Prepare for organizational alignment
Organizational alignment is important to ensure a collective buy-in to the strategies you're planning to execute on. To ensure you have the required support throughout your cloud adoption journey, consider getting a few key stakeholders involved early on, and expand your leadership buy-in as you iterate on your strategy execution.
Leadership and executive buy-in
You identified the motivations and business objectives to support your organization's mission. Now you need to ensure that your leadership is aligned to that vision and strategy.
If you don't have leadership buy-in for your adoption strategies and plans, it can result in several significant risks.
Recommendations:
Align leadership with strategic goals: Help your leadership better understand and justify the investments into adoption projects, ensuring they’re fully aware of the benefits, challenges, and risks.
Obtain the required resources: Adoption projects often require significant investments in technology, talent, and time. Secure leadership buy-in to obtain the necessary resources for your projects.
Communicate leadership buy-in: Change can be challenging for many employees as digital transformation and adoption projects accelerate. Reduce resistance to change by ensuring leadership buy-in is promoted and communicated to the organization, enhancing employee adaptability.
Align organizational strategies
If you already have existing organizational strategies, the alignment between your business, digital, IT, and adoption strategies is crucial for a successful cloud adoption initiative, whether you've already got a footprint in the cloud or not.
The business strategy typically defines the organization's high-level mission and goals, market positioning, and competitive approach. This typically aims to drive revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and cost efficiency.
The digital strategy typically defines how technology transforms your business processes, customer interactions and offerings to enable digital growth and innovation.
The IT strategy typically defines how technology infrastructure and resources support your business goals, focusing on operational efficiency, security, and modernization.
If your organization has these strategies in place already, ensure the adoption strategy supports the goals of existing organizational strategies and missions. Even if some of these strategies aren't in place, having a conversation with key business or IT stakeholders regarding the ambitions or objectives in these areas is important to drive strategy alignment. This alignment can help to:
- Complement your technology roadmap and infrastructure modernization initiatives.
- Allow IT to better support both business and digital goals more effectively.
- Support the goals and objectives, such as agility, growth, cost efficiency, and customer experience and satisfaction.
- Help accelerate your initiatives like data-driven insights, product innovation, or digital customer experiences.
Recommendations:
Regularly review strategy alignment: Ensure you regularly check-in with business, digital, and IT-leaders to keep your cloud initiatives aligned with evolving goals.
Agile feedback loops: Use agile practices to gather feedback from key stakeholders and leaders, and quickly revisit and adapt your strategies to meet changing needs.
Understand your operating model's readiness for cloud
For an organization to efficiently utilize the benefits of cloud in a modernized way, they need the organizational capabilities (People, Processes, Technology, and Partners) to do so. When defining a cloud adoption strategy, you need to know what your current capabilities are to prepare for and inform the development of your adoption strategy.
An organization's operating model is essentially how an organization structures itself to meet its strategic objectives to provide value to its customers and stakeholders. A full operating model represents all the value streams, capabilities, organizational structures, management systems, information systems, delivery partners and locations.
Understanding your organization’s current operating model plays a crucial role in developing your cloud adoption strategy:
- Organizational capabilities and processes: Organizations with traditional support, technical change, security, finance, and architecture capabilities might have significant difficulty in keeping up with the continuous change and scale brought on by cloud services. The adoption strategy in this case needs to factor in the evolution of these capabilities to effectively support and enable cloud.
- Organizational culture: Highly regulated or risk-adverse organizations might have a non-collaborative and command and control culture. Cloud might introduce resistance to change in the ways of working. The cloud adoption strategy needs to factor in how to address the organization's culture needs to enable the benefits of cloud.
- Roles and skills: Organizations that are primarily on-premises might lack expertise in cloud architecture, DevOps, and cloud-native security practices. The cloud adoption strategy needs to factor in the training and skilling plan to address the adequate adoption and enablement of cloud services.
It's important that leadership identify and acknowledge their current limitations across their existing operating model for the cloud adoption strategy to provide suitable attention and resourcing for the plan the cloud journey.
Recommendations:
Understand the current operating model: Evaluate the organization's current capabilities and structures either through a workshop with leadership or through a third party and benchmark your organization's current operating models' readiness for cloud.
Identify gaps: Based on the benchmark, hold a workshop with leadership to identify the readiness gaps for cloud and the strategic objectives and determine how the cloud adoption strategy needs to be aligned.
Ensure all key stakeholders are informed: Ensure all key stakeholders are informed and aligned on the gaps and the risks regarding cloud adoption and ensure these are suitably addressed during the planning stage (link to CAF plan).
Continuously review: Continue to conduct benchmarks and workshops with leadership to continually review readiness along the journey so that progress can be measured, and the strategy can be adapted iteratively.
Shift from a project model to product model
Organizations moving or expanding their footprint in cloud who are wanting to ensure they can broadly scale their cloud services at speed might need to shift from a traditional project delivery model to a product delivery model for operations.
This shift is a fundamental change in how business' structure, develop, and manage IT and technology investments as part of a cloud adoption strategy.
A project model: Task-driven against a clearly defined scope, clear start and end time frames, and a budget typically focused on CAPEX. Once projects are complete, the ownership often shifts to another team for operations and maintenance.
A product model: Focuses on solutions as continuously evolving assets which require ongoing value delivery. It's an outcome-driven model with cross functional teams taking end to end ownership of development, operations, and governance. This model enables more responsive and scalable value delivery.
Key benefits of a product delivery model
Democratization and scalability: A product delivery model ensures all cloud platform teams services are productized to make them more easily consumable and accessible to all parts of the organization to drive cloud adoption and maturity.
Drives innovation: Product models align with cloud-native technologies, making it easier to experiment, scale, and roll out new features.
Business alignment: Continuous value delivery helps ensure the technology investments stay aligned with business goals.
Fosters collaboration: Encourage cross-functional collaboration across technical and business teams to drive business outcomes more effectively.
Examples of what the shift looks like
Focus: A project delivery model is focused on completing tasks and delivering a "finished" solution, whereas a Product delivery model is focused on ongoing improvements and continuous value delivery.
Outcomes: A project delivery model's outcome is typically based on a completed solution at a point in time versus a product delivery model's outcomes based on a continuously evolving service.
Ownership: A project delivery model usually has temporary project teams with a clearly defined end date, versus a product delivery model which has persistent product teams responsible for the lifecycle of the service.
Team structures: Project delivery models typically have isolated, temporary project teams, while product delivery models have cross-functional, stable product, platform, and enablement teams.
The project-to-product delivery model shift directly informs the cloud adoption strategy by redefining how the organization plans, executes, and maintains its cloud initiatives. It ensures the principles of continuous improvement, customer-centricity, and collaboration are embedded. This ensures that cloud investments provide lasting, strategic value rather than short-term, one-off results.
Recommendations:
Follow these recommendations to start shifting from a project to a product delivery model.
Understand your current structures: Assess your organization's existing operating model capabilities and culture including things such as delivery functions, funding approaches (CAPEX or OPEX driven), and team structure models. Hold a workshop with your leadership team to discuss these and document how you currently operate, then map out where you might see benefits in shifting to a product model.
Establish a target state: Once your strategic objectives are clearly understood and aligned and you have evaluated your cloud culture and operating model, then identify the target state by which you need to transform across architecture, operations, governance and culture. Hold a workshop with your leadership team to work through this and identify the initiatives and program of work that would need to be in place to drive this forward.
Stakeholder awareness and leadership buy-in: Engage key stakeholders to ensure they understand and support the project-to-product shift, including the cultural and operational changes it entails.
Set expectations: Outline the cultural shift required for a product mindset, focusing on customer-centered thinking, continuous collaboration, and a focus on outcomes over deliverables.
Account for time and resources: Ensure you have enough time and resources for the planning stages to determine how current gaps need to be addressed when moving from a project to product approach and establish a roadmap to enable this.
Identify and define partner relationships
Organizations moving or expanding their footprint in cloud might need to rely on both internal and external partners. These partners can help you execute your cloud adoption strategy and provide the necessary expertise and resources to ensure success.
Consider the following:
Identify key partners. Identify the key partners that help you execute your strategy. You should include your cloud provider and providers of critical line-of-business applications and other infrastructure that is necessary for success.
Promote integrated partnerships. Treat your cloud provider and key ISVs as part of an integrated partnership that can help you deliver your strategy, rather than as a supplier that's accountable for delivering to a contract.
Regularly meet. Set up a regular cadence with stakeholders from partner organizations and understand how they contribute to meeting KPIs and KRs, as well as other opportunities for collaboration.