Agile projects are 28% more successful than those delivered via traditional methods. More than 80% of Australian organisations are now getting their digital transformation journeys underway – but only 33% are seeing success in delivering the desired outcomes, according to analysis from BCG.
Strategic innovation is at the cornerstone of successful agile digital transformation. Once implemented, it helps revolutionise and future-proof your business by altering how work is carried out; despite dynamic internal factors, competitors or new trends and technologies.
Maintaining an agile approach when deploying new business initiatives also means that your team is equipped with the ability to easily adapt and provide constant, tangible value to your organisation. This is the key to not only surviving the ever-evolving digital world, but also for thriving and reaching strategic business goals faster.
For example, Australia Post created a working environment where agile teams can prosper, utilising various governance processes and funding models. Around 95% of their digital work is now capacity funded, allowing the business to become more innovative.
But how do you get started? We’ve compiled four of the most important steps for beginning your agile digital transformation journey.
Step 1: Build a strategic vision of what transformation success looks like
According to a global leadership study published by Deloitte, 69% of respondents expect tech leaders to be facilitators of change within their organisation. This highlights the importance of having a pre-planned, strategic vision that clearly maps your digital transformation strategy.
Additionally, it should also detail how the strategy intends to measure and track progress to enable the business to make adjustments and improvements to outcomes in real-time.
Transformation occurs from the top down. Because of this, it becomes important for senior leadership teams to collaborate on a constructed vision that is well-articulated in order for it to be shared with the rest of the organisation.
Step 2: Move to a customer-centric, digital engagement model
The way your customers consume information and purchase products online is always changing. Customers now prefer personalised experiences tailored to the problems they face, and the solutions they seek.
For example, Twilio’s 2022 State of Customer Engagement report found that businesses who shifted towards a focus on investing in digital customer engagement had an average revenue boost of 70% over the past two years.
Interestingly, Twilio’s report also found that 75% of businesses consider their digital personalisation experiences effective, although more than half of consumers disagree, signifying a greater need for improvement in this area.
Step 3: Utilise secure digital platform technologies
Modern digital platforms are quickly becoming more cost effective and feature-rich. However, with this luxury comes considerable risk. These dynamic solutions may appear to be ideal at first, due to the ease of connectivity and open architecture, but IT departments are challenged with keeping up with their security and dealing with the overall risk management.
The inclusion of secure interfaces to digital platform components plays an essential role in protecting IT assets and driving digital innovation and growth. As a result, executing a strategy that supports safety and speed is equally as important.
Step 4: Obtain insights through data-driven visualisation
Digitally-focused businesses are always gathering data; but what’s even more important is to connect and visualise it in a way that generates useful insights that can be put to action in real-time. For example, it becomes essential to use the data for building and understanding customer personas, to provide better value and learn what makes them tick.
Data visualisation allows you to see progress towards important business initiatives, and turns complex information into understandable and usable data. For example, stakeholders and decision-making business leaders can determine next steps when the data is easily understood and more accessible, especially in relation to technological development and business planning.
While digital transformation is often viewed as a buzzword, it plays an integral role in helping shape the future of how business is conducted, changing how organisations work from the inside out.
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How agile is your business? Speak with one of our digital transformation consultants for a productive discussion on how to get started with an agile project approach.
