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Managing transformation: Hybrid is the new reality

Hybrid is the New 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

A recent McKinsey & Company survey showed that faster companies perform better on business-critical outcomes such as profitability, operational resilience, innovation, and growth.

Managing transformation for organizational speed requires companies to rework legacy business processes, practices, and systems that inhibit flexibility, dilute strategy, hinder execution, and prevent fast, effective decision making.

Respondents to the 2021 State of Strategy Execution Benchmark Survey identified the top four risks of not adapting to change and disruption at speed:

• A decline in growth
• Lost opportunities to competitors
• Decreased customer retention
• Major loss of profit

Moving faster in response to business fluctuations requires eliminating silos and disconnects across the organization, with updated processes, and technology.

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.

Modern approaches to managing transformation

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, functional, and technology leaders, together with 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.

Learn more: Rewire with Planview for Your Strategy to Delivery Journey

What is the best software for managing transformation?

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, technology leaders, 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.

A disparate array of tools renders decision-making difficult and/or fraught with inaccuracies. Executives and managers cannot build a single source of truth, instead relying on their own fragmented, often discordant versions. Organizations sacrifice response time or quality because information showing linkages between strategies, outcomes, work, financials, and resources isn’t readily available.

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

What you require is a platform that seamlessly connects strategy to delivery with the flexibility to support practices spanning from traditional to modern to Lean and Agile.

Rewire with Planview for your strategy to delivery transformation journey

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

• Ledningens siktlinje
• Adaptive portfolio investment funding models
• Leading tools best suited to the way teams work
• 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 adapt to change as you manage transformations.

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.”

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Planview Customer

Santander UK
Unlock Enterprise Agility: Drive Strategic Delivery for The Business July 2020 Webinar

What is transformation?

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:

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.

What is the difference between transformation and change?

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.