remote and “work from home” opportunities, all evidence indicates these trends are increasing.

Companies that empower their teams see a material improvement in speed of delivery. Managing transformation involves a mix of execution methodologies within a business unit or across an enterprise, with teams using the best approach for the program or product.

Elevate Portfolio Funding and Planning

Portfolio planning has traditionally concentrated on prioritizing which projects will best meet the needs of an array of stakeholders. When managing transformation, portfolios need to shift focus from internal requests to what matters most – the products, services, and customer experiences your organization ultimately delivers. This new perspective changes the conversation to prioritize the outcomes that provide value for your customers.

Similarly, portfolio funding moves away from discussions about specific projects to broader programs and / or epics that deliver organizational benefits and drive measurable business outcomes.

Determine the outcomes that matter, prioritize the initiatives that will get you there, and create a roadmap to:

• lead organizational change
• reveal dependencies
• measure progress
• understand impacts from decisions
• support future adjustments

Visibility and Governance

Enhanced visibility and streamlined governance are key to increasing organizational speed. Moving fast doesn’t eliminate ensuring that time and money is well spent.

Traditional command and control governance slows down decision making and impedes the very teams you are seeking to empower. A new, more adaptive approach to governance instead focuses on outcomes and results, not tactics.

Managing transformation is accomplished through building ways to measure desired results frequently and implement tools that provide visibility to progress. Establish guardrails that everyone agrees to, so teams know what and when to escalate to the leadership team.

Capacity Planning

Traditional capacity planning evolves as team empowerment grows. The focus moves from balancing individuals and roles to making sure teams can deliver value effectively.

Initially, cross-functional teams are supported by shared services for specialized skills. Capacity planning ensures the demand on those shared services teams is balanced to manage dependencies across the various teams.

Over time, teams become more self-sufficient by aligning either SMEs from shared services teams to specific program or product demand, or pairing to uplift the program and product team skillset. Capacity planning increasingly focuses on enabling team empowerment to manage their own capacity to deliver.

New Definitions for Teams

Gaining a line of sight into all the work is a challenge. Companies typically have a proliferation of disparate tools for teams, portfolios and work, and for the ways different parts of the organization execute. Finance, EPMOs and PMOs piece together data from these different sources, often in spreadsheets and presentations, to provide executives insights into progress and issues related to strategic initiatives.

The right technology is essential for success in managing transformation to gain organizational speed and agility from coordinating cross-functionally, shifting priorities and realigning work. What’s needed is a platform that provides:

1. A “single pane of glass” to see the big picture and how all the work relates to strategic priorities
2. Tools tailored to the different ways your teams work
3. Flexible portfolio planning across a range of traditional, Agile and Lean approaches to funding, prioritization, and governance
4. Support for different approaches across the organization today and as these approaches evolve

What you require is a platform that seamlessly connects strategy to delivery today, with the flexibility to support modern approaches spanning from traditional to lean.

When managing transformation, realize the flexibility and speed for your business needs with Planview’s adaptive approach. The platform provides:

• executive line of sight
• adaptive portfolio investment funding models
• leading tools best suited to the way teams work via Planview FLEX
• all connected, and highly configurable to accommodate different stages across the organization and each respective journey

Partner with Planview to modernize your portfolio and work management approaches and successfully navigate your entire strategy to delivery transformation journey.

The benefits are tangible with real impact:

• Increase speed of delivery and realize value sooner
• Realign quicker as priorities shift
• Reduce wasted spend
• Improve effectiveness and efficiency

“Planview is more than a supplier; they are a partner. They give us the functionality we need to complete this journey we are on for enterprise agility.” (Planview Customer, Santander UK – “Unlock Enterprise Agility: Drive Strategic Delivery for The Business” July 2020 Webinar)

Find Your Hybrid: Plan the Roadmap for Your Journey

Just like your portfolios, investments and outcomes, you need an adaptive approach to succeed. Planview works every day with organizations to understand where they are and where they want to go.

And we recognize that even within your organization needs vary and approaches must adapt to those needs. Planview experts can work with you to:

• Understand where you are today, the key components that need to change, and achievable steps in that journey
• Adapt when different parts of your organization are in different stages
• Create a roadmap for your organization’s journey so you can successfully guide your transformation journey through today’s hybrid reality

See how Planview can help your organization modernize Portfolio management and work management across today’s hybrid environment.

Executives, managers, and business consultants often use the word “transformation” to describe any kind of change initiative. This generic application has diluted the meaning of the term and often contributes to failure. This is because managing transformation is completely different: It’s a wholesale redesign of an organization or a value proposition.

The focus of a transformation is the future, not the past. Executives analyze the current state of business to determine future direction. If the “transformation” involves any of the following, it is NOT a transformation:

• Improving a single process
• Trying a new sales methodology
• Deploying a new software application
• Impacting one or more departments, but not the entire organization
• Has a firm start and end-date
• Has a set budget
• Has known parameters and steps to success

It’s not easy – transformation requires a rewire. The good news is that the results are worthwhile. As one CEO told McKinsey: “I’d never have launched this agile transformation if I only wanted to remove pain points; we’re doing this because we need to fundamentally transform the company to compete in the future.”

This is the objective of managing transformation, whether it is digital, operating model, organizational, agile, or another type. Executives set a vision and strategy that the organization can rally around and work towards. It involves risks but done right, transformation can generate rewards such as financial growth, greater market share, agility, and sustained innovation.

The risks are big, because forging new ground takes people into the unknown. Managing transformation involves every department and employee in the organization, and there’s no manual. It is not a traditional, top-down project with set timelines, budgets, and milestones.

As a result, success requires transforming mindsets and cultures as much as processes and technologies. Employees have to buy in to the shift from the bottom up, ready and willing to disrupt their status quo. The role of leadership is to inspire and empower them rather than manage everything from the top down.

In addition, managing transformation must be cross-functional. This is especially applicable in organizations where survival depends upon employees and teams working on complex projects and innovations across departments. Leaders need their ingenuity and collaboration to start and sustain the transformation.

For example, recent events have accelerated the need for digital transformation at many companies. Some organizations made fast progress by organizing cross-functional teams to collaborate in a heightened environment. Others discovered the difficulties of transforming the digital experiences of customers and employees using standard operating procedures, organizational boundaries, and bureaucracies.

Writing in Chief Executive Magazine, Nigel Thurlow addressed the need to remove traditional hierarchies and silos during a transformation:

“The problem with this approach is that value flows to your customers horizontally across an organization, which means that we need to remove the barriers to flow, and that means those silos. This means leaders need to be working together as a real team to achieve flow.”

When managing transformation, everyone, including the leadership team, needs to be comfortable with uncertainty, experimentation, and failing fast. Employees should have the freedom and resolve to make decisions with limited information. Executives must remain committed to the transformation or risk the organization backtracking to familiar behaviors and processes.

For years, the failure rate of transformation initiatives has remained at around 70 percent, according to McKinsey & Company. By understanding what transformation is and what it entails, executive teams and their employees can create a more successful, sustainable business.

Traditional ways of planning, funding, and managing in an organization often prevent the agility that executives are striving to achieve. Forrester addressed this disconnect in its report “The Agile Enterprise Emphasizes Practice Over Process”:

“Firms initially turned to Agile development to deliver digital products quickly but still kept traditional planning cycles, funding mechanisms, and command-and-control organizations for the most part. The result? Small successes at the team level but a lack of real speed to market as organizations attempted to scale their initial successes.”

Here’s how these groups need to change when managing transformation:

• Finance: Finance’s traditional processes, budgeting cycles, and reporting are not set up for adaptability and speed. New delivery models are creating challenges in getting financial information. Finance needs to have processes that allow for flexible funding models while staying within budgetary constraints and meeting compliance and regulatory requirements.
• EPMOs: Traditional top-down portfolio management approaches can prevent EPMOs from reacting quickly enough to new demand and shifts in priorities. A mix of work methods limits visibility into how all the work that’s happening relates to strategic objectives. The EPMO needs a modern, adaptable approach to strategic portfolio management to guide cross-organizational strategy execution and provide C-level performance insight and governance.
• PMO’s: The PMO finds it increasingly difficult to quickly roll up progress and status across all work to provide up-to-date forecasts. Without a clear view into the work being done, the PMO cannot effectively to prioritize new demand balanced with capacity planning. PMOs need to shift focus from day-to-day execution and strict project governance to ensuring teams are focused on right set of priorities and are empowered for success.

Many executives, under pressures from the board or directors and shareholders, view managing transformation as a change initiative: a one-and-done project. On the contrary, this is a continuous endeavor that alters the way an entire organization runs, with a focus on positioning it for speed.

Managing transformation involves changing mindsets, behaviors, and entire ways of working. It’s a test and learn process focused on continual adaptation. It means being able to operate within today’s environment of uncertainty, risk, and experimentation.

Change, on the other hand, has one goal, with a beginning and an end. This could be to improve an existing process, such as new employee on-boarding, or to implement a new customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Regardless, a change program is usually a linear, carefully planned project. Employees may be required to learn new work skills or processes, but they generally do not have to adapt to a new culture or operating model.

“To truly transform an organization means changing its design, its operating model. Your organizations are designed in vertical hierarchical structures, often colloquially referred to as silos, that are jealously protected by the executives that lead them…The problem with this approach is that value flows to your customers horizontally across an organization, which means that we need to remove the barriers to flow, and that means those silos. This means leaders need to be working together as a real team to achieve flow.” – Chief Executive