Amazing Lessons Learnt From Digital Transformation Failure

Lessons from a reputed Company’s Digital Transformation Failure

What happens when the CEO of a Digital Transformation consulting firm fails in his own Digital Transformation?

You will find out in this article.

My name is P K Saxena.

I am the CTO of Sofcon Systems India Pvt. Ltd.

Sofcon Systems India Pvt. Ltd. is a Noida. India based, 27+ year old end-to-end Automation Solution-providingCompany.

I will take you through the joy ride of a journey wherein my guide will be Eric Kimberling.

Eric is the CEO of Third Stage Consulting company which is an independent consulting firm that helps customers throughout the world reach their third stage of Digital Transformation success.

And there is such irony that I am going to write about in this article which will amaze you.

The irony being that Eric who works at Third Stage Consulting firm, an independent Digital Transformation Consultants where he helps organizations through complex Digital Transformations every day.

But when it comes to eating his own cooking or eating his own dog food, Eric experienced something different than what he advises to his clients.

Story from Eric’s Organization

In fact his organization made a lot of the same mistakes that he tells his clients not to make however he made those mistakes in his case.

Now just to set the backdrop, this was a relatively simple Digital Transformation.

So Eric thought as the Digital Transformation was fairly limited in scope.

Indeed it was meant to migrate their email server from one provider over to Microsoft.

And so the idea was that they were just going to migrate the back end emails and their Microsoft teams and share file OneNote or all the stuff that they had within their Microsoft Office Suite of products.

They were going to migrate it to a new hosting provider.

How hard could it be?

Well it turned out that it was more difficult than what Eric thought.

And it turned out that it created some disruption within their business.

This experience is a good reminder that Digital Transformations are almost always more difficult than what you think they are going to be.

And there is some good lessons and takeaways that Eric experienced and I would like to share those experiences with you in this article.

Now some of the lessons I am going to discuss in this article from Eric’s Digital Transformation are actually outlined in his Digital Transformation report.

It is a report that offers best practices, lessons, tips and software reviews to help organizations go through their Digital Transformations.

So I encourage you to download that report and other white papers and videos for whom I have given links down below this article.

More difficult than Eric thought

The first lesson here is that this Digital Transformation for Eric at Third Stage Consulting firm was more difficult than what he thought.

In fact he thought and he believed that the back end migration of emails in Outlook data from one hosting provider to another hosting provider would have minimal effect on them as users.

He was completely wrong on that.

It had significant effects on them as a team in terms of their productivity and ability to plan their days into attending meetings and to keep up with the emails as well as other communication activities.

Now most of the clients they advise are going through more significant Digital Transformations.

As they are ripping out their back-end financial systems and their supply chain systems and their human Capital Management systems and all the Technologies they use to run their entire business.

So in Eric’s mind what he thought that this was not which was different.

This was an email migration.

This was a Microsoft Outlook migration.

It was something that happens behind the scenes.

It should have pretty limited effect on them as end users but again it was more difficult than what Eric thought.

There was more impact it created than what Eric expected.

And I think that it is a good takeaway especially for those of you who are going through more complex Digital Transformations.

That is probably going to be a lot more difficult than what you think.

And even the simplest change to a business process or to a technology is probably going to have a lot more impact on people than what you think.

The Little things matter

Eric also learned from this Digital Transformation how much the little things matter.

When Eric says the little things basically it is the little things that you do not think is really that big of a deal.

It is a small risk and those small risks suddenly become big risks.

There is so many of these small risks that they add up to one big risk.

So it is really important to recognize that these little paper cuts can certainly create a lot of pain through an organization when there is too many of them.

So in Eric’s case at Third Stage Consulting firm they thought that it will not matter.

Because they had fairly vanilla ways that they used Microsoft Outlook.

In fact Eric thought that the impact of the organization would be pretty minimal.

Again this was just more of a back office or a back-end migration of data and applications from one hosting provider to another hosting provider.

But it had unintended consequences like Microsoft teams meeting links were no longer working for future meetings.

That had already been scheduled when they were using the old hosting provider.

Because that migration broke those links which had been planned or scheduled on their Outlook calendars.

It broke those Microsoft teams links because they pointed to the old hosting provider.

Eric did not know how he did not think of that.

But he did not.

Migration Process

So it makes you think that you really have to think through all the things that could possibly break during migration process.

And you really want to test your processes and your Technologies very thoroughly.

Before you go live or before you make a switch.

The other little thing that is not at all so little.

And this is actually an area of spirited debate within Eric’s organization.

As they are going through this migration is that –

Is it enough to have 80 percent or 90 percent of your people that are fully productive within a fairly quick amount of time?

And my answer to that would be no.

It is not good enough because even if you have 10 or 20 percent of your organization that is operating at subpar performance.

In some cases they cannot perform at all.

They cannot get access to emails or data or whatever it may be in your Digital Transformation.

That can have a domino effect throughout your organization.

So it is important not to settle for 80 user adoption or 90 user adoption and get as close as you can to 100 percent.

And get as close as you can to fully understanding and fully testing and understanding.

How your business processes and your Technologies and roles and responsibilities are going to look in that future State.

Also the more you do and invest in that early on.

Before you go live.

Then the less time and money you are going to save by having to put out fires after the migration or after the transformation.

Clearly Define Success

The next thing that Eric learned from this experience is how important it is to clearly define success.

Eric’s definition for success and the one metric that he shared with his organization and his team.

That was working on this migration was that it would not disrupt their Daily Business operations.

And it would not affect their clients.

However it did not affect their clients in any material or significant way.

But it did create internal business disruption and certainly create a loss of productivity.

And while that loss of productivity is to be expected to some degree that you do not want it to be more significant than it needs to be.

So they completed their migration over a weekend.

It started on a Friday afternoon with the idea being that they would work through the Kinks and have everything completed by Sunday evening.

So that by Monday morning when they return to work in their normal day-to-day operations.

Then they would be fully functional in their new Microsoft Outlook environment.

At one point during the weekend, Eric got a victory email from his third party I.T. provider that said the migration had been successful.

Validation of Success

And Eric thought

Great.

We are done.

We completed this.

There were not any issues.

We can log in and get back to work.

And this was on a Saturday afternoon.

Eric wanted to go to log in but he could not get to his email.

Because the emails were in the new hosting provider

And hence he could not access it.

So the question he had for IT providers –

“Do you really think this is a success when the CEO of the company cannot access the data?”

However they replied and said –

“No it is successful. The data is there. We just have to work through the issues on your computer.”

And Eric’s point was that –

“In that case the migration is not successful. And we are not done.”

Moreover his other thought was that-

“If I am having user adoption issues or user issues in this new environment.

I figure out that with 70 other team members there had to be at least one or two or five or ten other people that had the same problem.”

And it turned out that he was right.

There was a handful of people that had significant issues.

There was another handful of people that had more minor issues that they eventually worked through.

So Eric thought one thing which was really important.

As well as one thing he would do differently is to be a hundred percent clear and be even clearer.

Than what he already tried to be

Which was what do you need to do to be successful in the Digital Transformation?

What risks are you willing to accept and which ones are you not willing to accept?

No News is Not Good News

The old saying that no news is good news does not apply to Digital Transformations.

In Eric’s opinion the reason for that is just because someone has not called the help desk and complained about an inability to do their job does not mean that they are not struggling to do their job.

Another spirited debate they had internally at Third Stage was that they have not heard that many complaints from people.

They have not had that many tickets opened with their IT group as it relates to the migration.

Moreover Eric’s thought was well if you cannot get to your email.

And you do not know who to email to complain.

You do not know who to issue a ticket.

Then you are not going to send an email.

Because you cannot access your email.

So in his case no news was not good news.

And Eric pushed his team on Sunday evening.

After he experienced his issues he told his team.

That they have to find a way to communicate with each and every single person on their team to ensure they have what they need that they are fully functional.

As well as if they are not then Eric can refer them to his IT group.

And that is exactly what he did not granted.

In fact he would have liked to have had this be part of his plan while going into the migration.

But he adjusted and adapted and made a 11^th Hour decision to make that additional investment to ensure.

That he had some sort of contact with everyone who might not have been getting his Communications.

This Was Eric’s Responsibility

At the end of the day it would be really easy for Eric to blame a lot of people other than himself.

He could blame his third party I.T. providers.

He could blame his own team for not following the directions the way they should have.

Also he could blame the team members that were more involved working directly with his I.T. staff.

But at the end of the day this was his company.

This was the company he led and ultimately it was his responsibility to make sure.

That they were doing the things they needed to do to be successful.

And he did not do that enough.

However there was a lot more he could have done.

And if he could do it again.

Then he would do things a bit differently to ensure that they had a better plan.

And then they better understood some of these risks that even he did not understand.

So I think one of the key takeaways here for executives out there is even if you think that this is just an accounting system replacement.

This is some sort of back office system replacement just a technology lift and shift.

Hence no matter how simple you think the technology migration is I assure you that

It is probably a lot more complicated than the Digital Transformation which I am describing in this article in which case Eric had issues even as small scale as that was and

As Leaders there are times when they need to micromanage and there are times when we need to dig into the details roll up our sleeves.

Moreover we need to ask the tough questions and really fully understand what is happening with the migration.

Risk Involved

Basically the bigger the transformation and the more that is at risk.

As well as the more that is at stake with your transformation the more that statement is true.

So if you are a CEO.

If you are an executive sponsor.

If you are a steering committee team member that thinks you can abdicate responsibility to a project manager.

If you are a system integrator who thinks you can abdicate responsibility to a project team to make the project successful.

Then for you yes they may be very talented and they might be capable.

But you have to be the one that is ultimately responsible.

And it is your neck that is going to be on the line if things do not go well.

So that was another big takeaway.

It is that Eric took responsibility.

As well as Eric had to take responsibility for the fact that this transformation did not go as well as he would like.

Further now again thankfully this was not a big Digital Transformation.

In fact it was a very small scale transformation.

But it was a micro example of how difficult Digital Transformations can be.

Take Away

And it is a micro example of lessons we can take away and apply to the most complex and most risky Digital Transformation.

In fact that is what a lot of global organizations go through.

So for best practices on Digital Transformation including technologies that might apply to your organization.

As well as tips and lessons learned from other Digital Transformations I encourage you to download Eric’s Digital Transformation report.

It is an annual report published each year that contains a number of best practices, software reviews and rankings and other materials that will help you.

I encourage you to download that via the link given below.

I have also included links to other materials that I think will help you through your Digital Transformation.

So be sure to check out that in the description given below.

I hope you found this information useful.