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Change streams in business-focused digital transformations to get comfortable with constant change

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This article explores the change streams that can affect the roadmap and scope of your planned activities. Planning for how to deal with these changes throughout the program is a key factor for success.

In other articles, we've discussed how to use the Success by Design framework to plan your digital transformation. We've shown you how to start from your business model and then narrow down to the business processes and applications that deliver the most value. However, you should also keep in mind the broader theme of constant change and embrace the mindset of getting comfortable with frequent and inevitable change.

Business changes

When you start your transformation journey, you build your business application based on the goals set by the business. But you should also appreciate that during design and implementation, you might need to adjust and refine your application. You need to support agility and change as a fundamental part of the program. This is where some of the iterative methodologies can be beneficial. They help you respond to change without disrupting your progress.

The leaders of transformational change often find that not all aspects of change are well defined in the early stages. So it's important to iterate, adopt changes quickly and early, and be flexible as you gain more clarity. When transformation occurs in an industry, the outcome of the transformation is often not known. You must be able to adapt quickly in the middle of the project to incorporate these inevitable changes.

User changes

A key stakeholder in your transformation plan is the business user, who interacts with the application often. If you implement a process in the application that doesn't meet the needs of the users, it can lead to poor adoption and lack of engagement. The same applies if the application doesn't consider users' working patterns and usage. You should get user feedback continuously throughout the process using well-defined and frequent touchpoints. This is key to achieving your transformation goals.

Your approach to designing and developing the application should be user-centric. It should clearly show how the change being implemented results in value for the user.

You should also expect that user experience expectations change constantly as users are exposed to various software products in the enterprise and consumer space. For example, the predictive text fill feature popularized by web search engines is now the expected search experience in business applications. It's more important now to adopt new features and improvements delivered by cloud solutions.

Product and technology changes

In the world of cloud-based applications, you can expect a constant flow of new capabilities, improvements to existing features, and transitions to the latest technology paradigms. These can affect your current application. Traditionally, the IT team provided the business applications, with features requested by the business and users. With the cloud, the service providers themselves are invested in understanding the latest trends in business and delivering innovative capabilities to help their customers stay ahead of the competition.

For example, a business tries to transform its sales application and assembles an application using the best-in-class sales capabilities offered by the service provider. The alternative was to spend years in research, design, and development to build from scratch, which would make the application obsolete by the time it launches.

Similarly, the continued investment in microservices by Dynamics 365, such as planning as a service, can transform a core business model for companies. They can run material requirements planning (MRP) as needed to drive a significant and transformative way of managing demand and the supply chain.

The enhancements delivered via continuous updates have a shorter adoption timeframe than traditional major version upgrades.

Software as a service (SaaS) application providers that compete to build and deliver business capabilities for customers are helping advance business applications in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Applications that were just forms over data have evolved into applications that can automatically capture data, learn from the data, deliver insights, and guide users to the next best action. Before, they were mostly passive data capture systems used to track, view, and report on known data. It's more important now for businesses to watch for new capabilities being made available and adopt them to accelerate their transformation and be a differentiator in the industry. The key value proposition of SaaS is also the ability to tap into the enhancements and features that are based on broad market research. Activating these features can accelerate your transformation with minimal effort and without any development cost.

Your SaaS application provider is no longer just a software vendor providing an off-the-shelf product. They're a strategic partner to your business with significant impact on your ability to implement your strategy. Developing a strong relationship with the SaaS providers to not just learn about the roadmap but also influence the roadmap through strategic feedback ensures that you get the most value out of the product.

External changes

External economic, social, and political drivers can disrupt your transformation plan. The COVID-19 pandemic is an example of how supporting remote work and creating online collaboration channels became a top priority for most customers in 2020. This required coordinated changes from infrastructure, to network, to the device and application layer across the IT landscape of organizations. Although it's hard to foresee and plan for external events, the iterative approach to delivering continuous value in smaller batches allows you to pause and pivot as needed.

For example, one organization is on a long-term transformation program that releases a major capability to users once a year. In contrast, another organization has adopted the DevOps culture of delivering value with regular bi-monthly or monthly updates. The latter company can realize value from investments sooner and is better positioned to pivot when change demands it.

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