Episode 7: Value-Based Digital Roadmap Creation

Introduction to Digital Roadmap Creation

Maciej Kłodaś (MK): Hi guys, my name is Maciej, I’m the leader of Analytics Experience Competency Group at C&F and this is C&F Talks, a place where experts discuss their everyday challenges from the perspective of an IT partner. My guest today is Maxwell Gott, Senior Director for Business Development. Hello, Max.

Max Gott (MG): Hi, how are you?

MK: I’m good. Thank you very much. Thank you for being here. You’ve traveled a lot to be here and make it happen, so thanks. Can you explain what’s your current role and focus at C&F?

MG: Sure. In C&F, I’m the Senior Director of Business Development and I’m focused on client engagement, trying to form strategic partnerships and help our clients drive meaningful impact amongst their stakeholders in the way of digital transformation.

MK: The impact, we’ve been preparing for this podcast a bit and we’ve been discussing digital transformation and ‘impact’ was the buzzword around it. So when I was preparing for this episode, I’ve been reading a bit about the digital transformation, how it started. The first time the expression has been used was around late 70s when the computers have been introduced to the corporate world. But you said that this in fact was only a digitalization of analog processes. Without the impact, we don’t have digital transformation, right?

MG: That’s correct. I think that impact is really driven from changing not only technology, but also people and process along the way. So it’s the culmination of people, process and technology, and unless we actually focus on all three of those elements, you’re not going to have transformation really occur and the adoption take hold.

Start With the Why: Understanding the Mission and Vision

MK: So how to start this journey? How to start off with the digital transformation to have this impact, to build this value? What is your approach?

MG: Well, if you’re working within your organization, depending on what kind of business it is, I would start by aligning with the organizational vision and mission, understanding the why, making sure that there’s a clear context of the business landscape that you’re in, working with senior leaders to understand where’s the direction of the company going and trying to attach on to some of the values of that company and listening to your senior leaders as to where they want to be in a few years.

Then as someone who’s in technology or in whatever business function you’re in, let’s say manufacturing, if you are really owning a digital roadmap, it’s your job to actually understand those corporate goals and understand how your stakeholder at, let’s say the department level in manufacturing, is going to aid in the company’s ability to reach those goals. And now how you, as an owner of a digital roadmap, can empower those stakeholders to perform against their objectives and make the impact for business outcomes.

MK: So, we have many factors to cover. Starting off from this value-based approach, how to start off with this journey? Because we have a lot of stakeholders, we have a lot of plans, we have business goals in place, we have budget restrictions. So, how to start off with covering all of these factors to make it happen?

MG: Well, I think first you need to define your vision for the digital technology roadmap. Understand who your stakeholders are at different levels. There’s executives, there’s department leaders, there’s middle managers, and there’s actually your end users, depending on where you’re deploying. Understanding the different levels of your stakeholders, mapping them out by use and also by influence.

Making sure you understand who has the influence to make change, to enable the progression of your roadmap, to secure funding, and move forward. You need to lay the foundation, making sure that you’re building things focused on value, but knowing your full scale early on. You will undoubtedly make mistakes, but building the foundation up front will avoid really costly mistakes later.

And finding your change engines in your network. Making sure that there are people out there that understand the vision and share the vision with you. Actually, they’ve collaborated in creating the vision.

So, you’re not pushing something on them, they’re anticipating it. They’re waiting for it to come out. They’re really excited about getting this technology to help change the way that they work. And they will be your champions to help drive that adoption and make the impact sustainable.

MK: So it’s not only about jumping into new shiny technology. It’s not about, you know, for instance, jumping into AI because everybody’s talking about AI. You need to find the real value behind implementing AI.

MG: Every technology has its own, it’s on its own journey and its hype curve. I do believe there’s extreme value in AI, but we also need to make sure that no matter what the shiny object is, and this year it’s AI, that you understand the business value and the potential ROI behind it.

You understand the impact it’s going to have across the processes that you’re working in, the people that you have in your organization, and the underlying technology around the new shiny object that you have. How is it going to interact with the ones that are already there?

Identifying the Stakeholders of Your Digital Transformation

MK: We are not starting with what, we are starting with why. Then we are moving to who will be benefiting from what we are creating.

MG: Well, I think most of the time today companies are focused on their customer. Any good leader is going to find a vision that incorporates their customer into it. So now if you’re within that company and trying to execute a roadmap to achieve business outcomes, you should start at the same place. Who is your customer? Who is going to use your application or your roadmap? Who’s going to fund it? Who’s going to support it? Who’s going to be your advocate? Even who’s going to be your skeptic? Understand your audience.

Understand their different levels. But primarily keep an eye on the customer-centricity. Focus on who’s going to use it every day. Understand where are they today in how they work? Where do they need to be tomorrow? And why is that important?  What’s the change that needs to happen to drive the business results to ultimately lead to the outcome that the business leaders want for their customers?

The Importance of Setting Clear, Measurable Goals

MK: Okay, but this is a very high level vision, right? We are here and now within five years, we want to be a very big company, very successful company. But we need to break it down into some smaller tasks. Then we need to find a way to measure it, to define some KPIs for that. How to approach this?

MG: Actually in some cases, even finding the baseline of your KPIs in and of itself is a task. Many companies out there have great capabilities to know where they stand today, but some of them do not. So I would say the first task is finding out where you are today.

Baselining yourself. Do you understand where you are in your digital transformation journey? If you do, that’s great. We can move forward.

If you don’t, that’s a place to start. Understanding across your network, let’s say it’s a manufacturing network, you have very different sites out there, probably a large network of sites, they’re not all the same. So trying to build a roadmap that encompasses change across the network, across the supply chain is going to require a unique understanding of where each node in that supply chain is in its digital journey.

What foundational systems are in place now? What adoption is there? Sure, everyone needs to focus on the data integrity, what’s there, but also where are the inefficiencies? Where are we not harnessing data? Where are we not harnessing automation? Where are we not harnessing some of the core tenets of transformation in the best way? And focusing on what is the inefficiencies in these processes now, and what are we trying to optimize? I think finding the optimization function is key, right? You’re trying to optimize, again, using manufacturing, your cycle time, your customer success rate, you’re trying to optimize cost, or are you trying to optimize all three?

So again, I know it’s broad stroke, but focusing first on what you’re trying to drive, and then meeting with a cross-functional team of stakeholders, those that actually own the funding, those that own some of the core systems that you’re going to be interacting with, some that manage the people. Engage the cross-functional team to explain the outcome, the vision we want.

We want to drive down this metric by X percent. We want to improve this metric by Y percent. This is how we think we can do that. Get the input, get the feedback, and that will naturally lead to the next level of detail after that.

Building Momentum Through Quick Wins

MK: Usually you have this roadmap, you have many different tasks, you have many different areas to address, and you have limited time, and you have limited budgeting, right? So you need to focus on, you need to have your priorities first.

MG: Well, you have to build momentum, first of all. You have to find the low-hanging fruit. You have to find the quick wins, not because they will provide the most meaningful value, but because they will provide you inherent value in getting momentum amongst your community. Starting the change, you know the adage: ‘once begun is half done’, ‘the first step is the hardest’. Getting people moving is the biggest task. So once you can establish some quick wins, show that there is some value in this idea. You will see an immense amount of ideas come forward after that.

This is great, now we can do this, now we can do that. Yes, I love this, but what about we focus over here? So showing those quick wins, the low-hanging fruit, some of them really are going to provide step changes, but some of them are just going to be catalysts for the next round of innovation.

MK: So what you’re saying is, when you start moving, when you start interacting with people, with stakeholders, with those who will be impacted by the change, they start generating new ideas for the roadmap?

MG: Before you know it, you will have a backlog that is really hard to manage. And it will come from all different sources.

You will have a backlog coming from your actual end users. These are more usability enhancements, but also they are the ones that are using it day to day. They will know how to make it more efficient, more user-friendly, drive adoption.

You’ll now have the next level of people saying, okay, I’m seeing this result in this KPI. How can we 10x it? What’s going on now? Oh, we created an efficiency over here, that’s created a blocker over there. How can we automate this data transformation, this translation? How can we even maybe automate this control in a manufacturing area? You’ll have your site leaders talking about the impact that it’s having culturally within the plans, the way that people interact with this and the positive feedback.

Now it’s great. Can we actually bring this capability to this department in my site? Can we bring it over here? And then you’ll have ultimately your sponsors saying, okay, we’ve started moving. We see this business result.

Now can we actually increase that? What about taking on this other area over here? So before you know it, I think once you have successes out there, good news travels fast within the community of people that work together. You will see people trying to latch on and wanting to create momentum in their respective areas.

Creating a Strong Business Case to Secure Funding

MK: It seems like things can get out of hand really, really quickly. So how to control it? How to secure that you need to focus on certain valuable things in this roadmap and how to secure budgeting for all of these changes?

MG: Success travels fast, but you also sometimes in the beginning to make sure you share the success. Make sure you drive the momentum and share the success. As I said, not everything is going to be easy.

You will fail, and you need to fail fast, and learn from that, and adapt. You need to explain to sponsors and stakeholders that not every step forward is going to be forward. Sometimes it’s two steps back, and three steps forward.

And you have to explain that. Ultimately, you need to actually build a network of trusted stakeholders at all different levels. And I’ve mentioned this before, but you need people who believe in it.

So that way you can move forward together. I think one of the biggest challenges you’ll have is not embracing your skeptics across this process. You will undoubtedly see skeptics at all levels, people that are afraid of change, people that don’t see the value the same way that you do.

MK: They will drag you down.

MG: They’ll stop you, they’ll drag you down. But you know what? I would say step towards them, right? Understand why they’re skeptical about it. A lot of times there’s really valid reasons for that.

Understand why they’re being skeptical about it. Is it because they think that the funding could be better used somewhere else? Okay, understand why that is. Tell me about that.

Is it because they’re going to be an end user and they’re afraid that their job is going to fundamentally change? Okay, let’s understand that. Why is that important? Tell me about that. And you will actually get ideas from these people that will make your roadmap stronger. And you also will remove the friction down the road as well.

Funding is always going to be a challenge because it’s not a simple task, digital transformation, especially at scale. It’s not going to be easy, but you need to understand your funding process in your company.

Make a partner with finance. Find your finance partner. Understand ROI. Really learn to speak the language of finance. And don’t be afraid to put a value on efficiency.

People, process, and technology, right? So ultimately, if you bring a technology that changes a process and changes the way people work with it, you need to unlock efficiency, whether it be on the process side, increasing yield or performance of a certain asset, or on the people side, in terms of the tasks that they do, right? The speed of it.

Really think about the value of it from the cost of your products, the cost of your materials, the cost of your people. And put a number towards it.

The Iterative Approach to Digital Transformation

MK: There’s something from the psychology area here, because you need to work with the people who resist the change because they have been doing that for years now.

They don’t see any value in changing because it works. Usually it works, right? So you need to show them the value of the change, that performance will be better and they will do things quicker. They will have time for different, more strategic tasks, right? But usually this project is a long haul. It’s like, well, it might not even end, it’s a journey. You explained that to me earlier. So how to start small, how to bring value fast, how to validate those ideas to have a buy-in from your sponsors.

MG: It’s definitely a journey. There’s not really a beginning and a middle and an end. And not only because these ideas are ambitious and big and you’re trying to drive change at scale, but because there’s constantly new priorities, new technologies.

Your business is likely changing just as fast as your roadmap is. Many businesses embrace change and move forward, especially if you have shareholders, they want to see continual growth. You might’ve had a year or two of really successful growth. Well, now how are you going to use that to grow even further? So there’s always going to be change. And so when it comes to the technology side, you’re going to see innovations that emerge and it will be a continual journey.

People will jump on that journey at certain points and then jump off at others. It’s a bus that’s moving and some people get on and some people get off. So it’s not going to end, but it will move forward. It’s a revolution.

So how do you get started? I think that you need to pilot. You need to think of the use cases that are meaningful and you can tell a success, you know that you can tell a success story around it as soon as you get started.

Pain points that exist today. Again, talking to your stakeholders, understanding real pain points, build something small, pilot it, incorporate the feedback, and then really expand it. Some of the more successful roadmaps that I’ve built have started with really small capabilities and they are sometimes that product or that application might be gone in five years, but you know what? It started a revolution.

It started people thinking, Hey, we can actually transform the way we do this process. If we had this digital tool. If we visualized this data set differently, if we had something that helped us manage our day-to-day work, if we had something to integrate data from this system to that system, it’ll help us see what we’re not seeing right now. So find something that a stakeholder community is talking loudly about as an inefficiency, build a pilot, find that community who’s going to embrace it at its early stage, at its MVP, if you will, and then listen to them and incorporate it.

And as much as you’re going to build momentum and you’re going to have other areas that go on, make sure that you have refined your process of taking the feedback in, incorporating it, and pushing out those changes. Because if you don’t, if you don’t build your foundation and your team, as those elements come in, that’s where you’re really going to fail. You need to actually find the team of people in your digital organization that can embrace change, that can be inspired by transformation, and that can be agile, that can actually roll with the punches, move things forward, and find a way to take those steps with you.

MK: Have you seen some pivots happening due to the fact of the changing of the digital roadmap because the organization has changed or stakeholders have changed along the way?

MG: Yeah, there’s always going to be pivots. One of the programs I worked on had a well-established roadmap. We had the early wins out there. We had a path forward. We had our funding secured for a period of time. And then something happened that changed basically the world.

As the pandemic came on, it fundamentally changed the way that our network was doing their business, right? It was a manufacturing network. All of a sudden, you now had people that needed to work from home, and this organization wasn’t really set up to run its processes from home. And so now we had a platform that was started for one particular business case, but potential was there to use it for other business cases as well in this new way of working.

So very quickly, we had to maintain the momentum in some areas we were, but also pivot and grow to scale this application much quicker than anticipated. And it caused some pain in the various different areas. But together, our company, our team, and our trusted partners, our vendors, we found a way to move it forward. We overcame those challenges because when things are going well, even though the challenge comes, as long as there’s a vision that people believe in, people believe.

They believe in the change, and belief can really inspire people to put the effort in, to move things forward, and to not be afraid of the challenge. So that was a huge pivot for us when we had an existing roadmap, and we had to suddenly change it based on changes in not only market conditions, but changes in the world. And we did so successfully. It was a crazy couple of years, but we came out very well at the end.

Demonstrating Impact and Delivered Value

MK: Change management is one of the most important things here in this process, right? You need to make sure that people understand what is the mission, what will be the value, why they are here, why they need to put so much effort, what do they get from it, right?

MG: I would say don’t underestimate the business adoption elements of transformation. You have an existing business right now, people that work a certain way. And this goes back to the resistance from stakeholders, but even if you don’t have resistance, you still need to put the effort in.

It’s not enough to just release your technology. Let’s say you built an application, a data dashboard, or whatever it may be. You have to actually make sure that that’s embraced in the process.

Drive the adoption of the technology. If you’re working in an environment that has SOPs – standard operating procedures, make sure that they’ve revised them in a way where it incorporates this technology. It becomes routine in the way that they operate.

That’s where you’re going to see the value. You’re not going to see the value if it’s just called upon once in a while. People will forget that this is out there.

You’ll have created these capabilities, these dashboards, these tools, and they will be somewhere in the back pocket, in the drawer, and they won’t be looked at. But if you actually embrace and incorporate them into the business process and spend the time to work with your stakeholders to drive the change in the way that they work, that technology will be used much more often. You’ll see the successes much more loudly, and you will actually now have momentum to move forward.

And you will be surprised as you deploy your applications, there’ll be champions among the community. You have to find those champions, people that also share the belief. They themselves want to make change in their own local area as well, and find those champions and embrace those champions. They will be the people that you change, and they will be the change agents in their area as well.

MK: So this is one of the best practices to control the process. Any other practices, things you need to look for to measure your success?

MG: Particularly in larger, matrixed organizations, you’ve got many different cross-functional teams. Make sure you understand the power of cross-functional teams. There are people around you that have different responsibilities, and some of them will really help remove the friction in the process. So it’s stakeholders in their own way, but you have to make sure that you identify the complexity of your organization and bring people along for the journey.

Common Pitfalls and Challenges in Roadmap Creation

MK: We discussed some frictions, we discussed resistance, the change management. What are the other risks or challenges along the way when implementing or building such a digital transformation roadmap?

MG: I’d say sometimes if you don’t foster a spirit of agility, that will be a challenge. And that’s at all levels.

That’s in your team, that’s if you have a vendor helping you from the engineering side, and your stakeholders need to understand and really drive the concept of agility. Because no doubt your organization is very complex, and what is good for one area isn’t good for the other. We talked about changing business priorities, leaders change opinions.

Macroeconomics can get in the way. You thought you had funding for this, now you have funding for that. So you have to build agility into the process.

Everyone has a different personality type, and there’s people that really find change hard. So you need to make sure that you help them embrace that change and move forward. And I don’t mean on the adoption of a technology, we talked about that already.

I mean in changes that happen in the roadmap. Your roadmap is as old as it was yesterday, you know? It’s already changed. So when you build a roadmap, you need to think about some of the things that are imperative to the outcome you’re driving, and stay true to those.

Everything else underneath there should be flexible. You’re going to have many different levels of the roadmap. You’re going to have a roadmap that’s built for your executives. You’re going to have a roadmap that’s built for your department leaders, for your finance team. It’s not that you’re telling different stories.

You’re changing the language to the audience you’re working for. And so within each of those roadmaps, there are core tenets that can’t change, because that was what is identified as the business value. But there’s other elements in there that can definitely change to adapt to the time that you have in front of you.

MK: Okay, so from my perspective, stakeholder management right now is the most important thing when building a digital roadmap and executing this roadmap along the way. Imagine I’m a client and I approach you and say, listen, we have those business goals here right now. We need to start off with a digital roadmap. How to start the process? Help me to build it and to execute it.

MG: If you’re the business leader, you know where you are from your point of view. But do you actually know where your network below you is? Where’s their baseline? Where are they today? You’re looking at the balance sheet. You’re looking at some of the performance KPIs, and that’s great.

But in an operational sense, the day-to-day, the middle levels, the lower levels of organization, do you know where they are today? So I would start first with understanding your baseline. Sometimes that comes in the way of assessing certain things. Sometimes it comes from interviews, from workshops, but understanding where you are today is key to getting started.

Otherwise, you could be setting a path forward, but you don’t exactly know where you’re starting from. So I think the first thing I would do is try to find out what the baseline is, and it will be different in different pockets of the company. So the areas that are already pretty advanced in some areas, what’s working well for them there? Get the inspiration. No doubt they’ve probably done some local projects, maybe had some local digital capabilities brought in there.

Are they working well? Are they not working well? Are they scalable? Can you replicate those successes in other places? Why not? And the areas that are a bit more behind, why is that? Is it because no one thought of bringing something there? Or is it because there was too much resistance? Or is that process too different than in the areas that it’s been successful? Is it more complicated? Is it different technology? Or is it that there hasn’t been the proper investment in that area over time? So now your baseline is significantly further back. All of those can be overcome, but you have to understand where the baseline is at the aggregate, but also at the local level as well.

MK: I feel much more secure right now. So any last best advice for a digital transformation leader?

MG: I think that the best leaders that I’ve worked for have really embedded a culture of innovation. Making sure that there’s a belief that we can drive change. We can innovate. We can bring up ideas. We can try them out. We can fail fast. It’s okay.

It’s encouraged to fail as long as you’re learning from it. We should always be striving for continuous improvements all along the way.

What worked? What didn’t work? If it worked, let’s do it again. If it didn’t work, why didn’t it work? And let’s think of another way to do it. As long as you’re embracing learning and evolution, you’re embracing innovation, make sure you build a team that shares those tenets with you.

The technology will come, the processes, you’ll learn those processes, but it’s very hard to learn how to be innovative, learn how to embrace change. These are personalities. These are inherent in one.

You can inspire. You certainly can. I’m not saying you can’t change people, but you need to, as a leader, drive that innovation. And I’ve worked for some really great people that have inspired teams of people to move forward. And that is something that is rare.

And you need to make sure that you find the people in your team that can embed a belief and drive that change. And then start small. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis. Don’t try to work on something until it’s perfect. Get moving.

Start moving and you’ll course correct along the way. If you wait until the plan is perfect, your market conditions, your baseline conditions have changed. You could spend six months, nine months building the perfect plan.

But guess what? In that time, the starting conditions have changed. So just get moving. You will learn. Make mistakes. And you will course correct along the way.

MK: Okay. That’s about it. Thank you very much for the discussion. Thanks for being here, for making this episode happen. Thank you guys. And see you soon in our next episode.