A lot of companies turn to business transformation as their leaders strive to capture untapped potential or to realize gains in growth or efficiencies. Earlier, Anand Jayapalan had pointed out that most successful business transformations address the value creation opportunities of a company. Many transformations, however, can even focus on a specific theme. For instance, a workforce transformation that helps adopt agile working methods.
The CEO of a company generally supports the transformation process by communicating its significance, building a strong top team, modelling the desired changes and getting involved personally. The CTO or the chief transformation officer is a C-suite role that is becoming increasingly prominent in many sectors. The CTO tends to be the high-level orchestrator of the transformation process. They typically work as an extension of the CEO, and have the mandate and authority to make decisions about the operations, investments and personnel of a company. The CTO is tasked with a long list of initiatives. However, the duty of making day-to-day decisions and implementing these duties lies with the transformation managers, leaders and more. Even though C-suite attention is extremely important, a lot more people are required to make a transformation work. Such employees tend to play transformation-specific roles, like a work-stream lead or initiative owner.
Successful transformations typically turn ideas into detailed business plans that have trackable, time-bound metrics to measure outcomes. Such business plans should must ultimately result in in value creation, cost savings and growth opportunities.
There are a few core actions that can be especially predictive of business transformations that capture the most value. These actions are:
- Use of an objective fact base to identify opportunities for improvement: A company has to thoroughly make use of facts to assess the maximum financial benefit from a transformation. This will provide more confidence to the business leaders in pursuing ambitious yet realistic targets that reflect the full potential of the transformation.
- Communicating a compelling reason for why a transformation is required: Just protecting the bottom line is not enough today. Business leaders must properly explain to the employees why things should be done differently. In case people do not understand what the transformation means for their daily work and overall business goals, their behaviour and mindset will not change. As a result, organizational health may be hampered. Developing talent and skills, role modelling and fostering understanding are among the prime ways to make sure people are brought on board and stay there.
- Matching the best talent of a company to its most crucial initiatives: This action puts focus on the need to link business and talent priorities with the creation of a clear view of where value is generated in the company, as well as who has the ability to deliver that value. Integrating transformation practices into everyday structures, processes, and systems is crucial for creating value.
Earlier, Anand Jayapalan had underlined that companies successfully undergoing transformation are more likely to have significantly altered their annual business planning and review cycles. These changes include executive-level weekly briefings, monthly or quarterly reviews, and individual performance discussions.